Grief
This is a deeply personal essay about this complex emotion that is a part of the human experience, yet few talk about it openly. So as I go through, here’s what I’m learning about it.
I experienced loss before, but the past year brought me this new depth of emotion called Grief. Although confusing at first, this stranger arrived without a knock and made its way into my life quite intimately.
The hippocampus, responsible for both spatial mapping and memory, is also deeply tied to our sense of emotional attachment. Losing someone isn’t just an abstract sadness—it’s like a piece of the world, as we knew it, physically disappearing. The brain keeps reaching for that person, expecting them to be there, just as it would a familiar piece of furniture in the home.
Grief, then, is the process of the brain rewiring itself to accept the absence, like adjusting to a room that has been rearranged in the dark. No wonder it feels so disorienting.
But grief cannot be experienced in neuroscience and in understanding what, why, and how.
You'll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you're drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it's some physical thing. Maybe it's a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it's a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.
In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don't even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. When they come, they crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what's going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything...and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life.
Somewhere down the line, and it's different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, an inside joke, or a Google Photos notification. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you'll come out.
You learn that you'll survive. And other waves will come. And you'll survive them too. If you're lucky, you'll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.
I lost my grandfather and other people who were important to me this year. In that loss, I saw the depth of my strength and love, but I also understood how profoundly fleeting, interwoven, and temporary the human experience is. With that realization came both loneliness and a deeper sense of connection. Mortality and the impermanence of people became real to me, yet that awareness filled me with immense gratitude for the world around me. And in that gratitude, I found the quiet reassurance that I’m going to be okay.
