What happens to our brains and bodies when we’re grieving? Why is it so hard to truly understand that our loved ones are gone, even when we know it with our minds? How does grief change our relationships, our health, and even the way we experience the world?
In the first-ever episode of The Pure Podcast, our Content Lead Sabine Groven speaks with Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor, grief expert, psychologist, neuroscientist, professor and author of The Grieving Brain and The Grieving Body, to explore these questions and more.
They discuss how deep attachments form in our brains, why grief is a form of learning, and how continuing bonds with those who have passed can shape our ongoing lives.
With compassion, scientific insight, and practical guidance, Mary-Frances helps listeners understand the waves of grief, the physical risks it carries, and the ways we can navigate life after loss.
Listen to the full episode
Transcript
Sabine Groven
So firstly, I just want to say, Mary-Frances, thank you so much for joining me today.
Mary-Frances O'Connor
It's so lovely to be here, Sabine, thanks for inviting me.
Sabine Groven
We're going to talk about what happens to us when we're grieving. But before we talk about grief, you suggest that we must first understand love and bonding. So could you explain to us why that's so important and what happens in our brains when we form a deep attachment to somebody?
Mary-Frances O'Connor
You know, it's been said that grief is the sort of continuation of love. And I think it's such a good way to sort of understand that in order to know what we've lost, we have to really understand how are these attachment bonds, how are these bonded relationships working in our life and even at the level of sort of what's happening in the brain. And I know that may sound strange to people, but I think about it this way. You know, when you fall in love with the person who becomes your spouse or you fall in love with your baby, there are actual physiological changes that happen then in the brain.
And that is how our, how we know this is the one to keep coming back to, you know, you can sort of picture the little baby bear, you know, following along behind the mama bear and those attachment bonds, those what seem to be invisible tethers, you know, that keep them together. Those are physiologically found in the brain. And so that when we encode our loved ones, when we encode these relationships, there are changes in all the neurochemicals in our brain. And those are powerful motivators to seek out our loved ones or to or to wait for them through anything, you know, so that until they come back. And and it's it's a physiological representation as well. The firing patterns in our brain, they really are our loved one encoded within us.
Sabine Groven
In your books, you describe grief as a form of learning. What do you mean by that?
Mary-Frances O'Connor
You know, it's funny, I think of grieving as a form of learning in part because just as we were saying, when a loved one dies, we have to understand that. We have to understand what does it mean that they're really gone? And what does it mean for my life that they're really gone? And on the one hand, that might sound really obvious, like, well, yes, I can tell you that they are gone. I was at the funeral, or I was even there at the side. But when these bonds are formed, our loved one doesn't have to be in our presence for us to believe that they are everlasting, right? This is why, you know, you can send your children off to school and send your partner off to work because we know that even in their absence, we will seek them out again. We will do anything to get back together.
"After a loved one dies, while one part of our brain knows the reality, has these memories, there is another part of our brain that believes our loved ones are everlasting."
And after a loved one dies, while one part of our brain knows the reality, has these memories, there is another part of our brain that believes our loved ones are everlasting. And it's the reason, you know, many bereaved people talk about, and then I picked up the phone to text my mum, even though, you know, she's been gone for months. Or I bought a birthday card for my dad this year, which is just, which feels crazy because at some level I know they're gone. And at the same time, another part of our brain believes they are everlasting.
And so it's really a form of learning to understand, no, they are not going to walk through the door again. But then, importantly, what does that mean for my life? Right? It isn't just that they're down the street and we won't see them, or it's not just that they're on a trip. It's, you know, what is retirement going to look like without my spouse? Or how am I going to get through college if my mom has died and and and and she's not here to support me, and so there's so many things we have to learn to understand how to adapt to life with their absence.
Sabine Groven
Especially if we've planned for the future with someone in it.
Mary-Frances O'Connor
Absolutely, yes. And just by virtue of having a relationship, we have sort of implicit plans to be with them.
What I mean when I say that we have to live with the absence, which is not the same as them not being there, but really we're living with the fact that they are gone. So this is sort of a, it's just sort of a story you can imagine. For the story to make sense, you have to go along with the premise, and the premise is that your kitchen table has been stolen. so one night, in the middle of the night, you wake up and you decide to go get a glass of water because you're thirsty and you walk through the house and it's dark and you you're going to cross the kitchen to the faucet and you know as you cross the kitchen, just as you step into the space where the table should be, you can feel it.
Do you know what I mean? You can physically feel the hole, can't you? And it's the strangest sensation. And what's strange about it is, how can you feel something that isn't there? But of course,
Sabine Groven
Yeah.
Mary-Frances O'Connor
The way our brain works is we have all these expectations about how the world works, literally even how the physical world works, and we're anticipating that all the time. And so we're anticipating a sensation from the table. And when we don't receive the sensation, our brain has a reaction. Now imagine the number of times that you walk into a room where your loved one should be there.
And your brain is reacting each of these times as well, when they're not sitting at Christmas dinner, when they're not in their favourite lounge chair. And I think people don't recognise that each time we are reacting to that, even in the absence, right? And especially, I think it can make us feel very isolated from other people because they're not experiencing that room with the absence of this loved one, but we are, and I think it can make us feel disconnected from other people who are in our living, in our reality.
Sabine Groven
Is that something you hear people say when you're talking to bereft people that they feel quite lonely in that grave?
Mary-Frances O'Connor
Yes, yes, very often people feel quite alone. I think grief, the kind of grief where you've lost your one and only, whether that's a child or a sibling or a partner, a parent.
When you've lost your one and only, I think people are often very shocked by how that feels. And that can be in the fourth decade of life, the fifth decade, the sixth decade of life, and you think, I just wasn't expecting it to be so intense, or I wasn't expecting it to last so long, or just be as strange as it seems. And because of that, I think we are very hesitant to reach out and tell others how we are truly feeling because we think I'm crazy, you know, or I should be, I'm wallowing.
"I think we are very hesitant to reach out and tell others how we are truly feeling."
But it's not that, it's that there is a learning curve to living with the absence of our loved one. And the people around us aren't on the same learning curve. So we have to share with them how we're feeling so that we can try and connect with others who do understand what grieving is like.
Sabine Groven
You mentioned that people are often quite surprised by how it feels. So I think perhaps we have this expectation of what grief is, and we're familiar with these five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. But is that how it works in real life?
Mary-Frances O'Connor
This is an excellent question, and many of us remember, maybe even from school, having learned the five stages of grief. Now what's important here is those are a description of what many people feel. So many people, Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who wrote about these stages, she really did us this incredible service by talking with people who were going through really difficult times and discovering, grief, grief isn't just sadness, it's also anger or it's also bargaining, you know, this internal, you know, what ifs and if onlys and what that meant was that people had a better sense of what grief can feel like. But it's become used as a prescription, as though we experience these as stages of grief. get all done with anger, and then we move on to some other stage.
What we know from, you know, Dr. Kubler-Ross was writing about this in 1969. Now think how far science has come since 1969. So what we know now is people do often experience those feelings, but not everyone experiences them and certainly not that they go in some linear order. What we know is that over time, grief comes in waves, and it, you know, some days we do better and some days we do worse.
Over time, we see an increase across months in acceptance that this has really happened. And across months, we see a decrease in yearning, in expecting that they're going to walk through the door again. And so it isn't that these five stages lead to some closure. This is a real myth, I think, that has developed because we will, because we're human, because our loved one is gone, we will always have waves of grief. That's just the normal human reaction to loss. But we will have these waves less frequently, less intensely, and most importantly, they'll become more familiar.
"We will always have waves of grief. That's just the normal human reaction to loss."
And so we come to learn how to live with waves of grief, to live with the loss, to learn how do I comfort myself rather than reaching some point where we don't feel grief any longer.
Sabine Groven
Yeah. So the idea of kind of moving through five neat stages and coming out the other end completely fine, that doesn't really exist. No. Yeah. And I think what you say about waves of grief, that's also very recognisable for a lot of people and especially early on in the process, that can catch you completely off guard.
Mary-Frances O'Connor
Yes. That's it. Exactly. I mean, the first times you just think, don't even know, I'm not even going to get through this moment, you know. But then if we, if we really accept, this is going to happen, this is part of who I am now, you know, I've, I've walked through this door of loss and, now I have a much wider understanding of being human. I know for myself, you know, if I think on moments where I have waves of grief because my dad is gone, I know now that I'm more likely to, you know, text my sister and say, oh, thinking of dad, you know, and feel comforted because we're sharing a memory of him than to just be completely blown over by it and not know how to respond in the moment that you feel so lost.
Sabine Groven
Yes. You're lucky in that also to be able to have a sister to share that with. Yeah.
Mary-Frances O'Connor
I am. And this is one of the key things, you know, we have to find someone who understands. Now that could be a pastor, a vicar, that could be a yoga teacher, that could be a bereavement support group, could be a family member, could be an author, but we have to find someone. or even a diary, but we have to find someone who can really understand what we're experiencing, because by describing what we're experiencing and describing the way it changes over time, that is learning.
Sabine Groven
Yeah. And you know what, I thought it was really interesting reading your books from the point of view of so many people who experience this. And one thing that really got to me was the YSL scale. Can you talk a bit about that?
Mary-Frances O'Connor
Yeah. So this is a set of questions that we developed. We call it the yearning in situations of loss or the YSL scale. This was developed when I was at UCLA in California at the university there. And the idea was that, you know, loss because a loved one has died is, you know, that kind of grief is sort of the most... That's typically what we think of when we think of grief. But of course, any time a relationship is ruptured, where your one and only isn't able to be there for you, or you're not able to be there for them, we experience grief in any of those situations. So that could be the romantic breakup, that could be homesickness, that can be the empty nest, know, many situations where it is the absence of the person, separate, the permanent separation from them that causes these physiological as well as emotional changes that we recognise as grief.
Sabine Groven
Yes, the questions, some of the questions are really, or the statements are really heartbreaking. And the way that it's made is that you've left a blank space for the name of the person that they've lost. And so there are statements like, "It's hard for me to be happy without blank. I feel that in my ideal world, losing blank would never have happened". And the fact that...
Mary-Frances O'Connor
Yes.
Sabine Groven
So like loads of people are filling out this information. It happens to loads of people. It's really, really sad, but it's something that a lot of us will go through at some point in our lifetime.
Mary-Frances O'Connor
It's completely natural and normal. And the reason that we developed the scale was in order to get a sense of how people vary. As a scientist, my job is to look for patterns. And so we wanted to see patterns in how people vary in the amount that they are yearning for their loved one. Because we might say, well, everyone yearns for their loved one, but there's a lot of variability in what that's like was an opportunity to sort of put numbers to it and the reason to do that was because I was looking at these brain images, neuroimaging scans of people who are grieving and what I wanted to do was find out whether yearning was something that had a neurobiological component to it and in fact I found it did. There's a specific part of the brain deep in the brain that has to do with our motivation.
"It's actually very universal. We even see this in mammals who bond for life."
And this area of the brain, the amount of activity in this specific region correlated with the amount of yearning that people told me they were experiencing for their loved one. And so we can see the sort of physiological encoding. And I think the reason that this is helpful is that many people feel quite validated. They think, I'm not making this up. There is something going on inside of me, physically happening inside of me that is a part of this grief experience, and once we know that, just as you say, it's actually very universal. We even see this in mammals who bond for life. So when we see it in pair-bonded animals, that this same region is important in that bond, and there are changes in that part of the brain in the animal when they are permanently separated.
Sabine Groven
Wow, that is so fascinating. And because of that incredibly strong bond between somebody, then it's natural that that doesn't go away when someone passes. So I want to ask you a question about bonding and relationships after death. So you write about your mother in your books and how your relationship with her changed and even grew even after she passed away. So I thought this concept was really interesting. Are there any examples from your work where you've seen people keep a connection with someone who has passed away?
Mary-Frances O'Connor
Yes, so in my book, The Grieving Brain, I talk a lot about this idea that psychologists talk about, which is continuing bonds. And once we've fallen for our one and only, this person really is ingrained in the encoding of our brain. They are physically located inside of us, even while their physical body is gone. And what it means is, if I see something on the street. This is happening to me quite a lot because my mum is British, was British, and as I'm here in London at the moment, I see all sorts of things and they make me think of her. I know exactly how she would respond, I know how she would laugh or what she would say about it. And so she is still alive in the virtual world of my mind because my brain enables that.
It is a critical part of a relationship that even in the absence of someone, we can still fully imagine them. This helps when our loved one is alive to keep us attached to them. And after their death, this continuing bond is something that people can maintain.
So, for example, from a research study that we did where we had widows and widowers fill out a daily diary of the interactions that they had with the continuing bond with their deceased spouse. So the first thing to know is very, very common. Almost everyone talked about some form of interaction they were having with their deceased spouse. But secondly, I think just knowing the kinds of interactions that we can maintain, the relationship can be there. So one woman told us about, you know, when she would drive home from work, her husband had really loved music and she felt like he was sort of DJing the music that came on the radio, you know, just for her. And it was her way of connecting with him each day, thinking about the music they had loved together and, you know, in that moment feeling really close to him.
"Almost everyone talked about some form of interaction they were having with their deceased spouse."
Now, what's interesting is as we age, our relationship with this deceased person can continue to grow. So my mum died when I was 25. She had breast cancer and died far too young. And the kind of grief that I had at 25, it turns out, is very different than how I feel, you know, in my 50s about my relationship with her. So my relationship with her has continued to grow. That is to say, you know, I think I had no idea at 25 what it was like to be a woman in the age, you know, at the age that I am now. I feel closer to her now in some ways because I understand experiences she was having in a way that I couldn't possibly understand them when I was 25.
Sabine Groven
There's something really beautiful about that. Obviously sad, but really beautiful.
Mary-Frances O'Connor
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Sabine Groven
So, Mary-Frances, you say that time doesn't necessarily heal, but experience does. So what kinds of experiences can help us heal from our grief?
Mary-Frances O'Connor
It's very natural because grief is so painful for us to want to avoid certain things, to avoid conversations or to avoid certain places, to avoid the closet that has the things of our loved one, to avoid certain feelings or... And these are often places where we're not learning, where we're not learning how to be in the present moment in the absence of our person. And so it is, in fact, that experiencing, okay, here I am in the here and now.
I can decide how do I want to deal with, you know, the clothes, say, of my loved one. Would my loved one want me to donate them? Would my loved one want me to wear some of them? Would they want me to pass them on to certain family members? By dealing in the here and now with these things, having the experiences.
It reminds the brain as it's going through this learning process. Now my loved one is not here and does not need these things, but I can still have a relationship with them through the experience of deciding how to navigate the things they loved in life. So it's just one simple example, going out to dinner with your friends, who you always went out with, you know, with this person being in the now and reflecting on the fact that they are not here and also that you still get to have these other experiences, it has something to teach us. I can't know for each person what they will learn, but I know that experience is how we stay fully present and fully alive in this brief gift of life we're given.
Sabine Groven
Yeah, so not avoiding and try to live your life. In The Grieving Body, you write about how risky grief is for our health. Why is that?
Mary-Frances O'Connor
So this book, The Grieving Body, that I've written, I really wanted people to understand the physiological component that I've mentioned. And it isn't only about the brain. So when you come home from work and you see your partner, and maybe you get a hug. It makes your heart rate drop a little bit, makes your blood pressure drop a little bit, your muscle tension is reduced.
You can think of them as sort of your external pacemaker, right? Because they are really helping you to regulate your body. Or, for example, if I have to come out and do an interview, I may think about my partner because it motivates me, right? You know, someone's there behind me, I've got this, you know? And so my heart rate actually goes up a little bit, and I get a little more enthusiastic. And so our relationships really are physically a part of how we tackle the world, so to speak. And what we know from research, from really large epidemiological studies, is that when a loved one dies, for example, the day that a loved one dies, we are 21 times more likely to have a heart attack than any other day of our life. Which is just a shocking, shocking statistic. And even in the first three months, we are twice as likely to have a fatal heart attack as someone, say, who remains married during that same time.
"The day that a loved one dies, we are 21 times more likely to have a heart attack than any other day of our life."
And so knowing that this is true, I really think we need to understand better what are the mechanisms? How is it that this loss gets under the skin and then consequently, what can we do to really support the grieving body to really help people to get through this risky period of bereavement so that they can have the learning curve so they can go on to be the grandparent they want to be or so that eventually they can go back to work and be the teacher or the lawyer or whomever. But we have to find a way to get them through this risky period so that they can go on to have meaningful lives.
Sabine Groven
Yeah, so it's very important then for people to have some sort of support system, and not everyone will have that.
Mary-Frances O'Connor
And I think there's this sense of also, if you understand that grief is a physiological experience, I think we do a better job of knowing I have to soothe myself in the midst of this grief. I have to find ways to comfort myself. And I'm not just talking, I'm not talking about anaesthetising myself, right? I mean, many of us do go through this period of restlessness where we work too hard or we go on too many runs or we, you know, whatever we can to sort of take ourselves out of our mind, right? Which can be we have such painful feelings. And I'm not talking about, you know, drinking liquor as a way to sort of cut ourselves off.
I mean the kinds of comforting and soothing that acknowledge the reality, but also helps us to understand that people are there for us or that we have the capacity to deeply breathe and bring our heart rate down or to... We did a study in my lab, an intervention study where we taught people progressive muscle relaxation. So this is a process of learning to clench and then relax the different muscle groups of your body, but really to notice the difference. What does it feel like when I'm relaxed? And this really actually helped with their feelings of grief. So the capacity in any place, you know, you're driving in the car or you're sitting in a meeting or you're getting into bed at night. Learning how to comfort your body and soothe and relax your body helps you to manage the waves of emotion that come with grieving.
Sabine Groven
Yeah and that's a really good tangible practical tip as well for anyone listening. Progressive muscle relaxation is incredible. There is a very helpful NHS video on that that people can look up. I can link to that as well, but I love it. It feels a bit like a mini massage so... You've also compared grief to pregnancy. Can you talk a bit about this?
Mary-Frances O'Connor
Now this may sound like a very strange analogy, but given what I've just said, you know, I don't want people to think that bereavement, grieving, is a disease. It's not. And I think the analogy here is no one thinks pregnancy is a disease, right? But no one would say it isn't physiological. And no one would say that it isn't a risky period, right? And so, because we know that this may happen totally naturally, this may, you know, progress just the way it's supposed to, it will take the time that it's supposed to take, and the person has, you know, the capacity to navigate it with their support.
But because of the medical risk, we also create a whole system of care where we provide education about what the process will be like. We do assessments to see how the health of the person is, and if, in fact, they are having gestational diabetes or hypertension, then of course, we intervene so that we can support their body in going through this process. Imagine what it would be like if bereaved people had a way to access the education to get together with other people and find out, this is what it's like ordinarily.
"Thinking about bereavement as a time of medical risk means that we as a society could really support these grieving people."
And these are the ways it's similar for me, but it's not similar in these other ways. And these are the, you know, I can find out if I have hypertension, for example, many people who are grieving have increased rates of infection like flu and pneumonia, right? So, I should actually be kind of on top of getting my vaccinations more so than I would at another time in my life. You know, making sure you go to you to visit your dentist or have your mammogram, whatever it is. Thinking about bereavement as a time of medical risk means that we as a society could really support these grieving people so that they can continue on and restore meaningful lives for themselves and be a productive and loving member of our community.
Sabine Groven
Yes, absolutely. As a society, that should be in our interest and especially if someone is 21 times more likely to have a heart attack, then yeah, we should do something about that.
Mary-Frances O'Connor
Exactly. Yeah.
Sabine Groven
So grief can have a big impact on our bodies, as established. How does grief affect our immune system and our hormones? Can you say something about that?
Mary-Frances O'Connor
So one of the reasons that people are at higher risk for infection when they're grieving is that some of the research shows that there are changes in the immune system and in the endocrine or hormone system. So one of the most common things that we see is that we think of cortisol as a stress hormone. It really is sort of our body's way of organising how much energy to put into things.
When you're stressed about something, your body knows, I need to be putting more energy into dealing with this thing. And so cortisol rises and this increase in cortisol, this increase in adrenaline that we see during grieving, these are probably the reason that grieving people have a lot of difficulty sleeping, for example, because if you've just, you know, it's sort of like if you've just drunk extra cups of coffee, you're not going to be able to sleep.
So if you have extra hormones running through your body, it makes it much more difficult to sleep. Now, the answer is not to somehow pharmacologically these hormones, but rather to learn that this will adapt over time and to facilitate the things that are going to help it adapt. This is the idea of sort of learning to relax, learning how to work with your body's rhythms, like getting up at the same time every day, that helps to reset that circadian clock and helps your hormones to rise and fall in the way that they are intended to.
"When our hormones are affected, that also affects our immune system."
So when our hormones are affected, that also affects our immune system. For example, we know that it's harder for the immune system to fight infection when our body is stressed, that those hormones actually have an impact on the individual immune cells and sort of change their behaviour a little bit. And so, for example, in the book I write about my good friend Lizzie Pickering, has written this marvellous book, and after the death of her son Harry, she realised she was getting bronchitis and pneumonia over and over again, right? And so learning how to assist in the immune system, she learned, for example, she needed to do yoga and learn how to sort of breathe more deeply, learn to relax more and what she had the capacity for each day, given she had this huge extra stress of dealing with this loss.
Sabine Groven
Yes, because when you're grieving, that is taking up so much of your energy, and then you're supposed to go on with your daily life in addition to that.
Mary-Frances O'Connor
That's it. I give, you know, like I have the kitchen table example. I have a different example when you think about the grieving body. So imagine you're sort of bicycling down a city street, and it's a lovely day and you see that there's a red stoplight ahead, and so you go to squeeze your handbrakes to stop, only there's no handbrakes there. And so you're very worried. Your heart rate goes up and your muscles tense because you think, I have to stop, what's happening? And then you remember that you're on a beach cruiser bicycle, a Dutch bicycle, you pedal backwards to engage the coaster brakes. And so you do. And you stop before you get to the stoplight.
But what's important to recognise here is, there's something missing in the way you ordinarily function in the world. Much like bereaved people feel they are missing something in how they ordinarily function. And although you were able to stop before the stoplight, your body went through that whole stressful process and carries the fact that your adrenaline went up. And so your body is busy trying to figure out how to work in the world without your loved one. And that takes energy, and it takes time and effort. And that then is taken away from the other physical processes we all need to restore a healthy body.
Sabine Groven
Yes. So, losing someone who is very close to us is incredibly difficult. But can building new relationships with other people help, for example, getting a new partner?
Mary-Frances O'Connor
It's an interesting question. I would say that there is no one outcome that describes all grieving people. I would say that there is no specific goal of grieving.
It's sort of like, you know, I think of it as you, you, you realise that this person is not coming back, and you have to figure out how to restore a life now, given that this is true. And that life, I can't know, no one around you can know what that life should look like or is going to look like. But what I do know is that it can be good. It can contain grief and also contain many living loved ones. Now I think people come at this from different directions. Some people find they build a stronger relationship with themselves. They realise they can be more self-reliant than they had any idea. They become better at soothing themselves, knowing what their interests are in the absence of a spouse or a parent or sibling, they learn what's valuable and important in life, and they pursue those things.
"You realise that this person is not coming back, and you have to figure out how to restore a life now."
Other people find that they connect with people because they see that relationships are, there's an unknown, there's a fragility to relationships and that we have to really hold our loved ones in the present because the present is what we have. And so they find ways to deepen existing relationships. Other people find that they need to go out into the world, that they need to find new ways to understand the world, that death and loss has really changed their understanding of what's important and that they need to explore new places or new aspects of themselves or new religious beliefs or new philosophical beliefs.
There is no way, there is no one path. What is known is that to live a healthy life, to live a meaningful life, we need other human beings. And that will look different for each person. And there's also no timeline on it. I think even for those people who do want to start new relationships, let's say a partner has died, and at some point you think, I don't want to live as a single person, I want to be a partnered person, that relationship is an entirely different one. We're not filling the same shoes. And so being able to acknowledge that it will take many months and years to build the level of comfort that a relationship, that a long-time relationship has, means this is a different entity entirely. I think where people sometimes experience this is after a pet dies, of course, we become very attached to our dog or our cat.
People will think, I'll get a new puppy, you know. And the new puppy is nothing like the dog you had built this relationship with. Now, puppies are amazing and wonderful and bring incredible joy into life, but they are not the dog that you had. So as long as you are able to know that I will experience these feelings of grief over the loss I've had, while also being able to be present with this, you know, ridiculous animated puppy that I love, and then building a relationship with, then there's no problem. But if we think that the grief will go away because we also have joy, that is, think, where people struggle.
Sabine Groven
So we're nearing the end now, Mary-Frances, but I wanted to ask you, for anyone who is listening and is grieving right now, what's one thing you'd say to them?
Mary-Frances O'Connor
I would say...
Grieving is a natural process. Grieving is a learning curve, you know? There are things that we sometimes can kind of get in our own way. And I would just really encourage you to reach out and express to others who you think might get it. Those are often not the people who you thought they would be. Could be a neighbour, could be a grandma, could be like I say, someone at a bereavement support group, to reach out and tell them how it is for you. What are you learning right now? What is life like after a loss of a month, of six months, of two years, of 10 years? What is it like for you now? And what is it like for them? And how can you be together in the fact that you are carrying this absence?
Sabine Groven
That's lovely. Well, thank you so much for speaking with me. It was an absolute pleasure. I really appreciate you.
Mary-Frances O'Connor
It was lovely, Sabine, and thank you for bringing this conversation to people. It's so important.
