Book of the Month - The Grieving Brain

I did finish this book in February - honest! I've just been slow to blog about it. 

As you may expect, a book about neuroscience and how brains function forced me to really think about what I was reading. That's not because it was hard academic reading. The book is written in a clear, approachable style with personal reminiscences and reflections that break up the summarised scientific research nicely. However, although the writing was light, the subject matter was heavy and so I kept having to stop and put the book down and think about it. 

I discovered this book through the Behavioural Science newsletter. and posted about some of the key points last year. I liked the analogy for grief of trying to navigate through a room in the dark, but someone has moved the furniture so you reach out for something and it's not there. I've written a few times how I miss my Dad the most in places where I would expect to find him. 

This book explains why this happens.

It has to do with how our brains get changed through attachment to people. We expect certain people to be present - caregivers to care for us; lovers to show love to us. Throughout the book, Mary Frances O'Connor explains how scans of the brain illustrate this attachment and which parts of the brains are affected, and then tells stories from her own personal grief experiences that correspond with what the brain science shows. It's both very effective at underlining the point and deeply humanising.

O'Connor's understanding of 'grief' as a concept is that the human brain - her brain, my brain, your brain - is trying to solve a problem. The problem is that an important person is gone from the expected routines and relationships. Grief subsides as the brain learns to fill in that person-shaped hole it expects to be there. Although, for some people that learning doesn't really stick, or never happens at all, and they are trapped in chronic, persistent grief. 

One helpful message was that it is normal to feel fine one minute and utterly bereft the next. Or not. And that, actually, you don't have to feel intense feelings all the time in the immediate aftermath of grief - in fact, it might be more helpful to your healing if you don't, because your brain carries on working through the 'problem' of your important person being absent at a subconscious level and the learning might happen faster that way. 

While we often encourage people to confront their grief and think about the person who died, it might be better to let people be distracted by other things. Forcing people to do 'grief work' might - might - contribute to them mislearning the new shape of the world and cause them to slip into chronic grief syndrome. 

For me, personally, having written several blog posts about grief, this book helped me make sense of a lot of feelings. Missing my Dad after an FA Cup Final, for example, knowing he wouldn't be ringing me up to dissect the game, was my brain learning that there wouldn't be that anticipated post-match conversation. It was a moment when my brain adjusted to circumstances as they were, not the sequence of events it expected.

That's not to belittle grief, quite the reverse. O'Connor makes the point that grief happens because we love people and loving people has an impact on us. Towards the end of the book, there is a moving passage explaining why we continue to love people who have died. Put simply, we can't help it - 

"The physical make up of our brain - the structure of our neurons - has been changed by them. In this sense, you could say that a piece of them physically lives on... these neural connections survive in physical form even after a loved one's death. So, they are not exactly "out there" and they are not exactly "in here" either. You are not one, not two."

I thought that was a beautiful description that helped me to make sense of my experience of grief.