[Kettle whistling]
[somber music]
(Mary-Frances) I feel really comfortable with grief.
I think that's largely because my mother was diagnosed
with stage four breast cancer when I was 13 and lived
another 13 years before she died when I was 26.
And it meant that grief was around our house.
And I always wanted to figure out
how I could help her more with the grief she was experiencing.
[door closes]
Before
I did the very first neuroimaging study of grief.
I think it was a bit
mysterious when I told people This is what I wanted to do.
The way that I thought about it was, if we can have someone
who is lying in a neuroimaging scanner
and they're having that wave of grief,
we'll get a better sense of what that requires in the brain.
Here at the University of Arizona, I direct the Grief,
Loss and Social Stress lab, which we call the GLASS Lab .
And I have a number of graduate students and undergraduates
who help me in research looking at the consequences
of grief for the brain and the body.
People with complicated grief spend more dwell time
in one of the networks that they're in.
(Da'Mere) I'm a graduate researcher,
so I collaborate with Mary Frances on research projects,
helping to collect data, helping to formulate questions.
And this helps me with in my clinical work.
So I'm also trained as a therapist
and so I see clients and I'm able to give them insight
to a process
that feels very like emotional, but it's actually
a very concrete thing happening in the brain.
(Mary-Frances) If you think about
it, the brain is a prediction machine.
The heart is there to pump blood around the body.
The brain is there really to try and predict
what's going to happen next for us
and maybe help us prepare for it a little bit.
And it gets those predictions
from thousands and thousands of days of experience.
And so when a loved one dies, if you think about it this way,
if you wake up one morning and your
your wife isn't next to you, they're in bed.
It's actually not
a very good prediction to think that she's died.
Right.
And many bereaved
people will
recognize the experience
of waking up and thinking for a few minutes
that their loved one is still alive
and then the wave of the reality hits them.
And I think that comes from the attachment bond,
which is a different
kind of information that the brain can rely on
when we bond with our one and only
when we fall in love with our partner or our child.
That bonding includes the belief that you will be there for me
and I will be there for you, and that will always be true.
And so the solution
that the brain has for if my loved one isn't present,
then the answer is to go get them, to go find them, or
to create enough fuss that they will come and find you.
And so that solution, of course, doesn't work in the case
of the death of a loved one.
And so it takes a long time for the brain
to sort of reconcile these mutually exclusive
pieces of information.
There's a
newer model that we use in current
grief research called the dual process model.
And this model really helps us to understand
that there are two different
kinds of stressors that bereaved people have to cope with.
On the one hand, there are the loss stressors
and this is what we think of usually as grief.
But there are
these other set of stressors called restoration stressors,
and this is really about restoring a meaningful life.
What is it that I do now that I find meaningful?
So the advantage of thinking about both kinds of stressors
means that for mental health, we try to find ways
to cope with both.
And people can get stuck in only one or only the other.
It really is
more about being able to do both aspects
to fondly reflect on the time that you spent together.
Maybe even experience that bittersweetness that comes
with it.
And also to be able to engage in how things are now.
Many grieving people will recognize what I like to call
this should have would have could have.
Some very elegant research
studies have shown us that this kind of rumination
can actually be thought of as a form of avoidance.
These are those thoughts that just keep running around
in your head of if only they could have known
that the train was going to be late,
or if only the doctor would have run another test
or often about themselves if I would have gotten them
to the hospital sooner.
The difficulty with the would have, could have, should have
is if you think about it.
Each of those stories ends in.
And then my loved one didn't die.
But of course they did die.
And so getting stuck in that kind of rumination
doesn't really help us to adapt to the current situation,
the painful reality that we have to deal with
that is they are gone.
I think it can be really helpful
to make a distinction between grief and grieving.
And grief is just that.
It's that feeling that overwhelms you like a wave.
Grieving, on the other hand, is the way that that feeling
changes over time without ever really going away.
So the reason I think it's most
helpful to distinguish between them
is that if people believe
there will come a time when they don't feel grief,
they're going to be disappointed.
You know, if I open a drawer, I open a book
and I see a birthday card my mom sent.
Right.
I'm going to be totally overwhelmed
with grief in that moment, you know, seeing her handwriting.
And that's totally normal, even though it's been years
and years and years and years.
And the intensity, the frequency of those waves of
grief will change over time.
But it doesn't mean that it's ever over in some sense.
So there's a huge range in the way
that people express the grief that they're experiencing.
And almost all of it is normal.
Things I tell people that can be helpful are
if there are moments of your day when you can feel positive
things that you can, you know, be distracted by a
puppy loping in the park, or you can have a funny moment
with your grandkid where you're where you're
laughing about something, even if there are other parts
of the day where you feel just bereft.
It's really the flexibility of being able to sort of
go in and out of these waves of grief.
That's a sign of mental health.
We do think about
a small proportion of people, maybe five or 10%
of people who experience the loss of a loved one,
who have a more prolonged and severe type of grief.
We don't even begin to start looking at that as a possibility
until at least a year after the death has happened.
At that point, we're really able to look for those individuals
who are not functioning very well.
And so the opportunity exists then to intervene
and get them back on
a typical trajectory of grief and not actually
take their grief away,
but help them to find that flexibility in their life.
My father
died about six years ago,
and I think as with most grief experiences,
we never know what it's going to be like until it hits us.
Even someone who studied grief as much as I have
can be surprised by what comes along with it.
But I knew that the feelings would change over time,
and it was easier for me to just let those waves
come over me and then also recede.
So life experience taught me a lot.
And having talked to so many grieving
people, taught me a lot as well.