Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD: The Map of Loss

Neuroscientist and professor Mary-Frances O’Connor is the author of The Grieving Brain, an exploration of the brain during loss. In her work, O’Connor studies the ways in which grief, loss, and bereavement imprint on the way we process the world—unable to physically map and locate the person who is now missing from our interpersonal landscapes, we must find new ways to navigate our lives, working around holes that feel, quite frankly, unbridgeable. I loved our conversation, because we explored both science and faith, as well as the enduring reality of grief: Those who have experienced loss understand that grief never goes away, even when you move past the stage of unrelenting grieving. We also talked about the new DSM-5 diagnosis of prolonged grief disorder, the pitfalls of rumination, and the essential nature of patience—both for ourselves and each other. At a time in our culture where we’re coping with massive loss—from the personal, to the cultural, to the environmental, O’Connor’s framework and language feels critical for understanding where we’re at. Particularly, as she points out, because the oscillations of grief work—moving from pain and anguish to moments of laughter and joy—is actually the framework for true mental health. Mental health is not maintaining happiness as status quo, she notes, it’s the flexibility to move through all emotions, including the most difficult ones.

TRANSCRIPT:

(Edited slightly for clarity.)

ELISE LOEHNEN:

Well thank you for your book. Let's start at the beginning of the book. I love that you make this very critical distinction between grief and grieving. Cn you explain that for people?

MARY-FRANCES O’CONNOR:

Sure. The distinction is really that grief is this wave of feeling and thought that comes over you ,and grieving on the other hand is the way that those waves of grief change over time without actually going away completely. And so someone after weeks, and months, and even years will usually experience less frequency or less intensity of these waves of grief. But that doesn't mean that, you know, as an example, my sister is engaged right now, and I know on her wedding day, we're going to have grief because my parents aren't going to be there to see it. And just because I know we're gonna have waves of grief, we're gonna cry. We're gonna miss them. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with our grieving up to this point. It's just in that moment, we're aware of this loss, which is always going to be true. Our parents are gone.

ELISE:

Right now. I thought throughout the book, you did a great job of, you know, obviously Elizabeth Kubler Ross's mode caught fire in a way that I think she actually didn't intend, or that's what she said later in her life. It was never, as you call it a prescription for grief, it was a study of some of the emotions that emerge. But this idea of making it a tidy packet, or a to-do list, checklist is clearly very wrong. Can we talk through the two models that you mention: the loss oriented, restoration oriented, the dual process. Can you explain that for people of how it might go?

MARY-FRANCES:

Yeah. So this dual process model is a much more contemporary theory that we use in modern grief research. And it really does talk about the idea that there are two different kinds of stressors that a bereaved person has to deal with. And on the one hand, there are the loss oriented stressors as you described them. And these are all the thoughts and feelings and confusion, and having to deal with all of those day to day pieces. And this is sort of what we traditionally think of as grief, those loss oriented stressors. But there are also what we call restoration oriented stressors. How are you going to restore a meaningful life now? Now that this is the reality, now that this has happened, and that involves everything from, you know, how do I write a check for the bills if I not used the checkbook in 20 years, cuz that was their role, right?

Or, who makes the couples dinner invitations, because that was their job. And now I'm not seeing people because I'm not connected in the same way. So all of those ways, what does retirement look like now when I was planning it in one way, how do I co-parent my child, when my co-parent is gone. All of those stressors of how do we live in the now and future? Those restoration stressors are equally important, but what's most interesting to me about the model. The thing that I think is just genius about it is the people who developed the model talked about oscillation, that the sign of mental health is actually being able to cope with both the loss stressors and not have complete avoidance. And I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to go to places that remind me of this person. To be able to oscillate between that and the restoration and stressors, right? So I'm not gonna leave the room exactly the way that it was. I know that eventually I have to deal with their clothes and their important documents and so forth. Being able to do both is really the sign of mental health. And people sometimes get stuck in one or they get stuck in the other. But eventually both kinds of stressors, recede more and more. And you're also just doing everyday life stuff.

ELISE:

Right. And you say, people feel, let's say if they choose, they're like, I'm just gonna be entertained. I'm gonna watch a movie or I'm gonna go to a party. Like we need those breaks. We need to vacillate between the grief work and the relief. And yet we feel both, you write, you know, guilty and also like we're sort of socially doing things wrong if we don't stay in a perpetual grief work pattern, that somehow we're being avoidant, but you can't do them either to any extreme, right?

MARY-FRANCS:

Yeah, exactly. Being able to sort of, I think of it as jumping into those puddles, this is a, a phrase that Julius Samuels is in the UK writes, you know, it's like jumping into the puddle of grief and then jumping out of it. And those skills take a long time to develop. And dealing with the intensity. It just takes a very long time.

ELISE:

Yeah. And then I thought it was, I don't know if it was Bonnano's model, but this idea too, of these four trajectories. Resilient. Chronic grieving, chronic depression, depressed, improved. Is that right? Chronic grieving, chronic depression. Can you explain? And that sort of takes into account people's through this study, people's emotional state before the bereavement. So it's a more accurate, because some people do get stuck in sort of a complicated grief.

MARY-FRANCES:

Right. Yeah. I mean, the amazing thing about modern science is that we have fantastic statistical models that can really help us to see patterns in the data that you can't just do if you interview one person at one time point. And so this type of work looks just, as you say, at it's called a prospective study because it recruited people into the study before a death had happened. So it recruited couples into this study where one of them was over the age of 65. And that was the requirement. And what that meant was it was sort of randomly sampling people who would eventually become bereaved. It was a 10 year study, right. It takes a lot of money to fund a 10 year study. But what it enabled was now we had people who weren't just self-selecting into, I'm gonna join a grief study because I'm bereaved.

But rather, what do people look like in general before a death happens and how does that impact what they look like after? And one of the most important things to come from that was the discovery that having a history of depression really looks very different than after the death has happened. You're much more likely to continue to have depression, but it isn't necessarily because of the death. The death may have been a very important event that happened in the course of having chronic depression, but it's important for clinicians to really be looking at people's history. So if you come in to the doctor, to the therapist's office and you say, oh my gosh, this death has happened. And I feel terrible. Part of the question should be, and how were you doing before that? Because you can understand how the treatment might be different if this is a long standing emotional pattern for you, or if this really started because everything was going well, and now you lost this close person and you can't really seem to restore your life again. And that's more what we would think about when we think about, um, what's sometimes called chronic grieving or complicated grief or most recently prolonged grief.

ELISE:

Right? I like that within this, there's also this category of resilience. Throughout the book, I think you do a really good job of teasing out the distinctions between grief and depression. Because I think we have a collective ideal or idea of someone who is in grief that they should be depressed and you can certainly be in, you can be grieving, intensely and not qualify as a depressed person. Can you talk a little bit more about why those distinctions are so critical?

MARY-FRANCES:

Resilience was a big shock in the clinical research community. When this study came out, showing the majority of people who experienced the death of a loved one are defined as resilient. And that doesn't mean they don't suffer. That doesn't mean it's not difficult for them, but it means that they never lose the ability to function day to day. So it's difficult, but they are still getting dinner on the table, right. It's uncomfortable and it leads to tears and so forth. But, but they do see friends right outside of their, of their home, or they do eventually go back to work and, you know, can eventually get lost in a work project. It turns out when you randomly sample people, when you just look at any possibility of a person who's experienced the death of someone, most of us are resilient. And the reason this was such a surprise was that most of our studies are what we would call, help seeking, bereaved individuals. People who need help are the ones who are likely to come into a research study. If that makes sense. People who are doing well think, well, this isn't really for me, but by actually looking across the whole population, we see that most of us are resilient and that's such a wonderful thing, but it was a real surprise for people.

ELISE:

I feel like that's that type of nuance that culturally we need to understand better. So we can support people as well. Because there's such an aversion to being with people when they're sad, nd it's uncomfortable for people and we rush to make them feel better or want them to feel better. And then at the same time, it's like, how are you going on a date six months. We're full of judgment.

MARY-FRANCES:

It's the big book of rules about grief. Right. Which, who knows, who wrote those?

ELISE:

Totally. I wanna go to sort of your work in the brain, but let's talk about, cause I had never heard of this, complicated grief treatment. And so this is for people who are really like the example that you was so touching of the woman who just couldn't stop making dinner for two every night and then trashing half the food, she just didn't know how to get out of this pattern. So what exactly is, is C, G T and what are they trying to interrupt there?

MARY-FRANCES:

Yeah. You know, again, we have sort of had a transition in language just very recently. We probably would call it prolonged grief treatment now. Although it was for a long time called complicated grief treatmen. It actually comes from researchers at Columbia University. So if you just Google Columbia University and prolonged grief treatment, it will come up. So Dr. Kathy Shear developed this treatment and it really is enabling people to address both the loss stressors and also the restoration stressors. And so those loss stressors are something like a behavior where you, you know, as I described in the book, just as you said, she, she can't quite grasp. She knows he's gone, but she can't bring herself to stop cooking for the two of them. And so those loss stressors often in treatment have to do with, what's the thing that you're avoiding and how do we give you the support and the encouragement to experiment, trying new things and engaging in your life in a new way.

And then actually helping you to see that over time, there's sort of this upward spiral when that happens, it doesn't happen right away. But on the other hand, it's also about knowing that we often avoid particular thoughts or particular feelings. So even if you tell the story of the death, I don't know if you've ever had this experience, but sometimes someone will tell me what happened. And you can tell they've told the story in exactly the same way, many times. And in that moment, although clearly it is upsetting at some level that this death of someone they love has happened, there's no emotion in them telling it. And there's a way in which we can get stuck in our thoughts and kind of disconnected from the feelings. What does it mean for you today, right now, in this moment, that this death has happened and it's often avoiding those feelings that keep us from being in the present moment and really engaging in a meaningful life. So treatment has a variety of skills that they teach. But the idea is to get you back on the sort of natural healing trajectory that happens.

ELISE:

And that obviously requires processing feelings reconnecting to, to, I guess, your heart to be cheesy about it. Not that you have to stay there 24 hours a day, but that you at least start building those paths. And is that, you know, at the beginning you talk about attachment patterns and how our brains are coded and the maps of attachment. So that when someone is missing from our lives suddenly, and you go to reach for your phone, you turn over in bed and they're gone, like how startling that is to the brain. Can you describe that part of your work and what you're looking for?

MARY-FRANCES:

I think that if you think about it, people have been saying for a long time, you know, I know that they've died, but it just feels like they're gonna walk through the door again. I know that sounds crazy, but it feels like they're gonna be back. And I think if you think about what happens from the perspective of the brain, when a loved one dies, you have to remember that what first happened was that you developed a bond with this person, whether that was falling in love with your spouse or falling in love with your baby or whatever it was. You at first encode this bond. And part of that bond is you will always be there for me. And I will always be there for you. You are my special one and only. And so after the death, then of this person, on the one hand you have in the brain, you have memories, right?

You were either there when the person died or you were at the funeral. And on the other hand, that attachment neurobiology continues to have this belief. If they're not in my presence, the solution is just to go get them right. There is, this is how we can kiss our, our kids and our spouse could goodbye every day. And they can go off to work, which would be terrifying if we didn't have some deep belief that they were attached, and would return to us at the end of the day. So you don't have to be in their presence to have this deep belief that they are out there. They are out there for me. And so then what you have in the brain is memories on the one hand: I know this has happened. And at the same time, this feeling of, I just feel like they're gonna come back to me, right. Or I still have this connection to them. And so it takes a long time for the brain to understand these two streams of information that don't fit together. And for the brain to update its understanding, to be able to predict their absence more than their presence.

ELISE:

It makes tons of sense. And I thought that that study, I think it was a Japanese study too, about belief in an afterlife or strong belief in an afterlife. And that the impact on bereavement in some way, because if you have that sort of faith and this idea that your loved one is physically is somewhere good, that that really shows up in the body in, in positive ways.

MARY-FRANCES:

Yeah. I think that what's so strange for the brain is that it has a solution to our loved one, not being with us. They're somewhere else. That's the solution. And so go get them or make enough of a fus that they come get you, right. You think about animals, or this is how, you know, being in the mall. Right. And you get lost as a child and you start screaming, right. Because I'm gonna attract them and they're gonna come back to me. So the solution is just, they are somewhere else, literally in our language, they are lost. We have lost them. But in reality, it's not that they're lost. It's that there is no map anymore, right. That there is no place. And many religions have provided enormous comfort for people by explaining where their loved one is now. And often even when we will see them again.

So Dia de los Muertos or, um, judgment day or right. In many cultures, in Japanese culture ,and so forth, you have, where are they? It's a reason that they're not with me. And when we believe that it can be very comforting and that comforting can show up in our physical body, as well as our emotional life. And it doesn't have to be a religious belief, many people who would describe themselves as spiritual belief, you know, this person disintegrated into all these molecules. And now they're in every flower that I see. Every bird that passes over, they are somewhere. Now I know where they are. They're not lost. I know where they are. So he particular belief that you have doesn't have to be religious, but I think it is often this quest that is very distressing for people.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, I put myself in the spiritual category and in my experience with bereavement, it's been a huge help to stay connected or to feel his presence around me all the time. And it irritates me to no end that, you know, we live in such a judgemental secular society. And that, that idea is like, people are like, Ugh, move on. Or like, you're phshw, whatever. And it's like, well, one, let people have their faith and their beliefs. And two, you're not sidestepping physical grief. It's not like people are like, oh, I'm, I'm good. I'm good. My dead, I don't mind, my person is, is in all the flowers. And, you know, you still have to go through the physical loss and the physical processing, but I wasn't surprised to see that there's a, uh, health, that there are biometrical indicators that, that, that, that sort of base can be helpful.

MARY-FRANCES:

And even as a neuroscientist, you know, which is maybe the most secular perspective you could think of. I think I find great comfort in this idea that when you form that bond, when you fall in love, your neurons are actually changed. The way that the electrical firing patterns happen in your brain, the way that proteins are folded, are changed, because of this one and only person that you have spent time with. And from that perspective, when my dad died, he is still here literally right in my physical brain. He's physically in my brain. That's data on the one hand, but I also find it comforting on the other hand that he is still with me. And because it's with the brain that I perceive the whole world, he's also in a sense with me as I experience everything. And so I think that for many people finding whatever it is that makes sense for them is the most important part.

ELISE:

I loved the study that you mentioned, Jane Goodall's work, but beyond that in, in looking at chimps and the way that mothers, Chimp moms, I'm sure there's a more technical scientific term, but the way that they grieve. That they do not separate from their dead infants or children for days. And you think about sort of the way that we're sanitized from grief. Now, we don't necessarily even see a body. It's very abstract. We hear about massacres. We hear about natural disasters and collectively it's obviously traumatizing, but we're able, it doesn't become visceral or real for us.In a way that's probably protective, but when is that not protective. And when do we need to be with our dead in order to fully understand that they are dead?

MARY-FRANCES:

Our understanding of what helps for people who are experiencing the death of a loved one has changed a lot over time. And one of the places that's changed the most is actually neonatal deaths. And so there was a time that if an infant was still born, it was sort of whisked away. And mom and dad never saw the actual infant, but that's their baby, that's their child. And we came to understand that it is important to see that infant, to see that they have died and to make those memories, as painful as it is in the moment. It is still helpful in understanding the reality of what has happened. And so to, you know, have those moments with our deceased loved ones, whether that's in a hospital, or if they die at home to have those moments can be very important for people.

Now, there are circumstances where the way that the person looks has changed so dramatically, they've been in a violent death or in water or something after the death. I think there are times when it seems as though the trauma of, of having that memory of them looking dismembered, or somehow not human would be problematic as a memory. And so I don't know that we have really clear understanding of kind of what's the right thing to do at which moment exactly. But I think it has a lot to do with allowing the person to make the choice, and even to encouraging them. Is there a way that you would like to see this person, with support. Is there a way that you would like to have something from the person from the circumstance in which they died in order to have that with you later? This is not my area of expertise. But I do know that actually making the memories of knowing in reality that this person has died does seem to be important for people.

ELISE:

And it can be quite galvanizing for the public. When we think about that two year old Syrian boy, we think about some of the indelible images we think about George Floyd.

MARY-FRANCES:

And sometimes I, I mean, sometimes it is even at, at a funeral. Part of the reason that we developed embalming was being able to see the person for a last time and recognizing that they are gone, but sort of looking as similar as possible to what they looked like when they were alive. Now, I think many people have had the experience of sort of this doesn't look at all like what they looked like when they were alive, but nonetheless allowing a person to connect with the physical body and to really have the experience that they're not living any longer, I think is something that is then indelibly marked on the mind and the brain as well.

ELISE:

And so when you look at the behavior of chimps, for example, is it weeks that they carry around, and then the other chimps ultimately remove the body, like what's the most natural progression?

MARY-FRANCES:

So this research comes from observing chimps. These are chimps in, in nature, in the wild that researchers are just making observations about. So these are not captive animals. And in these circumstances, it's been observed numerous times now that if an infant chimp is stillborn or dies very young, that the mother will carry the infant. And as you say, it can be days, it can be weeks. And in some cases it has been months. And so you think, well, what is happening here? What is going on there? And I think that it is clear that the chimp is not confused. So that usually baby chimps cling to mom so that mom can use her hands to be doing whatever else she needs to be doing. So it's actually very unusual to carry an infant when you're a chimp. And so it's not that the mother is confused and thinks they are still alive.

But the observation has been that they spend a lot of time looking at the infant and that they're very defensive of any other chimps interfering. And that eventually they relinquish the infant on their own. And so I think this is such an interesting idea of sort of the reality of the death has really finally sunk in. And there isn't a need any longer on the part of the chimp to hold onto that infant. Now, many people would say, I'm anthropomorphizing here. There are ways that this type of research is done. So they make comparisons to other types of situations and so forth. The part about the story, the, the scientific report that is most touching to me is actually about how the community, the troop of chimps responds in this one particular report. And so chimps are very hierarchical.

So sort of who gets to groom, who is a big thing, you know, like the more important chimp gets groomed by the next important most chimp, but not by the least important chimp or, you know, I don't know the rules, but there are rules. And in the course of this grieving time with the mother, she often stops grooming herself. And in the chimp world, of course, having fleas and so forth is actually bad for their health. And so it seemed suddenly that during this period of grieving, anyone in the community was allowed to groom this mother who was grieving as a form of support. And I just think it's so touching to think about, we're not trying to disturb what you're doing. We're not trying to interfere with you and your, and your deceased infant, but we are gonna take care of you while you're doing that. I still, I find that very, very touching,

ELISE:

So beautiful. I mean, it makes me, cry's really, really beautiful. One thing that I thought was so hopeful is obviously you're a professor at the university of Arizona and that undergrads love this work. You teach a very popular, is it a lecture?

MARY-FRANCES:

Yes, it's a, it's a course, the psychology of death and loss that I teach for psychology majors in their junior or senior year.

ELISE:

And people really like your course, which I think is heartwarming. I mean, it's both or, or potentially troubling, I don't know, but I do think it feels like this people have to come to this work in order to really step into life. What do you attribute that to? I'm sure you're an excellent professor. So all of that aside, maybe you're an easy grader, all of that aside.

MARY-FRANCES:

That may be true. I suppose. I think that now, I mean, I always keep in mind that these are in general people who self-selected into the course, so they wouldn't take the course if they didn't have some level of interest. But it is 150 students every year. So it's not, you know, it's not a small class. And I think that our young people are really, they want answers. They want to grapple with the difficult parts of life. And it's very rare that they get access to conversations about life and death matters on, you know, Facebook and TikTok. So a way in to having a thoughtful conversation about, you know, what is happening with hospice care, what does it mean that the suicide rate is so high? What is the science behind grief and grieving? These are questions that they really seem to want to grapple with. And, you know, they probably hear the words, death and dying more in that 14 weeks than they've potentially heard them in their entire adult or childhoods, up to that point. But it's a wonderful course.

ELISE:

I really wanted to talk about rumination, rumination versus acceptance. And then will you also tell us about co-rumination? Becuse I've certainly found, I think we've all probably found ourselves in that pattern, but, um, but can you take us through that?

MARY-FRANCES:

Yeah. So rumination it's those thoughts that just keep coming back to you, even when you're not trying to think about something, they just run through your head. Many of us will think about worries. This terrible thing is gonna happen, or I'm not gonna be ready tomorrow, or something like that is an example of rumination. But the particular flavor of that, that often happens in bereavement is what I like to call the would've, should've, could've. And so this is sort of, if only I could've gotten them to the hospital sooner, if only they would've known not to take that last drink, if only the doctor would've ordered this other test, all of those stories, right? And the trouble with those stories is there are an infinite number of them, and there is no actual answer to any of them.

It is simply being round and round and round in this loop. But the real issue is if you think about it at the end of each of those stories, it ends with, you know, if I'd been able to get my loved one to the hospital sooner, then they would've lived. Each of these stories ends in: And then they lived. And in reality, of course they didn't live. And so when we spend a lot of time in these virtual realities, we're not spending time in the present moment, which is full of sorrow, but it's also full of love and compassion and joy. And so it really is that you're missing out in many ways on how do I create a meaningful life given that it is true, that I will carry the absence of this person. That's the real difficulty with rumination. Completely natural, happens especially at the beginning, but for most of us, those intrusive ruminative thoughts decline over time.

And if they don't, we can learn ways to manage those thoughts. And then you asked about co-rumination. So I think this is such an interesting concept, the idea that often in very close relationships, you'll have two people who sort of do this type of, ruminative thinking out loud with each other. And so you get together and you know, it’s sort of, the world is against us. And you kind of talk about how that is true or, \people just don't understand us. And you'll talk about how that is true. And the funny thing about that is there is a way in which it creates connection between two people, right? You feel like, oh, this person gets me when no one else gets me. And so there's sort of this spiral that happens. The trouble is you usually don't feel better after one of these conversations, your mood is not improved.

And so if you spend a lot of time doing this, although on the one hand, you feel very connected to this individual. On the other hand, it doesn't help you with things like problem solving. So if people aren't treating me the way I wish they were treating me. There is a whole problem solving you could go through about how would you talk to people about that? Or how might you change your expectations for this person or that person, instead of just examples between the two of you of how this is true. So I think it's an interesting, it has some good research behind it as being predictive of later depression for the individuals. And, and so I think it's a really interesting psychological concept.

ELISE:

Yeah. And I think it's important for all of us to keep that, regardless of whether we're in grief or not, when you're in that pattern with a friend where you're like, wow, this is not productive or healthy, and neither of us are moving forward and we need to break this cycle.

MARY-FRANCES:

I have an example of woman who does a podcast about neonatal loss and she herself had experienced the death of a child shortly after birth. And she was a part of this grief support group that had been going on for a very long time, months and months, possibly even years. And at one point, her husband said to her, you know, you say that you want to feel better, but what I experience is that when you come home from these groups that you don't feel better. And while grief support is incredibly important and grief support groups can help you to feel more normal, especially early on when you feel like, oh my gosh, I think I'm losing my mind. There can be a point at which that tips over into just co-rumination. And she realized that while she could volunteer, for example, and work with new parents who were experiencing what she had experienced and could help to give them insight into the process, she didn't need actually to spend time with this group who, whose losses had happened a long time ago, where they were just sort of going over things again and again.

ELISE:

Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense in your experience or in the research, is there sort of a moment, is there a time span at, is it like six weeks or is there a moment when it starts to sort of tip into something more obsessive or unhealthy?

MARY-FRANCES:

It's such a good question. And I will say, this is the question I always get. How long should it last? And unfortunately it just doesn't work that way. People will say to me, when did you get over? Or I use this as a sort of humorous example, I will say, when did you get over your wedding day? Which is like, not a question that makes sense. I mean, eventually you stop thinking about your wedding day as much, but it's just an event that changes you forever. And so I'll give you a different example, which is my father who was widowed. He would often sort of adopt other widowers in my little town and, you know, and make dinner for them and so forth. And he'd called me one day and said, um, you know, this guy that I knew he was close friends with, he said, he keeps wanting me to look at these photo albums with him of trips. He and his wife had taken and so forth. And now his wife had died. And he said, I just, I don't know if it's a good thing that I keep sitting with him while he goes over this, or if it's not.

And I said, dad, you know what I know about the two of you, is that you also are both in Kiwanis, and you both bowl together, and you do volunteer projects through the church, and so forth. And I said, it sounds like you, you have both parts of your life. So I said, I think that if you can bear it, if you can tolerate it, let him tell you the stories, let him show you the pictures and it will change over time. And he told me later that it, that is exactly what happened. That his friend just stopped pulling out the albums as often over some period of time. And he said, honestly, if you hadn't encouraged me, I think I would've said to him, this is not healthy. We shouldn't keep doing this. But to rather see that it declined in its own natural way over time. That is mostly to say, we don't have a specific answer. There is not a date on which, you know.

ELISE:

And it's really important to allow people they're suffering. And it's not timestamped. And it's hard. We all gravitate towards schedules and calendars and we do, and that's, it's human. It's human.

I loved her comment about as a neuroscientist being arguably the most secular profession of all. But the reason I loved her book is that she leaves the doors open to mystery, and it’s a deeply allowing text about both the science and what we’ve observed in each other. The hard science of brain imaging studies and where grief may or may not be located, but also stories about how chimps grieve. There’s a lot of humanity in it, and I think the fact that grief work looks so differenct for all of us is something that hopefully we can come to understand. And that we can allow each other our suffering rather than trying to rush each other through it It is dark and hard work, but if you don’t process it, if you don’t learn what’s there, or find meaning even if the meaning is meaningless—that’s still a meaning according to Pauline Boss. Then that work remains and lingers and still needs to be done. It follows us around. The more space we can create for each other to feel our feelings, the better.

 


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Jeffrey Rediger, M.D., M.Div: The Mystery of Spontaneous Healing

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Nedra Tawwab: The Power of Boundaries