“They will tell you that you will get over it” my friend Lillian said as we sat in her living room with martinis. “But you will not get over it. You will just learn to live with it.” It had been a week since my partner Roy died, the friends and loving family had left, and I was just beginning to really feel the grief I had. I did not know where to begin.
Lillian was an old soul, experienced in life and pain and incredibly wise. She was right; one never really does get over a major loss, but we do move on, we do live with it. The anniversary of Roy’s death this year marked 14 years; I have now lived without him as long as I lived with him. I have a rich and lovely life—different—but I have learned to live with the loss and the sadness in a sweet synchronicity with the joy and passion of my life as it is now. There is an ebb and flow which comes and goes depending on the time of year, anniversaries of important things and big passages in my life. All of this is living with it.
Having this awareness has helped with my doula work. I help others who are grieving remember, process, and create a new space in their lives without their loved ones. I have gotten consistently clearer about how important it is to honor the grief, to be with it with integrity and humbleness for its power. Grief is an integral part of the dying process.
Mary Frances O’Connor, in her recent book The Grieving Brain, shares the neuroscience perspective in a fascinating discussion of brain mapping as it relates to grief. Our brains keep track of our loved ones, where they are physically, when you will see them next, where they are and what they are doing. Dr. O’Connor describes two streams of information running at the same time with us humans. One is dealing with life in the present, memories, and day to day reality. The other stream encodes our relationship with “an abiding belief that our loves ones will always be with us.” The idea that our brain does this is lovely. But it does complicate things.
Ever say to a friend who has just moved: “I need to see you in your new place so I can picture you there?” That is how our brain “marks” and then literally tracks. Dr. O’Connor says that specific neurons fire in our brains when we see those we love approach, there’s excellent tracking going on!
When there is a death of one of our loved ones, the “map” goes away, and our brain has an extremely challenging time with that. It cannot locate our person! At one level, we know they are dead, but the brain continues to believe that they are “out there” somewhere. So, we continue to try to track and find them. Dr. O’Connor notes that we know that our physical body changes when a person we love dies (cardiovascular and inflammatory responses; a broken heart is a real thing). So, too—–does the brain. In this way, grief is complicated as we struggle to connect the two odd paradigms of tracking at the same time as we rationally know that our person is “off the map.” This is powerful.
We manage grief so awkwardly—or not at all—in this death-denying culture. As science continues to learn how our brain works and what the connections between our physical, psychological, and emotional processes I hope that we continue to apply that to death and dying. Let us create spaces in our culture, in our families where we embrace the longing that comes with grief. Let us create rituals that tell the stories of our lives together, keeping the loved one with us in that way. Let us laugh at their foibles and share what they taught us. When the grief hurts terribly, let us not medicate it. Let us create a space for it. In so doing, we honor not only the person who has died; we honor our amazing brains and the capacity for the longing that we have. In this way, we learn to live with it.