Your Brain on Grief, Your Heart on Healing

Relationships are mapped through the brain and body using three dimensions:

1. space


2. time


3. closeness (emotional)

Grief is a process of distancing and reordering our relationship from space, time, and closeness (for example, not expecting to see them at a certain time or place, etc.) in order to cope with loss.

It doesn't matter what reason a person, animal, or thing left your life (death, rehoming, lost item, etc.) you can be incredibly attached to and grieve for them. When we experience pain, we have to find ways to resolve it. Grief is a state of pain and a state of wanting, which is the catalyst for activation. When someone we know goes, we get into a... See more

Thus our strange relationship with the pain of grief. In the early days, we wish only for it to end; later on, we fear that it will. And when it finally does begin to ease, it also does not, because, at first, feeling better can feel like loss, too.

Perhaps the simplest and most inclusive definition of grief is “unfinished hurt.”

Yet the fundamental loss remains—it doesn’t just dissipate—and, in a strange way, I think it can become a magnet for other losses. We come to see we are all simply creatures carrying around our ever-deepening loss. Small griefs seem to collect around the bigger primary grief. I think this realization allows us to become a true human being.

But if we are lucky enough, if we are are stubborn enough, we love and we lose and then the loss opens us up to more love — different love, because each love is unrepeatable and irreplaceable — on the other side of grief; love unimaginable from the barren landmass of loss, love without which, once found, the world comes to feel unimaginable.