The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss by Mary-Frances O’Connor – 5⭐

“It is because your loved one existed that certain neurons fire together and certain proteins are folded in your brain in particular ways. It is because your loved one lived, and because you loved each other, that means when the person is no longer in the outer world, they still physically exist—in the wiring of the neurons of your brain.”

This is a hard one to review, I think this is a book that I’ll unfortunately need to refer back to as the years go by, the unfortunate part of that being the certainty of loss.

I picked this up after a rough couple of months wherein I lost a beloved uncle on my dad’s side, and one of my favourite people in the world, my godmother, and my mother’s sister. I felt if I could get a handle on what was happening in my brain, the grief might not feel so overwhelming. I honestly think that this book helped me tremendously, but not in the way that I thought it would.

I tend to deal with death in a super unhealthy way, a lot of it has to do with outright denial until I can’t deny it anymore and then have like a ‘breakdown’ where I feel like I go into grief overdrive and feel everything all at once, but I’m now dealing with it much further down the road, and that makes me feel like I’m not ‘allowed’ to feel this grief so far on from the loss. This book made me realise that firstly, there is no correct way to grieve, and secondly, the brain is going to go through the process whether I fought it or not.

“Grief-related ruminations tend to center on a few topics, as evidenced by Stroebe and Schut, and their colleagues, Dutch psychologists Paul Boelen and Maarten Eisma. The five topics include: (1) one’s negative emotional reactions to the loss (reactions), (2) the unfairness of the death (injustice), (3) the meaning and consequences of the loss (meaning), (4) the reactions of others to one’s grief (relationships), and (5) counterfactual thoughts about the events leading up to the death (what-ifs).”

I took a lot away from this book, but something that has helped me in the last few weeks was not fighting the waves of grief that sometimes come along with remembering the people I’ve lost. Most frequently the memories of my godmother. She was a huge influence on my life, and as a result I have a lot of beautiful memories of her. What I would do in the past (and was doing as I was reading this book) was ‘pushing’ those memories away when they came up, because they made me too emotional. What this author helped me realise is that this can sometimes prolong the overwhelming feeling of grief. So I’ve started to allow myself those moments (not always at the best time) and sit with the feelings they bring up. This is SUPER unpleasant at times, but I have found that it’s getting a little less painful each time. Instead of crying, I find myself smiling at the memories and thinking of them with fondness instead of loss. It’s also done something interesting that I wasn’t expecting. While she was sick and after she died, I felt a lot of anxiety when I would think of her, this caused like this awful reflex where thinking of her at all brought up this feeling of dread. With allowing myself to feel the grief, it almost feels like looking forward to thinking about her. It’s hard to explain, and maybe the anxiety related to her dying would have dissipated anyway, but I do think this book helped.

“Intrusive thoughts are memories of personal events and people that come to mind suddenly and spontaneously, without our intending to recall them. Remembering the loss reminds us of how much we miss them, which leads to feelings of distress or grief. But are intrusive thoughts more frequent than other kinds of thoughts, or do they just feel that way?”

This book helps us to look at grief from a scientific viewpoint, and helps you to understand what your brain is trying to accomplish when we are faced with the loss of a loved one. I feel that by thinking about how the brain tries to interpret loss, it has helped me a lot with navigating the emotions I often try to suppress. Will this book ‘fix’ your grief? I’m sad to say that it won’t. But sometimes, looking at something like this through a more scientific lens, helps us to realise that something like our grief, something that seems to deeply personal, isn’t something that is specific to us alone. The inability to process some kinds of our grief, and the length of time it takes to ‘accept’ loss does not have a formula, but most of us will go through it. Just knowing that we aren’t alone in that process can be helpful.

I’m ever so glad I read this, and I’ll be picking it up again when needed!