How a Grieving Brain Heals Our Heart : Delights of the Ordinary No. 14

Loss is difficult. Grief is difficult. Yet, you can’t really study grief without studying love.

I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow however, turns out to be not a state but a process.

– C.S. Lewis in A Grief Observed

Two winters back I lost my mother. It is that usual time when the sun is still mildly warm while the air starts to become crispier and chillier, the sharp winters catching up, making daylight shorter and darkness longer. It is in that season when my emotions are usually flabbergasted to the extent of not knowing how to respond. There is a feeling of missing etched inside! I was in grief.

…Even after two seasons as I try to button up myself, so I can look strong outwardly, a much harder wave of sorrow makes me droopy in different spans, now and then.

Grieving is a process. Process of a lifetime.

What is grief?

To comprehend grief in mere words, grief is this “genuine reaction we have towards loss.”

Yet in existence, grief is “the intense emotion that crashes over you like a wave, completely overwhelming, unable to be ignored” says neuroscientist Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD.

Mary-Frances O’Connor studies the neurophysiology of grief and is a pioneer in fMRI research. She writes in her book The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss –

“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.”

Some losses are sudden, some are subtle. And they essentially are a matter of mind and heart.

Our brain has its logical relation to the world and those around us. And when the person vanishes from our current reality – our existing world – the brain has to do the intricately tough task of remapping and redrawing the world in the pursuit of making our existence feel complete again, along with that vacant space left in our heart.

Grief is an extreme emotional swell that overwhelms us at the very beat of losing someone (sometimes just a thought of it). The outburst can be different for each one of us but sorrow is constant.

Grief Doesn’t Equate to Grieving

As children our brain learns about the world’s details, to draw patterns in three dimensions – time, space and closeness.

Every time kids sulk when friends leave, or change schools, when family relocate they are experiencing some level of loss. Every abandonment (even emotional) is a smallish grief pang for a child. We learn to recognize loss and the grief attached to it from our formative years.

Even after many years of losing your loved one, when you still have random reflexive split-second memories to vanquish you, you are practically grieving. Grieving is us going through the nostalgic lanes and reliving them in our minds. Though love is a thing of the heart, our brain equally participates in the process. Our neurons help us form attachments to others in love and in relationships; but, with loss, our brain must come to terms with where our loved ones went, or how to picture a future that encircles their absence. 

Conner says,

“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… a premise that makes no sense, and that is both confusing and upsetting.”

[…]

“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.”

Loss is not just death and we not precisely grieve over death. We also lose people to distance, differences, damage to relationships, despair and heartbreaks. We lose them in different phases of our lifetime at different levels. And every time we relearn the fading of that safe house of shared memories, physical presence and trust.

Grieving is a process.

And we can grieve for a longer time than others, even life long. The older we become the harder it is for the brain to remap itself. Harder for our hearts to consider reliving again.

At a more basic level, bereaved people have to relearn every small habit that incorporated the ‘we’, beyond just ‘you’ and ‘me’. So, every time you cook a meal and don’t have to automatically consider your child’s food preferences, or every time you reach for the phone to call your mom with the news of the day – each of these is the learning to not take into account the other person on this earthly plane. 

– Mary-Frances O’Connor

There is No Right or Wrong Way to Grieve. There is No Time Frame.

Every person we love leaves a real, structural imprint in our brains and it is in these grieving moments we are simultaneously re-mapping those deep imprints and renewing our minds, internally processing our emotions which helps us heal. Grieving is never a linear process, we go back and forth, with more and less acceptance over time.

If you have lost people in death or distance, you are allowed to be in grief. This is how we are created, to give grieving its utmost time. It may take years and years of grieving before we have the capacity to generate a validation that love is not long lost. Loved ones may be.

The ‘I Wish Moments’

Sometimes grieving is also deeply mixed with lost opportunities. Those ‘I wish moments.’

‘What if I had sent a love note to my mother before she passed away?’

‘What if I had this one opportunity to hug her tightly before she closed her eyes forever?’

“What if I packed her woollens before she left for university?”

In our heads, this shift is too much to bear. So we may find enough reasons to fix this grief with ‘what ifs.’

That rational burden of blaming ourselves is such a deep hindrance in seeing the whole gamut of love and forgiveness. The things we could not do does not define our love for them. Even if we could do what we wanted to do, we would still grieve for other reasons.

The Patterns of the World

The problem is that we are stuck with the patterns of the world and the way it sees grief and sorrow. We might think we won’t feel grief after lamenting over it, “that someday this will be ‘over’.”

It doesn’t matter how long it has been since the loss or death, and abruptly you become mindful of the loss, you will feel that brief surge of grief. Yet we become more familiar, more arranged as time passes, even becoming compassionate for others, when the sorrow is never gone inside of us.

How do we channel that inward sorrow and direct it outward instead?

Because there are many ways to grieve so are many ways to show your love too.

Perhaps when we know that every change is a way for our brain to rewire itself, we may see the hope of living in the present attached to the strings of our past memories thus we do not shut ourselves down in life. To help our brain learn that every sorrow, as painful as it may get, has the capacity to develop a heart that can overflow with affection.

We all are marooned by grief and sorrow and by loss and we know a bunch of flowers may not be enough to overcome it. Maybe it is a good reason to send a text, an email, or drive across that trough to tell our tribe how lovable they are. Maybe to also coax them to love in whatever way they can. Maybe to move boldly along with sorrow and mend the world with our awe and wonder. It is in the heartache we are able to discover the newness.

I know all of this is stupendously harder to practice than writing or even reading it. We all know we need to forgive, but we all know in our experience that it is not always the easiest choice to make.

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.” 

-Louise Erdrich

Now to the cool internet find of the week.

To watch: If you would know that illusions leave us in perpetual bewilderment then watch The Changing Room Illusion by, Michael A. Cohen. We are much less aware of the world than we realize.

P.S. As I write you this newsletter, I got news about the death of our friend’s wife. She leaves two young children and a husband here on earth. Life is short and probably that is why it is just mandatory to forgive, to learn to re-love and not to reject people because of their carnal follies.

May we look for beautiful, redemptive transmutation of sorrow into kindness, to live in the present and make those choices that are eternally good.

Maybe one day we can. I can. Make those choices. In my ordinary life.