How to Heal a Grieving Heart

Grief is difficult. Loss is difficult.

Yet, you can’t really understand grief without studying love.

When I lost my mother to a brain haemorrhage, it was winter. That usual time when the sun is still mildly warm but the air starts to nip. The feeling of a sharp winter coming up. Days turning shorter and darkness longer.

It is in this season when my emotions are usually flabbergasted to the extent of not knowing how to respond. There is a feeling of missing etched inside! Even after two seasons as I try to button myself up, trying to look strong on the outside, 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 simply put grief is the “genuine reaction we have towards loss.”

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

Yet when we experience grief, it 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 MRI research.

Conner 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.”

Grief is an extreme emotion that overwhelmingly swells in us at the very beat of losing someone (sometimes just a thought of it). The outburst can be different for each one of us however sorrow is constant.

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

Read more: How grieving is not grief