When A Person That’s A Part Of You Is Gone
“The Grieving Body” shows evidence that our connection to the people we love is in both our minds and our bodies.
The following is an excerpt from The Grieving Body: How the Stress of Loss Can Be an Opportunity for Healing by Mary-Frances O’Connor.
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The Grieving Body: How the Stress of Loss Can Be an Opportunity for Healing
When a loved one dies, it is not just our brain that responds. Our reaction to loss is not only in our thoughts, our emotions, our mind. The response to the death of a loved one is a physiological one as well, reverberating through our body. Bereaved people show increased heart rate, blood pressure, stress hormones, inflammation. Without our spouse, or our child, or our sibling, the world feels all wrong. Even when we cannot put our finger on what is missing from the situation (maybe it’s missing the shoes kicked off and left lying in the hallway, or the whistle of the teakettle from the next room), our body still reacts to their absence.
When we form a bond with a loved one, we form an unconscious dynamic system, in addition to the conscious one we typically think of. This relationship between two bodies has many responses without either person’s conscious awareness. When my partner hugs me, my heart rate decelerates. When I go to sleep at night, I respond to the warmth, smell, and sounds of him next to me, helping to cue the release and inhibition of various neurochemicals that allow me to slip into that state of slumber. Every time I leave on a trip, my departure from him resounds through my body in ways I am not aware of but that are nonetheless physiologically real. And our reunion leads to more changes in my body, experienced as comfort and familiarity upon my return, as my hormones return to their optimal set point. My body, in addition to my mind, is in a relationship with him. The death of a loved one reveals this system, which otherwise functions as an invisible force, a magnetic attachment bond that dances electron around nucleus without being seen by the naked eye. My body simply responds to my loved one’s absence, unconsciously.
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What Happens To Your Body When You’re Grieving
Human beings attend to the things we consciously experience. But there is more to love than words, and there is more to grief than the sadness we feel. Previously, I have written about grief and grieving through the neuroscientific lens. Much (although not all) of the mind is governed by thoughts, expressing what we are feeling and thinking, explaining our motivations and intentions, planning our activities. Not all of our grief can be expressed in words, and thoughts and insights do not always control our feelings or emotional reactions. The Grieving Body goes beyond the conscious experience to reveal the physiological impacts of grieving, what happens when “you” and “me” turn into “us” through bonding, and then “us” has a piece cut away. When this amputation happens, we do not return to the “me” of before, because the absence leaves a hole that could not have existed before we ever knew love.
Attachment relationships regulate our physiology, affecting our hormones and neurochemistry, our cardiovascular and immune systems. This dynamic relationship system governs our reactions and interactions. Our loved one is a huge resource in the ledger of what psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett calls our “body budget,” the constant attempt to keep our incoming and outgoing energy in balance. Because our brain relies on our loved one to help us calm down or to get us motivated, our loved one usually helps to keep our body in the normal range of energy where we thrive. Consequently, during grieving, our body attempts to compensate for the hole that has been left and tries to reregulate. Attempting to reregulate during grieving looks like fatigue or brain fog or restlessness or being more susceptible to the flu. Figuring out how to regain the equilibrium in our physiological systems, doing everything without our loved one, is a (largely) unconscious process in grieving.
The book you are about to read tells the story of how our psychology, our nervous system, and our immune system are intimately linked, and how our bonds with our loved ones regulate these systems. I am a professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Arizona, and my research on inflammatory markers and cardiovascular function during bereavement, along with the research of many colleagues around the world, has advanced a mechanistic understanding of the broken-heart phenomenon. But in addition to my scientific research, I have been learning through personal life experience, through my own grief. Grieving, as I wrote about in my first book, The Grieving Brain, can be thought of as a form of learning. Grieving can also be an opportunity for healing. The opportunity arises if we can listen to the messages of stress in our body, those internal sensations and emotions. We can slowly begin to respond to them in a healthy and compassionate way, restoring a full life that takes our body’s needs into account.
Excerpted from The Grieving Body by Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD and reprinted with permission from HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright 2025.
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About Mary-Frances O’Connor
Mary-Frances O’Connor is a neuroscientist and author of The Grieving Body and The Grieving Brain. She’s based in Tucson, Arizona.