What happens to the brain when we grieve?
Not sure, but poetry and prose might help.
One of life's great conundrums is figuring out how to avoid and process death. Reflecting on the perceived invincibility of the living, the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud noted in his succinct prose Reflections on War and Death, “Our unconscious, therefore, does not believe in its own death; it acts as though it were immortal.” It is common to think about death as an event that happens to someone else, especially when one is currently happy and healthy; but the death of a relative, friend, or lover, may change that. While Freud was invested in trying to unpack how the unconscious managed death, I was curious about how contemporary psychologists reflected on the relationship between bereavement and the brain?
Recently, the clinical psychologist Mary-Frances O'Connor tried to answer this question in her latest book, The Grieving Brain. What she argues is that grief is connected to various neurological responses that can transform our ability to recall memories or even go so far as to influence our heart rate. The experience of pain and suffering is complex, of course, and her research suggests that people who imagine their deceased can activate neural reward activity. This part stuck with me, mostly because I wondered how writing (and by extension writers), fit into this grieving-brain paradigm.
In an interview with New York Magazine, Joan Didion described her relationship to grief, exclaiming “We think of memoirs, especially memoirs of grief, as a soft art, one that necessarily humanizes the writer.” Referencing her grief memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion was pointing to the visceral pain she felt when her husband and daughter died in close succession. Sincere and sharp in how she approaches her loss, Didion directs the reader to a pressing question: how do we overcome and manage loneliness in the face of grief? The heartsick, vulnerable, and honest reflection on an artist’s grief is not unique to Didion.
The poet and scholar Elizabeth Alexander’s book The Light of the World is an epistolary memoir based on the loss of her husband, Ficre Ghebreyesus, who suffered from a heart attack in 2012. Alexander documents the ways that her heart was jolted by the loss of her love—her stomach churned and her world was turned upside down. Her text left me wondering, what is grief, if not a flood of memories, or even a sober assessment of one’s mortality? But more than anything, how does an intimate partner’s death remind a person of their mortality?
Writing about death is not new, but Didion’s and Alexanders’s memoirs answer a nagging question: how do humans grieve? But even more so, how do people mourn “in the absence of religious culture?” For the Yoruba, ibinujẹ, the word for grief, carries a different practice. The ethnic group often has distinct verbal phrases that help address the unique mourning situation within this context. The ritual, what is said and done, is part of how the person feels cared for. Within the Jewish tradition, when a person hears of the death of a loved one, they might exercise kriah (translate as tearing), that is, making a tear in their clothing to show their grief. Whether someone loses a partner, child, parent, or best friend, public rituals of grief can be a reminder that the lamenter is not alone.
When funerals and memorial services were halted at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, many people could not carry out public rituals of bereavement. For digitally connected families, public acts of mourning were redirected towards Zoom. In other cases, journalists and researchers created archives for this bereaved, such asThe New York Times’s virtual memorial, a compilation of images and interviews with lamenters. Public acts of mourning excite our bodies, emotions, and spirit, but more than anything, they are an invitation to dive into our unconscious and face our immortality.
Grief is not just in the business of putting suffering on the table, but it is also about getting in touch with why you miss the person who has passed; grief can be a celebration of life. At first, glance, sitting with grief is an all-consuming and difficult affair, but it is much more than that; it is about the human desire to keep the dead close, to hold fast to memories: a tender reminder that the living can continue to laugh and love. Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor’s work suggests that grieving can be beneficial if done transparently, that is, “craving of past relationships may assist those with CG in adapting to the loss.” Whether or not they are (or were) aware of her work, poets like Alexander and the late Didion, in their reflections and writing on grief, were potentially activating their brain’s reward center.
Near the end of The Light of the World, Elizabeth Alexander exclaims that “Fire [her late husband] comes to my dreams and has never been more vivid.” His emergence in her dreams might erode the sharp pain of grief, or even brighten the light in her soul, but the fact that she can see him glow while she laments demonstrates the power of raw grief.
New Writing
You can read my latest essay, “More than an Image: Black Women Healers at the Helm of Modern Gynecology,” which was a contribution to my Art Hx Fellowship at Princeton University. In the text, I contrast modern medicine’s representation of Black women as objects in medical textbooks with Black women as knowledge subjects in archival documents.
Reflecting and Writing,
Thanx for this one, dear Edna <3