When Time Stands Still: The Destructive Experience of Ambiguous Loss among Mothers of Combat Soldiers

What happens when stories refuse coherence? This article examines ambiguous loss among mothers of combat soldiers, focusing on how prolonged waiting and uncertainty infiltrate everyday life, eroding sensemaking. Drawing on ethnographic interviews, it explores how mothers experience the contraction of time and space—manifested in suspended routines, disrupted temporal orientation, and diminished physical and emotional safety. We present narratives that defy conventional formats and ask how meaning is constructed when coherence is refused and cultural frameworks of meaning seem irrelevant or unattainable. Interpreted through Clifford Geertz's interpretive anthropology and Veena Das's work on the everyday aftermath of violence, the analysis shows how trauma becomes embodied and spatialized. Building on trauma studies and anthropology, the paper argues that ambiguous loss generates both interpretive and ethical crises that challenge dominant cultural scripts, revealing how violence ruptures life projects and destabilizes the ordinary. But, rather than framing these accounts as “failed” sensemaking, they are read as refusals to impose closure within systems that prescribe resolution.