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

by Mary-Frances O'Connor

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.