Missing student Sudiksha Konanki's family faces 'ambiguous loss' – the grief of uncertainty
Nearly two weeks after Sudiksha Konanki was last seen alive in the Dominican Republic, her family must come to terms with the possibility they may never know exactly what happened to her.
The spring breaker went missing March 6 in Punta Cana, and while her parents initially urged authorities to explore every possibility about what happened to her, including kidnapping, they said Tuesday they now believe she drowned in the ocean and have asked authorities to declare her dead.
In a drawn-out search for a missing person that doesn't result in solid answers about what happened, experts say their family is left in an endless state of wondering and "ambiguous loss" – grieving, but not totally sure that the person is gone. For Sudiksha Konanki's parents, seeking a death declaration might help them begin the process of moving forward.
"This is incredibly difficult for us to process," her father, Subbarayudu Konanki, told reporters outside the family's Loudoun County, Virginia, home. He paused as her mother, Sreedevi Konanki, sobbed and turned away from cameras.
"It's one of the most stressful and traumatic kinds of loss there is because of the unknowability. Sometimes this ambiguity or uncertainty can go on for a lifetime," said psychologist Pauline Boss, who coined the term "ambiguous loss" in the 1970s and wrote the book "Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief."
How did Sudiksha Konanki go missing?
Konanki, a student at the University of Pittsburgh, was last seen on March 6 on surveillance footage at the Punta Cana hotel where she stayed with friends on her spring break trip.
According to Joshua Riibe, who authorities believe was the last person to see her, the two went into the ocean and were swept out by a wave. Riibe reportedly told investigators he helped carry her back to shallower water but didn't see where she went after because he was vomiting and passed out. Riibe is a student at a Minnesota university, and investigators said the two met in the Dominican Republic.
Earlier in the investigation, Subbarayudu Konanki urged authorities to expand the search beyond the water after his daughter's body wasn't found in an initial search. He asked them to consider possibilities other than drowning, including kidnapping.
Given a current "culture of harm to women," Boss said it's not surprising that Konanki's family initially thought she may have faced violence. The story resembled that of Natalee Holloway, who vanished while on a graduation trip to Aruba two decades ago. Holloway's body was never found, and years passed before a man she met there confessed to murdering her.
The family may have also believed Konanki was kidnapped because they could hold onto hope she could still be found alive, said George Bonanno, a clinical psychology professor and expert in loss and trauma at the Teachers College at Columbia University. Bonanno said our brains have trouble adjusting to uncertainty of death because they are good at imagining scenarios about our loved ones.
"If there's a possibility that the person is still alive, your brain is going to have a hard time saying, 'OK let's just recalibrate now,'" said Bonanno, author of "The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss."
What happens to the families of missing people
When someone goes missing, families throw themselves into the investigation to find them. And while the experience causes anguish, Bonanno said there is a sense of being able to do something about it.
But after time, what sets in is the "pain of having to rethink our whole world without the person," he said.
"Ambiguous loss" is "unclear loss, a loss without verification of life or death," Boss said. She's worked with the families of missing people for decades, including the widows of soldiers missing in action in the Vietnam War.
Our culture places lots of emphasis on rituals, the most important of which is the process of laying loved ones to rest, Boss said. Whether through burial or cremation, having a body as proof the person has "transformed to death" is a human need, she said. It can also help the brain adjust to a new reality without that person, Bonanno said.
But in the absence of that sense of finality, families might choose other ways to honor loved ones. One family of a firefighter lost to 9/11 whose body wasn't recovered opted to bury a guitar instead, Boss said. Some of the Vietnam soldiers' wives opted to accept a change in their status from missing in action to killed in action for practical or financial reasons, she said.
"But in their hearts and minds, they still held the uncertainty and the ambiguity," Boss said. "Some told me that if they ever married again, it would not be monogamy because they would keep their missing husband in their heart and mind."
In a letter to Dominican police from Konanki's parents in which they asked for her to be declared dead, Fox News reported they wrote that initiating the process of declaring her dead would not ease their grief but would "bring some closure and enable us to honor her memory."
Though they may always feel some uncertainty, that could help them begin to live their lives again, Boss said.
"They want certainty, they want to move forward," she said. "We need to find meaning in our losses, and find some new purpose in life, perhaps honoring our dead, perhaps living a good life for them."