The Grieving Brain

By Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD

I am not sure if the word orphan can be applied to a woman in her forties, but I felt very, very alone.

As I move through my third signifcant experience of grief, with the loss of my mother, I am especially struck by how this one is so incredibly different from losing my dad and Roy. This time, Mary-Frances O’Connor’s personal and professional work in The Grieving Brain has helped me better understand why my spirit, mind, and body responds to each loss the way they do. O’Connor is a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona and studies how the brain experiences grief. She artfully takes a very complicated science regarding neurons and synapses and makes it easy to grasp. She infuses research with personal stories of her own experience of loss to draw her research from the lab into lived experience.

I especially like her explanation of accepting, a step in the grieving process which seems to be required in order to remake a healthy life after loss.

The key to accepting is not doing anything with what you are experiencing; not askiing 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.

For this latest loss, her work brought clarity to a grief practice I had been stumbling around with, but hadn’t yet been able to articulate. It is a practice of pendulating between the memories of the past (which, she says can be healing, but can also lead to ruminating) and imagination about my future life. I was excellent at the memories of the past part. And the very nature of life forced me to consider my present and future (even if not with a lot of imagination). But after reading her description, I could really catch when memories of the past tipped over into ruminating and caused me undue pain. And this time, I have imagined a new life for myself with family and growing friendships, and could begin to use my imagination to engage there. Pendulation. Back and forth.

After Roy died, I had a quote from Trevor Noah done in calligraphy and hung it in my bedroom: “You can only dream of what you can imagine.”

Now I believe that imagination is one of the key faculties for transforming the grieving experience into a growing and thriving life.