06/20/2026
This is a very interesting post that led me to read further about Mary Frances O'Connor. She is the author of the Grieving Brain: How We Learn from Love and Loss. Her research is focused on how our brain understands loss. Hardly a day passes that we don't attempt to explain the reality of loss that a crime victim faces forever. The excerpt I read about was so relevant to what so many of you face daily.
Professor O'Connor is Associate Professor & Director of Clinical Training at the University of Arizona. I am purchasing her book and will share more with you. You can read more about it at https://a.co/d/0ahhnabx on Amazon. Thank you Sonya Shehane-Bradford for sharing.
π¨ According to Research about our Brain :
This is for the person who lost someone and felt like the world expected them to recover on a timeline that made no sense for what they were actually experiencing inside.
Who went back to work too soon because life does not pause. Who smiled when they needed to because other people were uncomfortable with the depth of what they were carrying.
Who felt moments of forgetting followed immediately by the weight of remembering and felt guilty for both.
Who wondered if what they were feeling was normal because nothing about it felt survivable and yet somehow they were still surviving it.
What you went through was not just emotional.
It was one of the most profound neurological events the human brain can experience.
And the science behind it deserves to be treated with the same seriousness as the loss itself.
Neuroscientist Mary-Frances OβConnor at the University of Arizona has dedicated her career to studying what happens inside the brain during grief and her research, captured in her landmark work The Grieving Brain, revealed something that changes everything about how we should understand and treat people who are mourning the loss of someone they loved.
When someone we love dies the brain does not simply register an emotional loss. It experiences something closer to a fundamental disruption of its operating system. OβConnor found that the brain of a grieving person shows significant changes in the prefrontal cortex, the reward system, and critically the regions responsible for what neuroscientists call the internal model of the world.
Throughout a close relationship the brain builds a detailed predictive model of the other person their presence, their patterns, their role in the architecture of daily life. This model becomes deeply embedded in the brainβs moment to moment functioning. It anticipates them. It expects them. It has organized thousands of automatic predictions around their continued existence in your world.
When that person dies the model does not update immediately. The brain continues generating predictions of their presence expecting to hear their voice, expecting to see them in familiar places, expecting the thousand small confirmations of their existence that the relationship had always provided.
And then reality delivers the absence instead. Over and over. In a process OβConnor describes as the brain slowly and painfully learning a new reality that every part of it was built around contradicting.
This is why grief comes in waves rather than a straight line. Why you can feel almost normal one moment and completely devastated the next.
Why certain places, songs, smells, or times of day hit differently than others because those were the coordinates where the brainβs model of that person was most active, most expected, most embedded.
The wave is not a setback. It is the brain encountering another moment where its old model expected someone who is no longer there.
Research by neuroscientist George Bonanno at Columbia University tracked thousands of bereaved people across years and found that grief does not follow the stages most people have been taught. It is non-linear, deeply individual, and significantly shaped by the nature of the relationship, the circumstances of the loss, and the social support available in the aftermath.
There is no correct way to grieve and no correct timeline. The brain is doing something enormously complex rebuilding an entire model of reality from the inside and that process cannot be rushed by will or expectation.
What OβConnorβs research ultimately found was both sobering and deeply hopeful. The brain is capable of integrating loss without erasing it. Grief does not end with forgetting the person or diminishing how much they mattered. It ends or rather transforms when the brain successfully builds a new model of the world that holds the reality of the loss and the continued meaning of the person within it simultaneously. When the absence becomes part of the architecture rather than a disruption of it.
They do not disappear from your brain. They are reorganized within it. And that reorganization, as painful as it is, is the brainβs most profound act of love for someone it was built around.
You are not supposed to be over it.
You are supposed to be changed by it.
And you are. In ways that will take time to fully understand and that carry the shape of everything that person meant to you.
