What Science Knows About Grief, by music writer Amanda Petrusich, is a long piece in the New Yorker about, well, what science knows about grief.
Petrusich lost her husband suddenly and unexpectedly so there are passages talking about dealing with the aftermath, from finances to well-meaning friends:
I got very good at sensing when the heft and finality of the loss was making someone uncomfortable. I found this both relatable (I surely wouldn’t have known what to say, either) and alienating. Grief can’t be “fixed”—death is famously irreversible—so conversations about it require both parties to abandon problem-solving and accept a kind of unpleasant stasis. When well-intentioned friends or colleagues asked me how I was doing, I felt dread. What I wanted to say was This feels exactly as bad as you think it feels. What I usually said was Yeah, I’m O.K.
There’s also the science promised in the title, which is fascinating–covering everything from giving grief a clinical diagnosis to experimental drugs to EMDR therapy–but the concept that interested me most was “two-person neuroscience”:
When I asked [Katherine] Shear [founder and director of the Columbia Center for Prolonged Grief] about the biological aftermath of grief, she brought up two-person neuroscience, an emerging discipline that studies how our brains affect other brains. “Our closest relationships, especially when we’re living together—in particular, when we’re living together—have an impact on our immune system, our cardiovascular system, our sleep, our eating, probably the whole body,” she said. “I think we have to understand what happens, neurologically, when we’re with someone to really understand what happens when we lose them.”
