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. 

November 2022 - a month in review, part 1: Loss

November started with a big loss in our family as Cathy's Grampy, Jim, passed away. We were able to see him in hospital a few days before he died to say goodbye. We had another opportunity to say farewell at the funeral service, which was held on the 21st November in the church in Gloucester he had attended for over 50 years.

I knew most of the stories that were told in the tribute at the memorial service, because Grampy was good at telling stories about his life, often with a humorous twist in them. 

Despite being christened Percival (like my paternal grandfather), he was given the nickname 'Sunny Jim' as a small boy. He introduced himself as Jim all his life. 

Cathy told me that Jim had fought in the Second World War in one of the airborne regiments, but he rarely talked about it. However, later in life he was contacted by a wartime friend and began attending regimental reunions. 

Jim slowly started to talk about his war experiences, including being on Sword Beach on D-Day, and losing his friend from Gloucester who signed up with him and died from mortar wounds. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and later witnessed the liberation of concentration camps.

The extended family all attended the final regimental reunion a few years ago, which included a thanksgiving service at Exeter Cathedral where the regimental standard was officially retired. 

At a reception afterwards, there were some Second World War re-enactors, invited as guests with their vintage weaponry and equipment. Jim saw how one re-enactor was holding a sten gun and told him he would lose a fingertip holding it that way. 

Jim then brusquely took the gun off the young man and adopted the correct position. I watched, unnerved, as the muscle memory laid down decades ago took over and suddenly Jim was in firing stance, holding a gun he clearly still knew how to use. It really brought home to me the way the war he rarely spoke about had shaped him. He also served after the war in Palestine - present in the country when Zionists blew up the King David Hotel that was the British government headquarters at the time - and then briefly in Vienna.

Jim was always very welcoming from the first time I met him when I had just started going out with Cathy, through the many years since. He would always thank me in his broad Gloucester accent for driving over with Cathy to see him. He would always ask me how Shrewsbury Town, and more recently Barry Town, were getting on - although he usually knew already because he kept an eye out for their results. And he was very persistent in trying to feed me cake. (He was frequently successful.)

I grew to love him like another grandparent. Although everyone called him Jim, through Cathy I was also able to call him Grampy, and it was a real privilege to be able to do that.  

I have started to think of grief as the process of remapping the world and we have already started to do that by noticing the gaps. Jim would always ring up on Cathy's birthday to sing 'Happy Birthday' to her. That didn't happen this year, reminding us both of the space that he occupied and has vacated. He will be missed in many other ways and at other times as we remember him.

Grief recedes as the new shape of the world becomes normal

I recently read this article by Mary-Frances O'Connor on the website Behavioural Scientist: Walking in the Dark: Creating a New Virtual Map in Your Brain After Loss. In the article, she explains how our brains create heuristic short cuts that allow us to navigate the world. We mentally construct routes through physical space, and experiences, based on what occupies that space. 

When something is removed from the physical environment, it takes a while for our brains to catch up. We still 'expect' the thing to be there for some time after it has gone. That's why we can often miss landmarks when they are demolished, or feel a little bit lost when a favourite shop closes. 

Mary-Frances O'Connor applies that to grief as well. In addition to mapping the physical environment, our brains also 'map' our social and emotional landscapes. So when someone is removed from that landscape it takes a while for our brains to adjust to their absence. Depending how big a role they play in our lives, it takes longer for our brains to fill in the 'hole' they leave when they die. 

So we experience a dissonance between the world we 'know' in our minds and the world as it really is - we are walking through two different worlds for a while. 

It's not quite as poetic as the description of grief being "love, persevering" that surprised me in the Marvel TV series Wandavision, but I found it a very helpful explanation for the process of grief. More importantly, it helps me rationalise the recession of grief with the passing of time. My brain is learning the new shape of the world without the people I love in it. I'm not a bad person for not missing them so much. I'm re-mapping the world.

There are still moments when I am reminded of the way the world was. During our recent week holidaying in Shropshire, I had an opportunity to visit my Dad's grave, and also the Shrewsbury Town Memorial Garden. 

I find the garden, with the little plaque saying 'Promoted to Glory' (an old Salvation Army phrase that my Dad would have liked) stirs the emotion of loss more than visiting the grave. 

It's not hard to explain why I find the memorial at the football ground more meaningful than the cemetery. I never went to the cemetery with my Dad. I didn't even know it was there until after he died. But I went to the Meadow with him several times. It was one of the places I saw him on the last day I saw him alive.

With a lump in my throat I said 'Well. Dad, here we go again. First home game of the season. I'll give them a cheer for you.' (That was something he used to say, if I was going to a game and he wasn't.)

It proved to be a nostalgic week really. Seeing the Llangollen Railway in reduced circumstances was sad for two reasons - I remember going there with Dad. Even going to the flower show brought back memories of us all going as a family. Dad would have had an opinion on the various problems the organisers were dealing with like having to cancel the evening fireworks display.

Relearning the way the world works takes time. There are still moments when I see something that makes me think of him. Back in May I saw a tote bag in the Ashmolean Museum gift shop that said "History Buff" on the side, and it would have been a perfect gift for him. 

And that made me sad, because I would have bought it back when he was alive and he would have thought it was funny. He always loved the t-shirt we got him with a picture of a trilobite on it saying 'Shropshire fossil'. My brain recognised it as being a good potential present, and still hadn't learned that I don't need to buy funny gifts for my Dad any more. 

My brain is catching up, though. Every time I get caught out by something that triggers an unexpected pang of grief, that's a learning point for my brain. The new world slowly gets mapped and the empty space is slowly filled. 

WandaVision provides a beautiful perspective on grief

Warning: Mild Spoilers below the picture of Vision

We have been watching WandaVision, the new Marvel series extending the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) that is exclusive to Disney Plus. The series is trying to unravel a mystery concerning Wanda Maximoff who was introduced to the MCU in the film Avengers: Age of Ultron and the sentient humanoid machine Vision, who was also introduced in Age of Ultron and was killed by Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War. 

Wanda and Vision had developed a relationship in those movies. In this TV series, Wanda and Vision are back together, recreating family life in various sitcom scenarios set in classic templates from sitcoms in various decades. The mystery is how this could have happened as Vision was dead, and Wanda had been absent for five years after the events of Avengers: Infinity War.

It's a very well-made series and I've been able to follow it despite not really knowing anything about the characters from their long-established histories in comics. However, I have been catching up on the MCU since starting to watch WandaVision. I had a week off work in February and watched Age of Ultron and the 3 Thor movies. Since then I have also watched Captain America:Civil War, Black Panther and Avengers:Infinity War.

Watching those films together really helps with the wider picture. I didn't remember how much Wanda and Vision featured in Captain America:Civil War, or how that film also operated as a prequel for Black Panther. Seeing the Wanda and Vision story arc across Age of Ultron - Civil War - Infinity War has really added to my enjoyment of the show. 

But the reason I'm writing about it is because of a line in the most recent episode, which was released on Friday - Episode 8.

In Episode 8 there is a flashback scene where Vision talks to Wanda about the loss of her brother. He is trying to understand the emotions she is feeling. 

Wanda explains that is feels like wave after wave comes crashing over her and she doesn't know if she can keep standing while they hit. Vision says that she will and then explained why with one of the most lovely descriptions of grief I've ever heard. He says

"But what is grief, if not love, persevering?"

That was one of those pieces of dialogue that really struck home with me. The Marvel writers have form for this. Eric Killmonger's defiant dying words in Black Panther is another such moment, and I have blogged before about the underlying theological implications of the depiction of deicide in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. 

This line took me unawares because in the last few weeks I have really been missing my Dad. I have been sorting out my stamp collection ahead of a presentation I am doing in a few weeks time and as I went through a small box of material that needs sorting I found a little trove of stuff that Dad gave me, complete with a data-packed note of where he had acquired the items 

There are no hard and fast rules about what triggers a little wave of grief and a renewed sense of loss. But it is comforting to think that those feelings are rooted in love more than anything else. Dad wrote those notes to accompany the things he gave me because he loved me. And I feel the way I do when I read them because I still love him. That is one of the hallmarks of love - that it perseveres. It is "stronger than death" as Song of Songs puts it. 

And my grief is love, persevering.

Gone with no goodbyes - the strangeness of a sudden death in the family.

My dad, me and our snow art

One of the things about my Dad's recent death is that it was abrupt. It's the best word for it. We had no warning it was going to happen. The circumstances were traumatic, especially for my mother who administered CPR under instruction from a 999 operator, and my brother who literally cleaned up a pool of blood.

The sheer intrusive violence of the fall that killed my father seems so unusual and remote that it's actually hard to tell people about it. We were unprepared and, as a family, we may have overshared with the people who we spoke to in the aftermath.

The suddenness of it all has been one of the hardest aspects of our bereavement. It's the first time I have lost someone close without saying some kind of goodbye. With my grandparents and grandparents in law there were hospital visits, and opportunities to speak to them. After a late night drive to Wrexham Maelor Hospital I held my Grandma's hand for about 15 minutes before she died. That was at the end of a slow decline in health and strength that we all knew only had one outcome.

But this was different. On the Saturday before he died I had driven up and gone to see the Shrewsbury match against Wycombe. My brother had scored some free tickets in the fancy section so we had gone in there. After the game we were due to walk to Dave's home, but it was pelting with rain. Looking across the car park we could see my parents' car stationary in the traffic queuing to leave.

Instead of the half mile walk uphill to Dave's house in driving rain, we dashed across the car park and piled into the back seat of their car, squeezing in next to the car seats for ferrying grandchildren. Mum was driving. Dad was trying to listen to the Radio Shropshire report on the game we had just all watched.

Mum deposited us up at Dave's house and I got in my car and drove down to my parents'. I ate tea with them and then got back into my car ready for the long drive home. A round trip to Shrewsbury means about six hours in the car, minimum (and depending on farm traffic!). As I drove south along the A49, which I contend is one of the worst roads in England, I asked myself why I had bothered. Admittedly I had driven up with a large freezer in the car that my brother was taking off my hands freeing up some much-needed space in my house. And Shrewsbury had won. And it was nice to see Mum and Dad...

And three days later my brother told me over the phone that Dad had died.

I went into a sort of high-functioning shock. I drove up on autopilot - the road I had literally driven three days previously. I alternated between manic concentration on the road ahead, or the song on the CD player, or the back of the vehicle in front of me, and just trying to blink away tears.

In the weeks that have followed, as I met people, I heard the same things and faced the same questions. I say that it was sudden or unexpected. I usually use the word at the beginning of the conversation. But the questions keep coming. "Was he ill?" "Did you have any warning?"

I went to the local paper shop to cancel Dad's magazines and the newsagent said "But he was in here on Sunday buying the non-league paper!" Yes, he was. Someone else said: "But he looked so well!" Yes, yes he did. I had to ring up one of his friends from the stamp club who wanted some items back that Dad had borrowed. "But I was talking to him just last week!" Yes. Yes you were.

That's what sudden means when we say it was a sudden death. One minute the person is here, fully functioning, possibly even being quite annoying, and the next they are gone.

It feels like we just aren't used to that anymore. Death happens in a slow, suffocating process, with medical appointments and care plans and stuff. Like a train announcement, we are told it is coming, and we stand on the bleak platform waiting the while it takes to arrive.

And let's be real, sometimes, when the person we love has slowly been overtaken by pain, or robbed of their dignity as their body has failed, sometimes death comes as a release. We feel guilty that a small part of us is glad that we can actually begin the next stage and move on with doing everything that we put on hold. We've been holding our breath and we can breathe out at last. We can sigh and grieve, and actually a lot of our grief has already happened.

But sudden death? That's a sharp indrawn breath, not a released sigh.

People have compared what I have been through to their own experience. A few days after my dad died, a beautiful friend of mine experienced the final loss of her father, years after a diagnosis of dementia. That's a long painful goodbye. Other people who have been through a bereavement like that have expressed that what I experienced was preferable, maybe. It was painless, for him. It was quick, for him. There was no halfway house of immobility for him.

I get that. I don't feel like agreeing. Any way of losing a person you love sucks. It sucks if it takes ten years; it sucks if it takes ten minutes and they die in the ambulance before they reach the hospital. No type of bereavement offers anything else than consolation prizes and I don't feel consoled. There may be comfort from being able to say goodbye, but I didn't get that.

There's a temptation now to close out this blog post with a little moral point - always make sure the people you love know that you love them just in case, or something twee like that. But I don't feel like doing that. I feel like raging at the sheer fucking audacious unfairness of the whole thing; that he can just be gone; the universe would just close off the bundle of synaptic receptors that generated his consciousness like that; that transmission can just stop without any permission being asked or granted.

I don't want to draw any trite conclusions because I hate how this event concluded. I don't want this to serve as a homiletic lesson for everyone else, because that's something you do afterwards. And I don't want it to have happened, let alone be in the afterwards.

It's a sharp breath in and my chest still hurts.

I don't plan to write any more blog posts about this (but plans are not promises). Thank you for reading.

A sudden departure - losing my Dad

Tomorrow it will be 13 weeks since my Dad unexpectedly died. Given that means it's been a quarter of a year since that Tuesday night, I feel I want to get some things out and down in type. I'm still trying to get used to a life where he is no longer an active participant. It's quieter.

Tuesday 19 March: I was in Pizza Hut. I'd left my phone charging at home. I'd even made a big deal out of that, joking with Cathy that she would have my undivided attention. Towards the end of the meal, she said she had an odd text message off my brother, Dave, asking if she knew where I was. I had a pang of guilt. A few weeks earlier Dave had asked me to pay the balance on a fishing weekend we had booked. I hadn't paid it. He was probably reminding me.

Cathy passed me her phone and I called Dave. "Hey, what's up?" I asked.

"Jon... Dad's died." His voice cracked as he said the word 'died'.

I went numb. I don't know what I said before I ended the call. Cathy came back to the table. I told her. We left the restaurant and drove home, packed a couple of suitcases and drove up to the family house in Shrewsbury. Dave was waiting for us with Mum. An hour or so later my foster sister Sarah arrived from Edinburgh.

Dad had fallen backwards down the stairs, and hit his head. The trauma of the injury meant he died within minutes. He may have been alive when the ambulance crew loaded him into the van, but he was dying as they did so. 

We still now aren't a hundred per cent sure what caused Dad to fall the way he did. If, as the most plausible hypothesis goes, he blacked out due to low blood pressure, he wouldn't have even known he was falling. There is a minuscule comfort in that his experience of dying was no experience at all. Minuscule. 

This is the first time I've experienced a sudden bereavement like this. I've got more to say about "sudden" death, but maybe that's for another post. 

The next few weeks passed rapidly. Funeral arrangements. I gave a tribute at the service, and felt happy with what I said. But the euphoria of those moments, which carried me so far, has worn off. 

Rapidly we experienced some "firsts". I went to my first Shrewsbury Town game without him, and felt strangely insulated from the emotions around me. None of it mattered and I felt strange seeing how much people invested emotionally in the event. We had our first family celebration - Mother's Day - and then a few days later I had my first birthday without him. We had Easter together as a family, and then recently I went with Mum and Cathy to Llandudno on what would have been his 75th birthday.

Those 'firsts' are all things we saw coming and planned for. There are other things that are unplanned. I didn't expect to feel a pang of grief so strongly after the FA Cup Final, realising this would be the first FA Cup Final that we wouldn't dissect afterwards. Growing up FA Cup Finals were always a big deal. We would watch them as a family, and Dad would run a sweepstake. After the game we would walk over to the local newsagents and whoever won would get to choose a box of chocolates, which we would all share. It felt like every year Mum won, and always picked Cadbury's Roses. If I'd won I would have picked Quality Street. 

And this year, after Manchester City bulldozed Watford, swatting them aside to a joint record margin of victory in an FA Cup Final, there was no phone call; no conversation. I felt desperately sad.

I feel sad at the moments that are lost. I wanted to take Dad to Jenner Park to see Barry Town play. We'd talked a lot about them as I'd been watching them this season. But we never got round to it. I wanted to go with him to Birmingham and see all the places he talked about in his stories - the churches he went to and the medical school, and revisit our old house. But it feels like all those memories are lost. He'd talked about us going to Snowdonia and climbing the last few mountains he had yet to tick off. Honestly, I don't think he was well enough to do that, but now it definitely isn't going to happen. 

A few weeks after he died I was ambushed by a voicemail he had left on my mobile. It felt strange to hear his voice, confirming some plans for the big birthday party that he never got to see. I wanted to record that message and save it, just to hear him fussing about details again - he always wanted to check the details. But then a few days later I went to play it back and the message had erased. They only get saved for thirty days, which I didn't know. It felt suddenly raw and real, like I had lost him all over again. You can't plan for those moments.  

So after 13 weeks it's slowly becoming reality. Life without Dad. Sometimes I just feel tired of it all. Sometimes I just want to tell him something interesting I found out. He used to tell me that he prayed for me every day. A few weeks after he died I thought 'Who is going to pray for me now?' It's not even that I particularly want anyone to pray for me, just that I don't know if anyone does. 

A friend warned me that grief is exhausting, and she was right. Even when I'm absorbed in work, or a book, or the internet, or a film, it's something tiring that I still carry with me. (I can't unhear the crack in my brother's voice.)

It's been a hard 13 weeks; a hard quarter year.