The kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie and the response of her television-personality daughter, a combustible mix of sadness, dread, longing, and resignation, has the effect of reminding me, at least in tone, of my mother’s quiet-but-poignant lamentations regarding the unresolved wartime disappearance of her Polish father, a man she adored. From the little that was known, he had escaped the Warsaw ghetto and managed to secure clandestine passage across the Vistula, away from the Nazis and toward the encamped Russians. But something apparently went wrong, and he was shot dead by a contingent of German troops who had also crossed the river. What haunted her, and she spoke of it in the same manner as Savannah Guthrie, was that her father was never found and therefore never buried. My mother’s dramatic, mystical side imagined his soul as still at large, unmoored and drifting in the ancient tradition of the unburied. I was mostly silent when she spoke of the story, and it was rare that she did. What she sought was what many Americans now call closure, which at times sounds more like a demand than a wish. But my own truth, now that my own mortality is tangible, is that more often than not, there is no clean final chapter, no explanation or even a longed-for resolution. Sometimes all that remains is acceptance, the book’s last chapter read again and again but with final pages always missing.