The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss

by Mary-Frances O'Connor

A key problem in grief is that there is a mismatch between the virtual map we always use to find our loved ones, and the reality, after they die, that they can no longer be found in the dimensions of space and time. The unlikely situation that they are not on the map at all, the alarm and confusion that this causes, is one reason grief overwhelms us.

The idea that a person simply does not exist anymore does not follow the rules the brain has learned over a lifetime.

In some cases, we are sad or angry at ourselves because we have “failed” to keep our loved ones close on the closeness dimension.

One example came from a young woman whose husband had died. The couple had shared a love of music, and she continued to feel connected to him through the songs she heard. She recalled driving home one afternoon, and every song that came on the radio seemed to be related to him in some way. Her vision of him DJ-ing her ride home made her laugh, and the continued connection consoled her.

Continuing bonds occur not just through conversations; they may include carrying on the wishes or values of the deceased. No research has investigated yet whether the closeness of these continuing bonds can be mapped in the brain. Someday we may have an answer to how this type of closeness works at the neural level.

Consequently, the process of grieving is not just about psychological or metaphorical change. Grieving requires neural rewiring as well.

It may be the cruelest aspect of our human nature that we can experience these incompatible mutual beliefs—both that our loved one is gone and that they can be found again.

CGT provides a therapist-guided imagined conversation with the deceased. During one of these conversations, when Vivian said out loud how much she had loved him, she was flooded with the feeling that he loved her, too. “I think he loved me too much to die while I was in the hospital room,” she said. “Maybe it was a blessing that I left, so he could let go the way he needed to.” The strength of her feelings of love made her realize that what still held them together wasn’t her cooking, but rather a deep bond that could never disappear. Later, though Vivian still cooked for parishioners because she found it meaningful, she no longer did it out of a compulsive feeling that she needed to feed her husband.

Our brain is doing everything in its power to keep us united with the ones we love. These powerful tools include hormones, neural connections, and genetics, which may even sometimes override the painfully obvious knowledge that the loved one is no longer alive. The magnificence of the brain gave me great empathy for what bereaved people overcome in order to make a life when their loved one will not return.

You have always had intrusive thoughts about your spouse, your kids, or your best friend. The emotional impact of them is different now that they have died, but being reminded of our loved ones is the nature of having a relationship. You get reminders because these people are important to us. That does not change right away because the person has died. Your brain has to catch up.

A third possibility is that you return in your mind to the night he died, going over the details as you have so many times before, in excruciating detail. That night you took him to the hospital, because he had been complaining all evening that he had chest pain, and you suddenly realized he looked ashen and sweaty. Why did you not consider it might be a heart attack, why did you believe him when he said it was heartburn from dinner? Why didn’t you insist on taking him sooner? Why did he keep smoking, even after his doctor told him it would increase his chances of heart disease? Why did you not confront him? He might never have died if only you had been more insistent, if you had acted sooner. In the example of the daydream as a response to yearning, your brain is orchestrating an experiential simulation, a virtual reality of how things could be now, contrasted with how they actually are, sitting there alone. By generating the “what ifs” in response to yearning, your brain is imagining events that might have played out very differently than they actually did. The alternate reality your brain vividly dreams up, where he did not die but is here with you, is unfavorably contrasted with the present moment in real life. In acute grief, these “what if” responses to the pangs of grief are common and completely normal.

In the 1993 movie Fearless, Jeff Bridges and Rosie Perez portray strangers who survive an airplane crash. Both of their lives unravel as they grapple with what it means to have survived. One night as they sit in his car, Perez reveals that she believes she killed her infant son by letting go of him during the crash. Bridges responds initially with utter frustration. When she completely comes apart, sobbing and praying to the Virgin Mary for forgiveness, Bridges is overwhelmed with what it must be like to believe what she believes, to feel like the murderer of the child given to you to protect. He gets out of the car, and with unclear intentions, tells Perez to get in the backseat and buckles her seatbelt. From the trunk, he retrieves an oblong, rusty toolbox and puts it in Perez’s arms, telling her to hold on to it and that it is her baby. In what might be a suicide attempt, Bridges gets behind the wheel and drives them through an empty alley toward a concrete wall, with the speedometer ticking upward. He tells Perez this is her chance to hold on tight, to save her baby. Completely immersed in the scene that resembles the plane crash, she kisses the toolbox. The speeding car crashes into the wall, and the rusty orange toolbox flies like a rocket through the front windshield of the car and into the cinderblock wall, its steel metal crumpling. For Perez, it is immediately and palpably clear that there was no way she could ever have held on to her baby, no way she could have ...

Although we are trading painful guilt for equally painful grief, at least guilt means we had some control over the situation. Believing we had control, even though we failed to use it, means the world is not completely unpredictable. It feels better to have bad outcomes in a predictable world in which we failed, than to have bad outcomes for no discernible reason.

the example of the young widow from chapter 7, she knows it is true that her husband died, and knows they went to the hospital in the middle of the night. She is subconsciously tempted to believe that because one antecedent (went to the hospital) is associated with one outcome (he died), the other antecedent (went to the hospital earlier) must be associated with the other outcome (he would not die). But that tempting logic does not make it true. It is not necessarily the case that if they had gotten to the hospital earlier in the evening, he would not have died.

The mind ruminates when it cannot resolve the discrepancy between its current state, such as feeling down, and its desired state, such as feeling happy or content.

The sneaky problem with rumination is that while one is ruminating, it feels as though you are seeking out the truth of the matter. The point is that the thoughts are prolonging our sad or irritable mood, not whether the thoughts are true.

Most of us do not like the experience of being overcome with grief. We feel slightly out of control; we may believe that if we allow ourselves to break down, we will never put the pieces back together again.

The key to accepting is not doing anything with what you are experiencing; not asking what your feelings mean, or how long they will last. Accepting is not about pushing them away and saying that you cannot bear it. It is not about believing that you are now a broken person, since no one can bring your parents back and you will never get another set. It is about noticing how it feels at that moment, letting your tears come, and then letting them go. Knowing that the moment of grief will overwhelm you, feeling its familiar knot in your throat, and knowing that it will recede. Like the rain.

To summarize, what Schneck found in the two studies was that conscious, intrusive thoughts about the deceased were linked to more grief. Avoiding those thoughts was associated with their happening more often. On the other hand, unconscious processing was associated with less grief. So, while the conscious thoughts distracting you may not be helpful (although possibly unavoidable), the unconscious thoughts during mind wandering do seem helpful.

If one believes that the only way to have a meaningful life is to be with the person who has died, this goal can never be reached. Instead, one may have to give up this specific way of achieving the goal of a meaningful life, while elaborating on other ways. Let’s face it, that is just plain hard.

Restoring a meaningful life is half of the dual process model of coping with bereavement. To restore a meaningful life, we have to be able to imagine that life. The inability to generate possible future events is at the heart of hopelessness.