Last night, I finished reading The Grieving Brain by Mary-Frances O’Connor.

I read it cover-to-cover. Each chapter is fascinating; it’s easy to forget one is researching a subject, or rather learning something new, which is precisely what O’Connor wants to teach us about the act of grieving: it’s a learning process, and it takes time.

Our understanding of ourselves develops with experience, but don’t take my mostly worthless word for it. Actual published authors Mary Karr, Mark Wolynn, and Mary-Frances O’Connor have all said the same. This understanding can influence our relationships with both our living and dead loved ones. As we age, these relationships can become more compassionate and filled with gratitude. Even our interactions with those who have passed can change, if only in our minds, affecting our ability to live fully in the present and shape a meaningful future (O’Connor, pp. 201-202).

“Holding your breath is not the same as never having breathed. So, too, your life in the beloved’s absence after their death is not the same as it would have been if they had never lived.”

Mary-Frances O’Connor

O’Connor uses such beautiful imagery and metaphor in the writing above that it bears repeating, and not only as a rewritten in-text citation at the end of my post. Even though she’s a lot smarter than me, I never felt like O’Connor was lecturing me or talking down to me. That is quite the accomplishment for a book delving into the intricacies of the human brain.

I was most often drawn to sections covering the why of the matter, e.g., why does our brain torture us?

Everything we know about human interactions confirms we are social animals who grieve the loss of our loved ones. It also happens in the animal world, and research has shown that human-animal pair bonds are comparable, but with our extra brain power, there are more complexities and subtleties to consider. Personally, I find solace in the idea that, while hormones certainly do not govern everything, they do play a role in explaining our actions. Natural phenomena like this move and inspire me. Discovering how our brain works was beautiful. Now, I want to convey that beauty and explain why it’s so hard for us to let someone go after they’re gone. It’s because of the way we encode them into our brains.

Midway through the book, monogamous prairie voles are brought to the fore. O’Connor does this to illustrate why humans choose to return to the same mate, or loved ones, repeatedly, and why it hurts so much when we can’t find them. Despite sharing similar genetics with prairie voles, montane voles are polygamous, giving scientists the perfect two mammal species to study. Monogamous prairie voles mate for life, whereas polygamous montane voles are less social and don’t have partner preferences. Researchers found that two chemicals were vital to the bonding process of prairie voles. After a single day of mating and releasing those chemicals, the pair would ignore all other voles, build their nest together and parent their pups as equals. One changed the other forever.

In a series of tests, scientists determined that the two hormones released in the brain, oxytocin and its close chemical cousin, vasopressin, proved critical to the neural development of the pair bond. To verify this finding, a pair of prairie voles were housed together but kept from mating. When the voles were given oxytocin (for the female) and vasopressin (for the male), the couple still formed an enduring pair bond despite not mating, but when deprived of those chemicals, no such bond was formed, regardless of any mating that took place (p. 109). When the same experiment was performed on the montane voles, the polygamous creatures did not develop a pair bond with each other (p. 110). This is what I found most fascinating.

While both types of voles have receptors for these hormones in their brains, the receptors are in slightly different parts of the brain for prairie and montane voles (p. 110). That minor change makes all the difference. Having sex releases hormones, washing the brain in oxytocin and vasopressin. This is how bonding works; while the vole is looking at, smelling, touching, etc. their true love, new neural connections and associations are made for the sight, smell, and feel for this one specific vole (p. 111). Once this happens, the changes that support bonding endure, or like a rose in bloom—once the petals unfurl, you can’t fold them back. This permanent epigenetic change motivates us to return to this specific mate over and over again (p. 112).

After going through a stressful situation, prairie voles frequently return to their nest to receive comfort from their partner’s licking and grooming. If their mate is missing, the CRH hormone is created. Cortisol, a stress hormone, is quickly released when they lose track of each other, motivating the vole to seek its partner. The increase in CRH in the rodent brain during separation also prevents oxytocin from working properly (p. 114). Humans have an additional two pounds of brain, so our system for bonding is much more complex, but similar primal mechanisms are likely working in the background. We deeply encode our loved ones in our brain—the way they look, the way they smell, the way they feel—and it provokes us to yearn for them. Encoding someone means that yearning is the inevitable result of separation from them (p. 122).

“[T]he areas that encode salience (the sense that this is important, this is bad, this is serious) of both physical and emotional pain are very close together, and enable both experiences to include suffering.”

Mary-Frances O’Connor

Death deeply changes us, altering how we function in the world. Understanding that those we love can be gone ad infinitum reshapes how we love, what we believe, and what we value—an intense form of learning. Encountering immense suffering and the reality of losing a loved one can be overwhelming, forcing a reevaluation of our lives (p. 217).

A loved one’s absence is not a void; it’s a continuation of their presence, like the exhale that follows a breath. Their influence remains, shaping our lives and choices as profoundly in their absence as their presence once did. Just as breathing involves both inhaling and exhaling, the people we have loved leave a lasting imprint on our lives (p. 207).

A/N: There’s so much more about this book that I would love to discuss, but I’m already over a thousand words. (I rambled about the voles for a bit too long.) I’d love to cover counterfactual thinking, intrusive thoughts, accepting/avoidance, yearning, and ruminating, if anybody has any interest in reading yet another post about this wonderful book. Even if nobody does, I’ll likely pen it, anyway. This book has done so much for my healing, I can’t recommend it enough!

Resources:

O’Connor, Mary-Frances. The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss. HarperCollins, 2022.

Kinsey Keys

aspiring memoirist rummaging through my noggin, stubbornly clutching the past to my chest like it’s a newborn babe starved for mother's milk.

See Full Bio