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

by Mary-Frances O'Connor

I always wanted to understand the why rather than just the what. Why does grief hurt so much? Why does the death, the permanent absence of this person with whom you are bonded, result in such devastating feelings, and lead to behavior and beliefs that are inexplicable, even to you? I felt certain that part of the answer could be found in the brain, the seat of our thoughts and feelings, motivations, and behaviors.

eventually moved back to the University of Arizona. I run the Grief, Loss and Social Stress (GLASS) lab there,

Neuroscience is not necessarily the discipline that springs to mind when thinking of grief, and certainly, when my quest began, that was even less the case. Through my years of study and research, I eventually realized the brain has a problem to solve when a loved one has died. This is not a trivial problem. Losing our one-and-only overwhelms us, because we need our loved ones as much as we need food and water.

I realized that the brain devotes lots of effort to mapping where our loved ones are while they are alive, so that we can find them when we need them. And the brain often prefers habits and predictions over new information. But it struggles to learn new information that cannot be ignored, like the absence of our loved one. Grieving requires the difficult task of throwing out the map we have used to navigate our lives together and transforming our relationship with this person who has died. Grieving, or learning to live a meaningful life without our loved one, is ultimately a type of learning. Because learning is something we do our whole lives, seeing grieving as a type of learning may make it feel more familiar and understandable and give us the patience to allow this remarkable process to unfold.

You see, grief never ends, and it is a natural response to loss. You will experience pangs of grief over this specific person forever. You will have discrete moments that overwhelm you, even years after the death when you have restored your life to a meaningful, fulfilling experience. But, whereas you will feel the universally human emotion of grief forever, your grieving, your adaptation, changes the experience over time. The first one hundred times you have a wave of grief, you may think, “I will never get through this, I cannot bear this.” The one hundred and first time, you may think, “I hate this, I don’t want this—but it is familiar, and I know I will get through this moment.”

How can our grief ever change, if the person will never return? Our brain is remarkable, enabling us to imagine an infinite number of future possibilities, if we harness this ability.

Even when a person has been ill for a very long time, no one knows what it will be like to walk through the world without this other person. My contribution as a scientist has been to study grief from the brain’s perspective, from the perspective that the brain is trying to solve a problem when faced with the absence of the most important person in our life. Grief is a heart-wrenchingly painful problem for the brain to solve, and grieving necessitates learning to live in the world with the absence of someone you love deeply, who is ingrained in your understanding of the world. This means that for the brain, your loved one is simultaneously gone and also everlasting, and you are walking through two worlds at the same time. You are navigating your life despite the fact that they have been stolen from you, a premise that makes no sense, and that is both confusing and upsetting.

If someone close to us dies, then, based on what we know about object-trace cells, our neurons still fire every time we expect our loved one to be in the room. And this neural trace persists until we can learn that our loved one is never going to be in our physical world again. We must update our virtual maps, creating a revised cartography of our new lives. Is it any wonder that it takes many weeks and months of grief and new experiences to learn our way around again?

We use brain maps to find our loved ones, to predict where they are, and to search for them when they are gone. 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.

Our attachment need—the need for the comfort and safety of our loved ones—requires us to know where they are. As I progressed from being an undergraduate to graduate school, I moved to a new university in a different town. My mother felt very strongly about coming to visit me in my new place. “I need to be able to visualize you where you are now,” she said. It helped her to feel closer to me, and I think mapping where I was made her miss me less in my absence.

The idea that a person simply does not exist anymore does not follow the rules the brain has learned over a lifetime. Furniture does not magically disappear. If the person we love is missing, then our brain assumes they are somewhere else and will be found later. The action required in response to their absence is quite simple: Go look for the person, cry out, text, call, or use any possible means to get their attention. The idea that the person is simply no longer in this dimensional world is not a logical answer to their absence, as far as the brain is concerned.

Am I Crazy? The first person I saw in psychotherapy who was dealing with grief was quite certain that she was “going crazy.” She was in her early twenties, and her father had died suddenly in a violent accident. She was convinced she had seen him on the street after his accident, wearing the bandanna he always wore, and she could not shake this experience. She truly believed she had seen him, and she also knew this was not possible. Worst of all, she hoped she would see him again, even though she was worried about what he would look like after he had been fatally injured.

perhaps it is not so surprising that we “see” and “feel” our loved ones after they have died, especially soon after the death. Our brain is filling them in by completing the incoming information from all around us, since they are the next association in a reliable chain of events. Seeing and feeling them is quite common, and it definitely isn’t evidence that something is wrong with us.

Our brain trusts and makes predictions based on our lived experience. When you wake up one morning and your loved one is not in the bed next to you, the idea that she has died is simply not true in terms of probability. For our brain, this is not true on day one, or day two, or for many days after her death. We need enough new lived experiences for our brain to develop new predictions, and that takes time.

Keep in mind that the brain cannot learn everything at once. You cannot go from arithmetic to calculus without many, many days of practicing multiplication tables and solving differential equations. In the same way, you cannot force yourself to learn overnight that your loved one is gone. However, you can allow your brain to have experiences, day after day, which will help to update that little gray computer. Taking in everything around us, which updates our virtual map and what our brain thinks will happen next, is a good start for being resilient in the face of great loss. Chapter

Seeing my friend going through this painful breakup brought home a vital point. If your brain cannot comprehend that something as abstract as death has happened, it cannot understand where the deceased is in space and time, or why they are not here, now, and close. From your brain’s perspective, ghosting is exactly what happens when a loved one dies. As far as the brain is concerned, they have not died. The loved one has, with no explanation, stopped returning our calls—stopped communicating with us altogether. How could someone who loves us do that? They have become distant, or unbelievably mean, and that is infuriating. Your brain doesn’t understand why; it doesn’t understand that dimensions can simply disappear. If they don’t feel close, then they just feel distant, and you want to fix it rather than believe they are permanently gone. This (mis)belief leads to an intense upwelling of emotions.

Like my friend and I did during phone calls after she was ghosted, we run endless possible scenarios after a death. How could this have happened? Could we have stopped it? In fact, people who are grieving very commonly describe endless rumination.

Psychiatrist Kathy Shear at Columbia says that “grief is the form love takes when someone we love dies.”5 Many cultures emphasize relinquishing the bond with the loved one as a part of facing the reality that they are gone. Some cultures emphasize that the bereaved should continue the relationship and communicate with the loved one, or even have rituals through which they are transformed into a continuing presence as an ancestor. Psychological science calls these continuing bonds. These bonds are unique to each relationship, and the people we have interviewed for research have graciously shared some of their intimate moments. 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.

The enduring nature of bonds, such as pair bonds, separates an attachment relationship from a transactional relationship. In a transactional relationship, such as with a colleague or an acquaintance, we track whether we are putting more effort, time, money, or resources into the relationship than they are, and how much we are getting out of it. With attachment, both people have access to help at the times when it is needed most. Examples include support and caregiving when one of you is ill, giving the other person the benefit of the doubt, or defending the other’s reputation. In a healthy and mutual relationship, we engage in these behaviors not because something equal will be gained in return, but because these are expressions of love and caring.

You may wonder who you are now, or what your purpose is, without the other person. If your child has died, are you no longer a mother? Or it may feel like you cannot go on without your partner. You may feel at a loss for what to do in situations where you previously decided things together. Unable to share your day’s events when you get home in the evening, you might feel almost as though they never happened.

These representations of the self and the other, this closeness, is mapped as a dimension in the brain. Consequently, the process of grieving is not just about psychological or metaphorical change. Grieving requires neural rewiring as well.

we can also extend this to the idea of being “grief adjacent,” or for how we feel when we are around someone who is grieving. When a friend is grieving, when they are learning to adapt to feeling that a part of them is missing, it affects those who care for them, often deeply. You

We appear to be hardwired to be influenced by the people around us, to be sensitive to cues of what they are feeling—in other words, we are hardwired with the neural building blocks of closeness.

scientists now make a distinction between empathy and compassion. In addition to being sensitive to what others are feeling, compassion is defined as also having the motivation to care for their well-being. As neuroscientist Jean Decety from the University of Chicago explains, there are actually three aspects to empathy. These are cognitive perspective taking, emotional empathy, and compassion.

compassion, or caring, goes beyond empathy. It is the motivation to help or comfort the person when you can take their perspective and know how they are feeling.

Another famous example of this belief comes from Joan Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking. Didion explains that she was unable to give away her deceased husband’s shoes, because “he might need them again.” Why would we believe that our loved ones will return, if we know that’s not true? We can find answers to this paradox in the neural systems of our brain, systems that produce different aspects of knowledge and deliver them to our consciousness.

Psychologist John Archer, in his book The Nature of Grief, pointed out that evolution has given us a powerful motivation to believe that our loved ones will return, even when the evidence says otherwise. In our early days as a species, those who persisted in the belief that their mate would return with food stayed with their young. The young of those parents who waited with them had a better chance of surviving.

Throughout the time that the penguins spend apart, brooding on the egg, the memory of the other is not just a memory. It is a memory attached to a specific belief or motivation—“Wait for this one to return. This one is special. This one belongs to you.” In humans as well, it is because your loved one existed that certain neurons fire together and certain proteins are folded in your brain in particular ways. It is because your loved one lived, and because you loved each other, that means when the person is no longer in the outer world, they still physically exist—in the wiring of the neurons of your brain.

the Kyoto University Primate Research Institute. In reaction to the death of an infant, these highly evolved mother chimps carry their baby for days after it has died. Chimpanzee mothers (and, in other cases, apes and monkeys) continue to carry and groom their infants after their death, from a few days up to a month or even two.

It is likely that human cultural events like funerals, wakes, and memorials serve a similar purpose. Preparing for a memorial includes calling family and friends, and telling them of the death, and hearing their condolences.

all mark the moment as different, and that moment stamps in our memory the fact of the death. At many funerals we see the corpse of our loved one in a coffin, or see an urn of ashes, the physical proof that their bodies are no longer the vessels for the souls that we love.

If we take seriously what bereaved people tell us, then it seems the brain can persist in two mutually exclusive beliefs. On the one hand, we have the clear knowledge that a loved one has died, and on the other, the simultaneous magical belief that they will return. When a loved one has died, we have a memory of learning that they died. This memory might be of the phone call informing you that your brother died, etched in your mind with lots of detail—where you were in the dining room, what you were cooking, how hot it was in the room, the smell of onions. These are what we call episodic memories; they are detailed memories of a specific event.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people were unable to be with their loved ones when they were admitted to the hospital and were not at their bedside when they died. Without the opportunity for saying good-bye, for expressing love, gratitude, or forgiveness, and without the memory of seeing our loved one’s physical decline and death, ambiguity may surround the “realness” of the death.

memories function a little more like cooking a meal. The ingredients of our memories are stored across many areas of the brain. When we remember an event, these ingredients are brought together, dumping into the mix sights and sounds and smells, a feeling the event created for us, associations with particular people at the event, the perspective from which we viewed various scenes.

C.S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, also wrote a poignantly insightful book entitled A Grief Observed, after the death of his wife. In it, he writes: I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had [my wife] for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string, then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. . . . So many roads once; now so many cul de sacs.

as a consequence of attachment, is that we believe so thoroughly in that person’s existence that we create a never-ending relationship to them, the persistent belief in here, now, and close.

Because this implicit knowledge conflicts with the episodic memories, we are less likely to acknowledge this implicit magical thinking. I call these conflicting streams of information the gone-but-also-everlasting theory, and I think it is because they conflict that grieving takes so long.

It is true that any new knowledge requires time and experience to acquire, but the time it takes to acquire other types of knowledge compared to the length of time many people grieve suggests there is something else going on, like incompatible beliefs. Developing this new knowledge requires the willingness to engage fully in our life during bereavement, and we will talk more about engagement in our day-to-day life during loss in chapters 8 and 9

When we lose a loved one, it is common to know that the person is gone and simultaneously harbor the magical belief that they will walk back in through the door again. If we take at face value that people believe both things, and accept that this is normal, then neuroscientists should look for multiple neural processes at work.

Kübler-Ross and others applied the stages of grief she originally described in terminally ill patients to grief in the wake of bereavement, which is a big leap. But description is not the same as empirical investigation.

not all people who are grieving go through all of the five stages or go through them in that order. The five stages are not an empirically proven model of the process of adaptation after loss.

The problem with this monomyth is that people feel they are not normal when they do not experience a linear set of obstacles. Or they feel like failures because they have not “overcome” grief or achieved some enlightened state. Friends, family members, and even doctors may worry when there is no clear return of a wise hero.

grief distress and acceptance seem to be two sides of a coin, but the rise and fall of each one tends to look like waves across days, weeks, and months. The relative increase in acceptance as compared to the relative decline of grief distress does happen, thankfully, but over a long period of time.

we also face what Stroebe and Schut called restoration-oriented stressors. These are all the tasks that we now have to do because the person is gone. Restoration stressors include practical things that you are not used to doing, or at least not doing alone, such as figuring out your taxes or shopping for groceries. In the case of losing a spouse, you not only have to learn to live without your friend and lover, but also without the person who used to do housework, say, or without a co-parent. For an older couple, widowhood might mean living without a significant support for our health issues, or without the person who always did the driving. And restoration means reorienting to how our world has changed, such as recognizing that our retirement dreams are not going to happen with our loved one. We have to make new choices and develop new goals in the face of our new reality in restoring a meaningful life.

Time off from grieving might look like denying, suppressing, or distracting oneself from one’s feelings about the death, and this was presumed to be bad for long-term adjustment. But time off from grieving can give your mind and your body a break from the stress of the emotional upheaval. Stroebe and Schut wanted to address these limitations in the previous models of grieving.

The insightful question that Bonanno answered with the CLOC data was this: Does everyone’s adaptation trajectory during grieving look the same?1 If bereaved people were interviewed at six months and eighteen months after their loss, would everyone look the same, or would you be able to detect groups of people who fall into different patterns? In fact, in the CLOC study Bonanno and his colleagues found that there were four trajectories that could be used to categorize people’s grieving. These trajectories include resilient (those who never develop depression after the death of a loved one), chronic grieving (depression that begins after the death of a loved one and is prolonged), chronic depression (depression that began before the death of a loved one and continues or worsens after the death), and depressed improved (preexisting depression that abates after the death of a loved one).

When a clinician is faced with a person who is suffering during bereavement, they need to ask if it is a long-standing problem. We must not assume that the death can be pinpointed as the cause of the suffering, even though they are suffering after the loss.

What was remarkable, however, was how many fell into this “not depressed” resilient category: more than half of the widowed spouses. That means that resilience is the most typical pattern of grieving, showing that most people who experience the death of a loved one do not experience depression at any time point. Frankly, this surprised many people who study grief. This insight reminded us that clinicians had primarily been studying bereaved people who sought help after their loss, a smaller group than the larger “resilient” group who didn’t experience depression. We had generalized our understanding of the people who were having difficulty coping to extend to all bereaved people, because we didn’t have systematic, large-scale research on grieving. We only achieved this knowledge about the common experience of resilience because the CLOC study had randomly chosen people in Detroit to participate in the study.

Since the time of Freud, we have learned that depression and grief, even severe grief, can be distinguished. For example, depression tends to pervade every aspect of life. People who have depression feel that almost all facets of their life are awful, rather than feeling that it is just the loss they are struggling with.

Depression runs strong in my maternal family, not unlike a vein of metal ore coursing through the generations, picking out one individual or another. I had already experienced one episode of depression before she died, during a period of homesickness in my junior year abroad in college. My response to her death included another bout of depression, and it was not my last. As I learned more from people who experienced complicated grief in my research studies, I came to realize that the hallmark of their grief experience was yearning. That was not the feeling I wrestled with when I was grieving. Although I struggled after the loss of my mom, I was not yearning for her to be around again. If anything, I felt relieved that she was gone, because my relationship with her had been so difficult, and because I knew how unhappy she was during stretches of her life. Feeling relief over a loved one’s death, though not uncommon, is terribly stigmatizing, so I did not admit that to a lot of people.