Reflections from the ongoing work of practice, leadership, and attention.
These essays reflect an ongoing practice of attention—exploring grief, leadership, belonging, and what it means to live into a new story, personally and collectively.
Grief as Learning: A reflection on The Grieving Brain
A reflection on grief as a learning process—how the brain struggles to update after loss, and how attention, time, and care can slowly reshape our relationship to what has changed.
In the wake of a death—especially an unforeseen one—we search for answers. Why did this happen? How? What could have been different? Often the mind searches even when there are no answers to be found.
I didn't read The Grieving Brain until nearly two years after I lost my daughter. Even so, I found it deeply validating. It helped me make sense of experiences I had already lived through but didn't yet have language for. A friend recommended it after her own profound loss, and she too found it useful in navigating the disorienting territory that grief creates.
Mary-Frances O'Connor is a clinical psychologist, neuroscientist, and professor at the University of Arizona. The book reflects that background—at times academic, but consistently humane. She distinguishes grief from depression, explains why yearning is not pathology, and shows how attachment is not merely emotional but physiological. We quite literally build our lives, and our nervous systems, around the people we love.
At the heart of the book is a deceptively simple idea: the brain is a learning machine. More specifically, it's a predictive machine, constantly anticipating what will happen next based on past experience. This works remarkably well—until it doesn't.
How the Brain Maps Relationships
O'Connor explains that when we form deep attachments, our brains learn that certain people exist here, now, and close. Even when a loved one is not physically present—at work, traveling, living across the country—we still carry a stable internal map of their existence. They are part of the world our brain expects to encounter.
That map does not update instantly when someone dies.
A familiar example helps. If you always place your keys in the same spot when you come home, your hand reaches there automatically. One day, distracted, you put them in your coat pocket and hang the coat in the closet. The next morning, your hand still reaches for the old place. The brain is not broken—it's doing what it has learned to do.
Grief works the same way, only the discrepancy is far more painful.
The brain continues to predict the presence of the person who has died. Each time reality contradicts that prediction, it hurts. Not metaphorically—neurologically. O'Connor frames grief as the repeated correction of a deeply learned expectation. This is why grief can feel so disorienting, even when we consciously know what has happened. Knowledge and learning are not the same thing. Unlike depression, which flattens experience, grief is marked by yearning—the continued pull toward someone who is no longer there.
When my daughter died, I experienced this painfully and clearly. In the months before her death, she had been traveling across the country. We weren't in close proximity, and we communicated only intermittently. After she died, those surface conditions were the same: she wasn't physically with me, and we weren't texting or talking in any given moment. My brain's map had not yet caught up to the deeper truth—that she would never again be here, now, and close in the way it expected.
My conscious mind knew this immediately. My brain did not. Each time the discrepancy surfaced, it hurt.
The most important takeaway from this is simple, but not easy: the brain needs time. Time to unlearn an old map. Time to build a new one. The pain is not a failure of healing—it is the healing process itself.
O'Connor offers an image I found helpful. Imagine walking through your home in the dark, used to brushing past a table in a particular place. If the furniture is suddenly rearranged, you immediately notice the absence. You may even question whether you're in the right room. Eventually, though, you learn the new layout. The room still works. Life still works. But the learning takes time.
For me, part of that learning involved realizing that my relationship with my daughter had to change—not end, but change.
Discovering the Scripts
I knew rationally that she was gone. I knew I would never again exchange looks, jokes, or hugs, or watch her become the person she was so beautifully becoming. But I also knew I would never forget her. Which meant the relationship itself was not disappearing—it was transforming. I just didn't know what that meant yet.
I noticed that most nights, as I was falling asleep, I was running the same internal script: I love you. I miss you. I'm so sorry. Over and over. The words were sincere. They were also static. I realized that if I kept repeating the same script, my brain had no new information with which to learn. I was reinforcing longing without offering a path forward.
So I made a conscious decision to interrupt the script.
Instead of speaking only from sadness, I began to invite different forms of connection. I intentionally recalled memories. I noticed moments in the present that she would have found funny or beautiful. I tried to experience joy with her, rather than only grief for her. This did not erase the loss—but it did allow my brain to begin building a new map, one that was less constantly jarring.
This, I think, is where agency quietly enters the grieving process. Not in forcing ourselves to "move on," but in gently offering the brain new experiences to learn from.
The Role of Mindfulness
The other major lesson I took from the book—one that reinforced practices already present in my life—was the importance of mindfulness. I've meditated on and off for more than twenty years, and I believe this helped me notice the scripts I was running in the first place. Mindfulness didn't make the grief go away. It changed my relationship to it.
One of the most painful patterns in grief is the endless chain of what-ifs. What if I had done this. What if I had said that. What if, what if, what if. These thoughts arise without warning, and early on they can feel inescapable. But they don't lead anywhere except deeper pain.
Mindfulness offers a different option. Not suppression, and not avoidance, but recognition. When a thought arises, we can notice it. Feel it. And then, if we choose, not follow it. Over time, this becomes a capacity. The thoughts still come—but they no longer carry us away from the present moment every time they appear.
The goal is not to stop thinking. The goal is to avoid being endlessly dragged by thought. Meditation, as unglamorous as it may seem, is a kind of medicine. And like most medicine, it works best when practiced before we're desperate for it.
What the Book Offers
There is far more in The Grieving Brain than I've captured here, and I would recommend it to anyone—whether grieving now, supporting someone who is, or simply wanting to understand how deeply human attachment really is. The book does not promise relief. What it offers instead is orientation.
Grief is not a malfunction. It's the brain doing its best to learn a world that has been irrevocably changed. Understanding that doesn't remove the pain—but it can make the pain feel less lonely, less frightening, and less wrong.
If this reflection has been of value, you’re welcome to support the time and care that go into this work.