No End to the Quest for Closure

“A whole is that which has beginning, middle and end.” --Aristotle

In Santa Cruz, a victorious prosecutor says she is grateful to have closure after a long-running murder case. In Miami Beach, talk of closure hits the airwaves nearly as soon as police confirm that suspected serial murderer Andrew Cunanan apparently has killed himself. And in New York, the survivors of TWA Flight 800 are reminded just how evasive it can be.

“The pursuit of closure,” Cardinal John J. O’Connor told friends and relatives of those who died on the flight, “is an elusive pursuit.”

Closure. That word again. Rooted in psychotherapy and suggesting “completion,” it has become a buzzword as ubiquitous as bad news and as handy as a self-help book. Everywhere, it seems, from our nation’s courtrooms, to talk shows and in chambers where laws are made, someone is invoking closure like a mantra in a way that experts say captures a unique moment in American history.

The quest for closure is evident in some of the nation’s institutions--from a new California law giving survivors the right to attend executions to memorials created to mark public tragedies.

“It’s in the zeitgeist of the culture. I’m seeing it all over the place,” said Ellen McGrath, a New York-based psychotherapist and commentator on psychology trends. “For lack of a better word, I’ll call it a movement.”

Never before has closure been so much on the public’s lips--catching hold as Americans increasingly look to the realm of mental health for help in coping with profound tragedies or everyday family life. The emphasis on closure shows the pervasiveness of therapy-speak during an era in which a claim to feel our pain is a presidential trademark and even Joe Six-Pack is conversant in lingo like “co-dependent”’ and “denial.”

Some observers say the closure crusade reveals a society eager for neat endings amid a string of high-profile tragedies, twists in the economy and technology, and even shifting rules over morality. It is an impulse, they say, for control in a changing world.

“There is a feeling of a need for limits. When there is a need for limits, there is a need for a moral world--that wrongs will be righted,” said Herbert Morris, professor emeritus of philosophy and law at UCLA. “If you don’t have closure, you’re living in an unsteady state.”

The nation’s conversation over the Oklahoma City bombing trial revolved heavily around whether the death penalty would bring closure to the families of the victims. Reactions to the civil judgment against O.J. Simpson were peppered with closure references. And the sponsor of a move to require the U.S. government to apologize for permitting enslavement of the ancestors of African Americans promotes it as a means to closure on that chapter of U.S. history.

So prevalent has such conversation become that it has sparked a backlash among some cartoonists and writers as touchy-feely gibberish. A recent New Yorker cartoon labeled “Closure” depicts Little Red Riding Hood in a moment of hand-holding reconciliation with the wolf, who ate the girl’s grandmother.

“We’re talking about the national habit of turning every trauma into group therapy,” scoffed Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Michael Skube in a piece attacking what he called “adult slang.”

Experts Fear Impact on Victims

Some mental health experts cringe at the loose usage and worry that society’s expectations about closure might backfire on victims who can’t reach tidy conclusions. A concept as amorphous as closure runs the risk of being slapped tritely on any number of emotional events--be it an anniversary, funeral or a charged courtroom confrontation.

Glib calls for closure often carry “a judgmental tinge” that a person’s grieving should be over, said David Foy, a Pepperdine University psychology professor and trauma expert.

But there may be more to closure than an overworked cliche. Some view it as a sign of how the country shares the hurt produced by its tragedies--from bombings to plane crashes to murder trials--and longs to mark an end to the communal angst.

“There have been public trauma events that have impacted the nation--whether it’s O.J., [who was] a public hero, or the Oklahoma City bombing,” said Linda Dunlap, who heads the psychology department at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. “The society itself wants to put closure in place.”

Dunlap sees benefits in the closure trend. It has focused society’s concern on the needs of victims and survivors as well as on the process through which people recover from loss, she said.

But what is closure?

“You’re going to get a lot of definitions,” said Michael de Arellano, a researcher at the National Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center in South Carolina. “It’s not real clear.”

Meanings differ even among specialists. Closure can encompass widely varying concepts. It refers to the last step of therapy and is a common theme in literature and film, describing the way a work ends. Most often, it means acceptance or resolution--to go on living by putting a tragedy in its place.

Louis Jolyon West, a UCLA psychiatry professor who interviewed survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing, calls closure “a final understanding” or “an emotional satisfaction that one has pursued a puzzling conflict to the end.”

But experts say the route is a highly personal one that defies mapping by others. Acceptance can take longer than erecting a memorial or completing a criminal trial. This can spell extra burdens for victims; although society and the media may be ready to declare a chapter closed, it seldom works that way.

West said the effects of emotional wounds linger like physical ones: “After you’ve been wounded, you can heal up, but it’s still a scar. It still aches when it rains.”

One grief specialist stopped taking reporters’ calls about public tragedies because he got sick of advising people to forget about finding closure. The researcher, George A. Bonanno, said victims are better off putting a tragedy out of their minds than constantly mulling it to reach understanding.

“People don’t get closure. It’s kind of a mythical thing,” said Bonanno, assistant professor at Catholic University in Washington.

In no way is the closure trend limited to disasters. It can be seen in more modest forms in everyday life: a woman’s search for the recipient of her brother’s donated heart, the reunion of war protesters. McGrath, the New York psychologist who also runs a clinic in Laguna Beach, includes under the umbrella of closure the trend of simplifying life by shedding excess belongings--saying goodbye to one lifestyle and hello to a slimmed-down version.

Closure can carry a gratifying, even triumphant flavor. La Verne retiree John Geddes returned in June to the Aleutian island of Attu, where he ditched his fighter plane into the sea in combat during World War II. Geddes, who has researched where the plane went down in hopes that it might someday be recovered, said the battleground tour of Attu provided closure by replacing his memories of wartime chaos with images of the island’s snow-frosted natural beauty.

Just months earlier, Geddes had tracked down a Japanese soldier whose photograph he came upon during the Aleutian campaign and held for five decades.

“It kind of completes the circle,” said Geddes, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel.

Sometimes, though, closure means facing unhappy truths. Foster children, for example, who harbor illusions of returning home might have to spend time with their bad parents to remember why they have been separated, said Pasadena family therapist Suzanne Boyle-Rezac, whose clients include foster children.

The point of confronting an ugly reality is “to get on with their life,” Boyle-Rezac said.

Closure may be most familiar as an emblem of the potent movement to grant greater rights to crime victims and survivors. Victims can offer written statements at sentencings in all 50 states and can speak at the hearing in at least 46. California last month became the latest to give victims’ relatives the right to attend the killer’s execution. The sponsor, Assemblyman Tom McClintock (R-Northridge), said the law gives victims’ families the same rights accorded relatives of the condemned--and a means to closure.

To be sure, there are other powerful forces at work besides closure concerns in these changes, including national worry over crime and efforts to toughen laws. But courthouse concern for closure comes as the legal system increasingly considers crime’s toll on victims and their own need for a day in court.

Tinged in equal parts with ideas of healing and redemption, the search for closure in the courts melds the modern tenets of pop psychology with ancient notions of justice done--Oprah meets Aeschylus.

Morris, the UCLA law professor, says closure mirrors ancient Greek ideas about resolving “polluting” events that leave the community feeling out of balance. This is seen in the famous mythical trial of Orestes, who killed his mother to avenge her murder of his father. To the dismay of the Furies pursuing him, Orestes is ultimately absolved--an outcome widely seen as symbolizing the victory of collective justice over the vengeful impulses of his mythical pursuers.

“There’s a message of closure there. We have a legal system designed to replace the individual urge for vengeance--and at the same time encompass it so it does not remain unsatisfied,” said Joseph Grodin, a former state Supreme Court justice who teaches at UC’s Hastings School of Law in San Francisco. “We have trials and verdicts and prescribed punishments. We do recognize victims and families are part of it.”

A Debate Centered on Death Penalty

The legal world’s most wrenching discussion about closure has centered on the death penalty. Nine states since 1990 have enacted laws allowing survivors to see executions.

“It gives them a sense of closure. That’s something that shouldn’t be taken lightly,” McClintock said.

In Oklahoma, which last year began allowing families to watch executions in person or on closed circuit television, one of the first survivors to watch was the law’s sponsor.

As a teenager, Oklahoma state Sen. Brooks Douglass and his sister were wounded in a 1979 home invasion that left their parents dead. But it wasn’t watching Steven Keith Hatch die by lethal injection last year that gave Douglass closure. That came a year earlier, when Douglass met in prison with the man who pulled the trigger, Glen Burton Ake. They talked and sobbed for 90 minutes. Ake apologized. Douglass surprised himself--he forgave.

The sense of relief was “a complete physical experience,” Douglass recalled. “It was like poison pouring out of the bottom of my feet. I could breathe again. My whole life changed.”

Barbara Biehn found her healing from seeing a killer die.

Last year’s California execution of serial killer William G. Bonin, who murdered Biehn’s 16-year-old son, Steven Wood, in 1980, lifted Biehn from a “black hole,” she said. Biehn, who lives in Arizona, said she went from being a shut-in to having a normal life, with friends and hobbies.

But Elza Rodgers, grandfather of one of Bonin’s young victims, said the execution merely rekindled dormant memories that come back each time another killer is put to death.

Bonin himself discussed closure for his victims’ families during a radio interview before the execution: “They feel that when I’m executed, it’s going to put a closure to them. But that’s not the case.”

Rodgers, who favors capital punishment, recalls that prediction. “I think he was right,” he said.

Still, closure remains a compelling notion--a staple of news coverage of tragedies and often the push behind how people cope with unhappy events. The first anniversary of the Northridge earthquake included a public celebration for “healing and closure.” Survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing cited closure--a need to understand the unfathomable--in pushing for a memorial.

After a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy who had been shot died after being taken off life support Saturday night, one of his colleagues fought back tears and spoke of closure.

‘Giving Yourself Permission to Let Go’

Other times, closure is meant for a more private ache. In the name of closure, a North Hollywood funeral home held a public memorial for all who lost loved ones last year.

Beyond the easy cliches and the mass appeal of closure lie the circumstances of someone like John Shelton. Sometimes relief requires abandoning hope, then settling for a ragged conclusion.

Shelton found closure by giving up hope his father could be alive long after being shot down over Laos during the Vietnam War. For years, that prospect propelled Shelton’s mother, Marian, in tireless work on behalf of prisoners of war, and it swept up her children, too.

Ultimately Marian Shelton surrendered, committing suicide in 1990. Four years later, the children persuaded the Air Force to declare their father, Col. Charles Shelton, dead. He had been listed as a prisoner since John Shelton was a boy.

“It’s like taking my mom’s struggle in our own hands and saying, ‘It’s over, Mom. Whether you like it or not, it’s over,’ ” he said.

Shelton, 41, no longer attends POW functions and said he now feels free to make his own choices. But closure is not as simple as shutting a book.

“Closure is giving yourself permission to let go. I don’t have closure with my mom yet. With the POW thing, I do,” he said. “I didn’t get to say goodbye to her.”