Have you ever wondered why the loss of a loved one feels like a physical pain, leaving you utterly depleted? In this revealing conversation, Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD, author of The Grieving Body: How the Stress of Loss Can Be an Opportunity for Healing, pulls back the curtain on the profound mind-body connection of grief.
You’ll discover surprising scientific insights into why grief dramatically increases your risk of heart attack, immune issues, and other physical ailments in those initial days and weeks. Mary-Frances illuminates the crucial 1-year milestone when normal grieving trajectories diverge, with a small fraction becoming stuck in prolonged grief disorder.
But this episode offers far more than academic understanding. Mary-Frances shares powerful wisdom for befriending your “grieving body,” listening to its needs with radical self-compassion. You’ll learn practical tools to gently navigate the waves of grief, escaping rumination’s undertow while still honoring the natural process of learning to live with loss.
Whether you’re currently grieving or supporting someone who is, this candid dialogue unwraps the oft-misunderstood physicality of grief. Join us in exploring how tenderly caring for your mind and body can open pathways for healing to emerge from unfathomable sorrow.
You can find Mary-Frances at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript
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Episode Transcript:
Mary Frances O’Connor ACAST.wav
Jonathan Fields: [00:00:00] So have you ever felt like your heart was literally breaking after losing someone, or even something deeply meaningful in your life? That hollowed out physical ache that courses through your body alongside the emotional turmoil? If so, you’re definitely not alone. Grief inflicts a profound mind body toll that our culture rarely acknowledges or understands. But what if I told you that the very physicality of grief actually holds the seeds for healing? That grief actually lives in a very real way in your body? And by tenderly caring for your grieving body, you can open pathways to navigate loss with more grace. Even finding pockets of meaning and joy along the way. So my guest today is Mary-Frances O’Connor, a PhD expert in neuroscience of bereavement. Her groundbreaking book, The Grieving Body How the Stress of Loss Can Be an Opportunity for healing, made Oprah’s list of best books to comfort the grieving. She’s a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, where she directs research illuminating grease effects on the brain and body. And in our conversation, Mary-Frances pulls back the curtain on surprising revelations like why the newly bereaved face a substantial increase in the risk of heart attack. In those first 24 hours, you’ll learn about the crucial one year milestone that separates normal grieving from prolonged grief disorder. But maybe more powerfully, she shares wisdom for befriending your grieving body with radical compassion, releasing patterns of avoidance and rumination that keep you stuck, developing a toolkit to gently honor waves of grief while still savoring life’s simple beauties. So whether you’re grieving a profound loss yourself or supporting a loved one, this conversation it really offers an empowering new lens, one that honors grief’s universality while illuminating pathways to heal profound loss and grief. So excited to share this conversation with you. I’m Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.
Jonathan Fields: [00:02:01] Really diving into your work. You know, grief is one of these experiences that if you’re fortunate to be around long enough on the planet and to have loved deeply and widely, you’re going to experience it, as I would imagine, the most unifying and common experiences that we have across the human condition. And yet we don’t like to talk about it. We don’t like to explore it. And when we do, we tend to really tap dance around it. So I’m excited to dive into this with you and also really understand what’s happening underneath the hood with the experience of grief.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:02:36] Yeah, it is a so universal, you know, all periods of history, all cultures, even some of our mammals that bond for life. You know, we we see grief as a natural response to loss.
Jonathan Fields: [00:02:53] You know, I want to tease out a distinction before we drop more into the the internal workings. And it’s a distinction that I hadn’t heard made until I saw you actually make it. I think a lot of us are familiar with the word grief, you know, centered around some sort of significant loss in our lives. But you identified something called prolonged grief. And I guess now there’s even in the DSM, this thing called prolonged grief disorder. Take me into what these are and how they’re different and how we really understand them to be different.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:03:25] I think it can be really helpful to start with the difference between grief and grieving. Actually, when we have a loss, when someone we are bonded with dies, we have a natural reaction to that. And we call this grief. You know, it’s in the moment, that wave of grief that comes with really strong emotions. It comes with often a physiological response. It’s, you know, a part of the thoughts running through our head. And grief is really in that moment, in that wave. So I could say to you, Jonathan, how much grief are you feeling right now on a scale of 1 to 10? That kind of thing. But what that doesn’t really tell us much about is how your grief has changed over time, right? So most people experience that waves of grief after the loss of someone, they become less intense or less frequent as time passes as we learn to accommodate grief in our life. My favorite analogy recently is I think about it in terms of the stock market. So if you look across days and months of time, the stock market goes up and down and up and down and up and down. Right. And I think this is very much what we experience as people who are grieving. Right. So the waves of grief look different every day. And some days are really bad. But overall the trajectory can still be in a good direction. Where in the research we see that for the vast majority of us, we see more acceptance and less yearning over time. Now, the reason that’s important is it means on any given day you may not be doing very well, but we can see when someone comes into my lab for a study or someone goes into a clinician, how they’re doing that day doesn’t actually tell us a whole lot about their grieving, right? And in that first year, it’s really a little hard to know because there’s so much variation, right? Goes up and down and up and down.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:05:43] And in that first year, it’s a little hard to tell kind of how they’re doing in the big picture. Although most people do show this change over time On, but around a year we start to see specific trajectories. So most of us this, you know, improvement over time, not that grief goes away, but that we it becomes more familiar. And then there’s this very small group of people, maybe 1 in 10 bereaved people, where we’re just not seeing change over time. And what that means is they’re not finding ways to do meaningful things. They’re not connecting with loved ones. It doesn’t mean that anyone’s grief has gone away. But this group of people aren’t learning how to accommodate grief in their life. And the reason that a year is sort of an important moment is because that’s when we can start to predict, okay, if you’ve seen change up till now, you’re probably going to continue to see change. And then if you aren’t seeing change by that point, we can start to predict that we’re not going to see change unless there’s some sort of intervention. That’s what we call prolonged grief. And of course, because it is in the DSM so that we can diagnose it and we can do evidence based treatment psychotherapy for it. All the things in the DSM are called disorders, right? So PTSD is post-traumatic stress disorder, major depressive disorder. They’re all called disorder. So it’s just prolonged grief. But in the DSM they call it prolonged grief disorder.
Jonathan Fields: [00:07:24] You know, it’s interesting also as you’re describing that the stock market analysis is it’s kind of funny and weird and off, but actually probably really apt at the same time because, you know, you take a five year window or a ten year window, and generally it’s always slowly trending up and slowly turning up. But on any given day or week or month or year, you could be whipsawed back and forth and back and forth. So it’s interesting though, the one year mark. Why is it a year where you use that window to sort of determine whether somebody seems like they’re stuck in this sideways pattern versus slowly, slowly growing through it?
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:08:02] Oh, I love that term, Jonathan. This sideways pattern, that’s such a good way to put it. Feeling really stuck, right. Like nothing is changing. So there’s a couple of reasons. The World Health Organization also includes prolonged grief in what’s called the ICD 11 International Classification of Diseases. It’s what the rest of the world uses. The US uses the DSM. And in the ICD 11, it’s a six month window where they start to look for evidence that people have shown improvement. And in the US, in the DSM, it’s six months for children as well. The reason that the DSM went with a year was a couple of things in the evidence, in the research where we’re doing longitudinal studies of how people are feeling and how they’re functioning. We can start to see indicators at six months, but it’s clearer at a year what trajectory you’re on. But there’s more to it than that. There was a real fear of pathologizing something that is normal, right? And so for nine out of ten people, they’re going to be struggling. That doesn’t mean they’re not normal, right? So we really wanted to make sure before we gave someone a diagnosis, that enough time had passed for them to have the support that they needed to learn new coping skills and so forth. And then the last piece is, you know, the DSM is a cultural document as well as a psychological one. And many of our religions and cultures have one year as a special demarcation in bereavement. Right? So there are many one year anniversary rituals that different religions do. And so we wanted to I think the DSM wanted to reflect that as well, that this is already a naturally occurring time frame in our culture, not when grief goes away, but we recognize that the second year is different from the first year.
Jonathan Fields: [00:10:05] Yeah. And that’s so interesting because that’s immediately what came to my mind. I was thinking, you know, in nearly every faith tradition at a year, there’s some sort of ritual that happens. Yeah.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:10:17] Yeah. You know, I am a neuroscientist by training, so my thoughts about these things tend to be more informed by neuroscience than by cultural studies, although I have learned a great deal. And I think of it this way as well. After a year, every single thing that you do, you have a memory of having done it once without the person you know. And that can feel really different. Now there are people who in that first year, they just feel numb. Um, and the second year, actually, they feel the emotions more intensely. It doesn’t mean that things feel all better after a year, right? But they do feel different, and this can be a helpful way of thinking about it.
Jonathan Fields: [00:11:05] It’s not necessarily that you’re looking for some sort of meaningful positive shift at a year, but you’re looking for some sort of shift.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:11:15] Exactly. So this is, you know, I’ll just give you a couple because stories are so helpful, I think, in these ways. Right. I have seen hundreds of of grieving people now. And I know as a clinical psychologist how to use the diagnostic criteria. For example, I had a woman tell me it had been about two years, and she said, why would I give my daughter’s bat mitzvahs if their grandmother isn’t there to see it? And you just see in that she’s just not able to participate in ongoing life, you know, without her mom. On the other hand, there was a man who told me older man, he had fallen in love with his high school sweetheart. And, you know, they’d had two kids, and I think there was a white picket fence in there somewhere. And. And then he told me the story of her getting breast cancer and how he had cared for her when she was terminally ill. And he cried when he told me about her passing away. And it had been a couple of years again, and he had recently started going out to dinner with a woman who was very different from his wife, but he was really enjoying it. He didn’t know what it meant, but he felt kind of energized being with her. And he said to me, the thing I will never forget, he said, the thing is, it was really good then, and it’s really good now. And I think that to me is the sign of mental health. It’s not that you don’t cry when you think about your loved one who’s died. Of course you do. They are bonded with you, and that’s forever. But you also are able to have wonderful things in your life. That is the sign of mental health.
Jonathan Fields: [00:13:04] It’s so interesting that you say that I was actually just recently having a conversation with somebody, and and it was around basically her opening question was like, how do you define mental health? My answer to her, which kind of surprised me a little bit. Also, I said, look, I don’t know. This isn’t this is just for me. Nobody else, I said, but, you know, for me, it’s the capacity to feel everything but get stuck in nothing. And that’s kind of what you’re describing here.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:13:29] Yes, that’s exactly it. And in fact, we I teach at the University of Arizona in the clinical psychology graduate program. So we’re training researchers and future psychotherapists, clinical psychologists, and in the class where we talk about psychopathology, we actually do a whole effort on what’s the difference between mental illness and mental health. Because, you know, the World Health Organization describes mental health as being just what you said, being able to deal with sort of the slings and arrows of day to day life and life events without getting stuck. Right. So having both positive and negative emotion in your life. But they also go on and say things like feeling like you can make a meaningful contribution to your family and community. Right. So a person who is grieving a lot, or a person who has a chronic illness like myself, I think a lot about what is it day to day that I do that’s meaningful? Not did I have a lot of fatigue or did I have a lot of, you know, did I break down crying today? To me, that’s not the definition of mental health. It’s about did I do a couple of things that I feel like made a difference, or I really connected with someone today. That seems important.
Jonathan Fields: [00:14:50] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. The notion of when you bring up a chronic health condition. Also, it speaks to another curiosity of mine, which is the bigger curiosity. The deeper curiosity is if we just take that one year sort of point to do the measuring why? It’s like the distinction between post-traumatic disorder and post-traumatic growth. Like, why do some people hit this window and they stay stuck in a spin cycle of suffering, whereas other people still feel the things and they come in and out of their lives, but they’re still they’re able to move forward and sometimes even integrate and grow from the experience. Again, not dishonoring the loss in any way, shape or form. But there’s something about them that allows them. And the reason that you’re mentioning chronic illness raise that question for me also is this notion of is your state when the loss actually happens, meaningfully impactful in your ability to actually, at this year, mark, be able to move through grief or stay stuck in it.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:15:57] It absolutely matters who you are when your person dies, right? Or when you’re separated from them in other ways. Because, you know, grief can come in lots of forms. Even if we mostly study bereavement because of its sort of basic building block of grief. And I think what you describe is exactly that. I mean, I would take just a step back for half a second because, you know, you can’t really talk about grief without talking about love and bonding. You have to understand what it is that you have before you can talk about what you’ve lost, you know. And so when we bond with someone who becomes our spouse when we fall in love with our baby or we, you know, connect with a very close friend. We encode that person as a part of us. Right? What that means is I will always be there for you. You will always be there for me. And we even forget that it means that our bodies become entrained with each other. That when I go home at night, you know, and I get a hug from my partner, my heart rate goes down a little bit, right? My blood pressure goes down a little bit. And he is the external pacemaker for my cardiovascular system.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:17:20] Right. Because I can predict that we’re going to have that over and over and over again. And so now to understand well this is what I have right. That I am bonded. This is he is a part of myself. He is a part of the way I regulate my physiology when that loved one is gone. There’s the initial low reaction that we call grief, and that is both an emotional one. Wait, what is happening? Where? Where are they? What’s going on that we call protest? And then also the despair of oh, no, they’re gone. Grieving is a form of learning. We have to learn that they’re gone. We can’t just automatically know that when we hear this information, because our attachment system allows us to believe they are out in the world, even if we can’t see them. You know, this is how we can all go off to work each day, because we know we will do everything in our power to come back together again. So I sometimes call this the gone, but also everlasting theory. On the one hand, we have a memory. We know we were there even when our loved one died. We can tell you the reality. But on the other hand you have this encoding.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:18:41] A part of ourself is I am a wife, I am a sister, I am a daughter, and I can’t make sense of their absence. They’re always going to be there. That’s the everlasting part. And given both of these can’t be true, we have a wave of grief when we realize yet again, oh, I can’t pick up the phone to call them, right? I bought a birthday card, and of course they’re not going to have a birthday this year. So that learning curve takes a really long time, but it takes a different length of time for different people. So back to your question of why, what predicts how people are going to do in this grieving trajectory. And I don’t really think there’s something magical about a year, I’ll be honest. In fact, we usually have an anniversary reaction. So actually in grief research studies, we study 13 months. So we don’t, you know, capture that accidentally. So this is what happens physiologically. We know there’s an acute response. In fact, in the first 24 hours after a loved one dies, or 21 times more likely to have a heart attack than any other day of our life. Isn’t that just a crazy statistic?
Jonathan Fields: [00:20:00] Yeah.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:20:00] So we know there’s this acute reaction in the first six months. Research by Thomas Buckley in Australia shows our heart rate and blood pressure. 24 hour heart rate and blood pressure on average, are increased in people who are bereaved compared to those who are bereaved. But by six months, we see a return to baseline sort of physiological functioning in most people. Right. And so we’re seeing that this natural reaction, sort of we’re adapting as our resilient body got slammed and our person was amputated from us, and now we start to see adaptation and understanding. And then over time, we get better at confronting the really hard things. Accepting that we’re going to have these waves of grief, and learning how to comfort ourselves, to soothe ourselves when we have those waves of grief. So I think the other thing that happens is, while there’s a natural response to loss, we also have to learn how to work with it. And we have to develop a pretty big toolkit of strategies. And not everyone has the support or the grief literacy right to know. Oh, it’s okay to avoid thinking about this while I’m in a work meeting to just, like, pretend this is not happening because I have got to get through this work meeting or I’m cheering my daughter on at her soccer game.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:21:33] I’m completely ignoring the people who are asking me how I am. Because I can’t do that right now, right? Denial and avoidance are just one tool in our toolbox, and there they have their place. But if those are the only tools that you have, then it makes the learning to understand the painful reality you’re living. It makes it much harder. We also need the tools of going for a run because it settles our restless bereaved body, or learning to do deep, relaxing breathing that calms and soothes our nervous system. Or when I’m in the grocery store and I see something that reminds me of our dad, I’ll text my sister and be like, yep, having a little welling up here in the grocery store again, and she’ll write back and say something lovely and sweet and we connect, right? And that makes me feel better. So I think avoidance, Rumination. These are things we have to develop skills to navigate in grieving. And not everyone has access to that.
Jonathan Fields: [00:22:43] Yeah. And I would imagine the state of your mind and your body and also your how full or empty your toolbox is coming into the experience of loss is going to have a huge impact because it changes the starting line in a weird way. That’s right.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:22:58] Yes.
Jonathan Fields: [00:22:59] So you described one of the aspects of what actually happens to us from a neurological and a physiological effect when we experience loss. You were talking about the increased risk of heart attack by 21%, which, you know, like so many people say, like my heart is broken. Obviously, that’s more than just a phrase and an emotion. There’s something physiologically going on there.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:23:21] Yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [00:23:22] Is there science or do you have a sense for like what is actually happening here that would literally dramatically increase someone’s risk of a cardiac incident?
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:23:32] This is such an interesting area of research right now, and we’ve actually been able to document in large population based studies this increased risk for cardiovascular incidents for decades now. It isn’t just a metaphor, right? It is there in black and white. So in the first three months, a man is twice as likely almost twice as likely to die of a heart attack compared to a man who remains married during that same time, almost twice as likely. What boggles my mind is that if we have known these statistics are true for this long, what are we doing about it? In my mind, the minute in the emergency department, in the nursing home, in the hospice unit, in the ICU, wherever, the minute that a patient dies, we know that the person next to them is at it incredibly high risk from that moment? Decreasing. But nonetheless for for a few months. And why do we not as a bereavement support. Why do we not inform them. You know, give them a red card that says if I turn up in the emergency department with chest pain, take it really seriously because this, my loved one, has died recently. I think of it this way sometimes grief is not a disease. Right? But pregnancy is not a disease. And yet no one would say it’s not physiological.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:25:10] And we have really increased medical risk during pregnancy. Right. So we have whole systems of prenatal care where we do education. These are the changes you can expect. And these are some changes that we should be cautious about. You should come in for prenatal care so that we can test for gestational diabetes or hypertension and then intervene if your body is not responding to the stress of pregnancy in the way that is typical. So why could we not also have bereavement care in the same way? Here are the changes that you might expect. They are very difficult, and we are so sorry that you have to go through this, and at the same time, your body will learn to regulate. If you use these suggestions about how to work with your sleep system or your appetite system to try and get a little bit back on track. But if you aren’t seeing improvement, then I need you to come back in three months or six months so we can test your for hypertension. We can test for, you know, why are you getting pneumonia or flu so so frequently, which we know happens in people who are bereaved. I think a system of care that really understands the contemporary science would benefit society so much.
Jonathan Fields: [00:26:35] It’s such an interesting contrast to that when somebody is about to bring life into the world. All of a sudden there are all these additional things. There are check ins, there are expectations. There are books and books and books about what to expect week after week after week. There is, you know, like there are plans for like care, for nutrition, for movement, for measurements, for like imaging, for all like testing. And as you described, you know, part of it is, is because, you know, you want to do everything you can to try and hopefully bring the healthiest new life into the world and also take care of the adult at the same time. And there’s a realization that there is this increased risk during this window. It’s such an interesting contrast. Right now you’re saying the science shows us there is an increased risk of all these different things in this post-lost window, this bereavement window. And yet we just say this is really tough. You know, like, make sure you’ve got people around you and bless them on and don’t say, well, here’s here are a whole bunch of things that you might expect to feel, to experience, to unfold. Look out for these. Here’s typical, here’s atypical, here’s what might be normal. Here’s what’s not. And here are some people you might want to have check in on you or or appointments you want to schedule. You know, maybe you want to see your GP or your therapist or your pastor or your rabbi, like, you know, maybe for this window of time. And yet in cult on the cultural side of it, I think there are these traditions and rituals. But on the medical side, I’ve never heard of sort of like a post bereavement medical plan.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:28:12] I mean, some of this stems back to the mind body dualism, right? So our helping professions psychologists, psychiatrists, GPS, as you say, nurses, they don’t get any training in contemporary bereavement science. And so they don’t know. I mean, there’s actually a national effort in the US and even more advanced effort in Europe and the UK and Australia to put bereavement policies in place. And what they realise is that even if we screen for bereavement, we have to be able to tell clinicians what to do. Right. So partly we need more research to understand what is typical, what is not typical. But having said that, it is so fascinating to me how people get confused about what’s emotion and what’s physiology. Your brain and body don’t know there’s a difference. Right. And so people will say, well, yeah, my blood pressure’s high, but I think it’s just the grief. And I think, well, you can still take antihypertensive medication whether it’s grief or salt, you know.
Jonathan Fields: [00:29:28] It’s like there’s no. But in that sentence there’s no.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:29:30] But in that sentence, yes, it is grief. And also, oh you’re menopausal. Okay. So that’s where you started. That was your starting line when the loss happened. So that all gets incorporated. Oh you’re 25. And that feels different than when you have the huge toolkit of strategies when you’re 55 to deal with some of the emotional stuff. Yeah, that’s a different starting line. It doesn’t mean that we divide things up and say, oh, well, this doesn’t need treatment or this does need treatment. I guess I think of it this way, and this is the difficult line. As I wrote The Grieving Body, I worried about walking this line. On the one hand, it is totally normal, natural, typical to have physiological feelings you’ve never had before, to have a lump in your throat, to not be able to digest your food the way you used to. These are actually pretty common when people are grieving.
Jonathan Fields: [00:30:27] And physical pain also like, oh, this hurts.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:30:30] Yes, exactly. My chest hurts, right? So on the one hand, this is totally normal and much less terrifying if you know that, that’s pretty common. On the flip side, because it’s a medically risky time, the body is this, you know, elastic rubber resilience where it can absorb the blow of loss. We can have someone amputated and our cardiovascular system learns how to regulate itself again. But if it becomes too much, if we get outside the bounds of normal human physical functioning, then we really do need to make sure to take care and intervene medically where that’s necessary. You see why this is a difficult line to walk. On the one hand, it’s normal and on the other hand, this is why I like pregnancy as an example, right? It’s typical. You will get through this. It is terribly unpleasant. And also if you have hypertension, you should get that treated right. So I think of it, I guess I think of it this way. A lot of it is paying attention, not being afraid of what your body’s telling you while you’re grieving. People get afraid of a wave of grief. They think, if I start crying, I’m never going to stop. And that’s just not how it works. The waves of grief, they come, they feel unbearable, and then they also recede. And it is going through these again and again. You know, that teaches us, oh, this is part of what it is to be human. And it allows us if we if we listen to what our body’s telling us, we learn to try courageously a few coping strategies. What actually makes me feel better. Then we have that wisdom when we sit with the next grieving person and we say, hey, listen, this is the worst you’ve ever felt. You’re not going to feel like this forever. Borrow my hope because I’ve been there in a different place. But I can connect with what you’re experiencing. I will be here until you get to that different place. We don’t know what it’s going to look like, but I will be here. Borrow my hope.
Jonathan Fields: [00:32:51] It’s a powerful offering. And at the same time, I know in depression, one of the most brutal aspects of this, when somebody is really deep into it, is the loss of belief that the feeling they have in that moment will ever end.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:33:05] Absolutely.
Jonathan Fields: [00:33:06] And I wonder if like that same phenomenon happens in bereavement. So even if somebody is sitting there next to you and saying, look, I can’t fix this, I’m not going to try and fix it. All I’m telling you is like, I’m right here next to you. And I know that over time it will be different because I’ve been through this. And you can borrow my hope if somebody if you’re saying that if the person who’s actually bereaved is just looking at you and has the same response as somebody who’s in a deep depression, which is, I just can’t believe that, like, this is just going to never end.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:33:34] Yeah. And you know what? That is also a part of the experience. The feeling of isolation and withdrawal and despair is one of the natural reactions that we have. So part of it is knowing first that we have a community of people around us to just keep us upright, not, you know, just keep us plugging along temporarily while we’re in that despair place, making sure we’re getting at least enough to keep us going. But you’re exactly right that it’s okay to have protests. This shouldn’t be happening. I’m so angry that you can’t understand where I’m at. That’s a normal part of the process and despair. You just don’t understand how I feel. If you’re saying it’s going to change, because I’m telling you, this is how I’m feeling, and I think it makes supporting folks who are grieving really tough and really worthwhile, because that is part of the learning curve. They have to go through this learning. And there’s a wonderful book by this man named John Onwuchekwa, and the book is called We Go On. His parents are from Nigeria. He has a lot of difficulties that have happened in his life, and his brother dies, and he really talks about his own just figuring out how to go on. So I think it doesn’t happen all at once, right? There’s no way to short circuit the learning curve.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:35:16] But if we allow the learning to happen if we allow the healing to happen. I’ll give you one final example. In some Native American traditions. So, for example, in the Cherokee Nation, people sometimes cut their braid off when a loved one has died. And I think it’s so powerful, right? It communicates right away to the people around you. My life is different, right? I am not pleased. Handle with care. Right? I am not my usual self. But also think about how long it takes your hair to grow. And no one says to you. Why isn’t your hair growing faster? What’s wrong with you? Because it’s just a natural process that takes time and we just support each other through that. And if there’s one thing I would say to grieving people, it’s just having compassion for yourself that you are going through this. Just being as kind to yourself as you would a motherless child who can’t really tell you what’s going on and doesn’t understand that a future could look different. Just holding your grieving body and just being so thoughtful and kind to yourself can help you as you go on.
Jonathan Fields: [00:36:37] Now that lands powerfully and you keep using the phrase grieving body, which is what you write about as well. And I think that reinforces the fact that we tend to think like the grieving is in the heart and the mind and and as we all know now, like there’s no distinction between your physical health and your mental health, like it is one seamless feedback mechanism. And and as you’ve shared, you know, the way that grief lands in your body and your physiology and your as you’ve described, your heart, your immune system, your endocrine system, your nervous system, like, you know, and if any of these things were a little bit jacked before this, it’s it’s going to hit harder and you’re going to like start from a more dysfunctional place and have to deal with that. And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. You’ve shared some of the the ways to reframe this, to think about it like compassion. Talk to me a little bit more about how what tools we might think about adding to our toolbox as we’re moving through this experience.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:37:36] It is interesting. I love your your line about we all are in a different starting line. Our body is in a different place. Our development is in a different place. Our emotional stability or mental health is in a different place when when this loss event happens. And I think of it. Well, so I have to tell you that after my mother died, about a year later, I started having these symptoms, had these what felt like twinkling in my arms, which is such a weird, like, that’s not a symptom.
Jonathan Fields: [00:38:12] Twinkling is a very distinct medical and technical term. Terrible.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:38:16] Exactly. So it took quite some time, but I was eventually diagnosed in my mid-twenties with multiple sclerosis. And I just want to be super clear that my mom’s death didn’t cause my multiple sclerosis. Right. So my paternal aunt had Ms.. And so I have a, you know, it runs in my family. And I grew up in northern latitudes where you get less vitamin D from the sun. And I had all these risk factors. Right. That was my starting line. But it’s perhaps no surprise that during the stress of my mom’s illness and then her death, that that was the time that it emerged right in my body. What’s interesting about it is there’s a way in which I almost I think it just informs who you are, right? And who you get to be in this lifetime. So I won’t joke with you. I really just ricocheted through my life. I was a professor. I wanted to be a professor. Right? I had no space in my head for whether my stomach was, you know, what my muscle tone was like or something like that. My body was there to move my brain around, basically. And my body eventually told me, you don’t get to live that life. That’s not actually the body you’re in. And I had to learn to pay attention to it and to develop a day to day and even our to our awareness of what my body could do, because it came also with a lot of fatigue and brain fog at times and so forth. And so I write a lot, especially in the second half of the grieving body.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:40:01] I think there’s something there’s some sort of parallel here between having to cope with a chronic illness and the grief that comes with that, and having to cope with a loved one being gone forever, right? And so I will tell you that there are days I mean, I mean this, Jonathan, there are days I wake up and I think, wow, I’m going to have to cancel everything except the one thing that I know I have to do today. For a long time, I had all this. Oh, you’re lazy. You could just power through. Or I had all these beliefs about that. And eventually, on a good day, I can tell myself, no, this is the body you got, for better and for worse. It means you’re really empathic. It means you understand physiology in a very embodied way. But if you’re sitting at the window with your brain fog, which means you can’t do any statistics, you’re not going to be writing any anything today. I still enjoy the hummingbirds outside my window, and it takes a long time to accept that this is not the life that you had expected. Your loved one was not supposed to die. And yet, here we are. And so the toolkit includes that developing awareness, developing equanimity, compassion for who you get to be, and then an authenticity of nope, this is my life that has loss. And I still get to do a few things that I really, really want to.
Jonathan Fields: [00:41:43] And I’m glad you shared that deeper reference. Also, because a lot of times when we think about loss and bereavement and grieving, you know, what we’re really focused on is another being being a person, a pet. And you know what you just introduced. Also there’s like grieve the loss often of the life we thought we were going to live in the context of our own minds and bodies, grieve the loss of a certain expectation about physical ability, about health and well-being, or just like, assume it’s, you know, like, this is what we’re promised. Almost. Yep. And then when it gets taken away, either in the blink of an eye or slowly and progressively over time, at some point we kind of have to say, oh, that expectation, it’s actually no longer valid.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:42:25] It’s a learning curve, right?
Jonathan Fields: [00:42:27] So it’s really it’s similar in so many ways. So it’s interesting for you. You know, what you’re describing is you you had this like compound loss and compound grief cycle. And both affect the other because they each affect your psychology and your physiology and your neurology. So there’s like these multiple overlapping feedback loops. And I could see how it could create a really brutal doom spiral. If you don’t have the tools, the community, the support to actually help you navigate this, I would imagine that there are many people joining us right now who have either been through that or are in it right at this moment. So much of what you’re speaking to in terms of that toolbox is what I’ve heard is community. What I’ve heard is, you know, awareness and attention. Like, actually owning not what you thought would be or wish would be. But actually this is what is true now and then. Compassion. So these are all powerful qualities. And I think we can all see how they would be just incredibly important if you don’t feel like you have easy access to them. How do we start to get access to these experiences and skills and just abilities?
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:43:37] I think there are many ways, honestly, it’s very interesting. I have a graduate student who’s been doing research project about grief in the black community. You know, we forget that bereavement is a health disparity, right? If there’s different life expectancies in different communities, that means that there’s loss that happens too soon or too often, right? And so when I think about her research, what she shows is that in this study she was asking about the experience of witnessing. So did you have a witness to your grief? So not just like social support, but like, did you have someone who validated that this was your experience and, and really gave you permission to have that experience? And what was fascinating was we had a whole hypothesis about how people would do if they had no witnesses. And in this particular study, now, granted, it’s not, you know, an enormous study, but we didn’t have any black folks who didn’t have a witness. And people talked about how they just kept reaching out. So, for example, a young man who was at college reached out to his community of origin, right. And he reached out online in order to find other black folks that were going through what he was going through to try and make sense of his experience. And so I think human beings need other human beings.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:45:07] Things we get in our own way of not reaching out for support. But if you’re not getting the support you need right now, keep reaching. Go online. There are wonderful support groups online now. Go to an older person in your life who you know gets it right. That could be a pastor. That could be your yoga teacher, right? That could be your grandmother. How did you get through this? What feelings did you have that you’ve never told anybody about? And how did you make a life for yourself after grandpa died? You know, my father, who obviously was widowed pretty young because my mom died in her early 60s. He used to collect all the widowers in my hometown, and he would make dinner on a Sunday for them. So, you know, these older men would come over and have, you know, his, like, crock pot meatballs or it was not fancy food. And he said that over time they learned, oh, you have to plan these things, right? Like, you have to make a you have to make an appointment with someone if you’re going to get to see them later. And then you can look forward to it. But you have to make a grocery list. You have to actually cook and come over or go over. And so just keep reaching out.
Jonathan Fields: [00:46:23] I mean, I think that’s powerful and also probably really hard when you’re in the depths of it.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:46:28] Absolutely. Your motivation is really low.
Jonathan Fields: [00:46:32] Yeah. And I’ve heard whether somebody’s going through, you know, an immediate loss or they’re just dealing with a health crisis. Yeah. That so many people around you, if you’re fortunate to have that community who’s really connected to you, that very often people say, what can I do? What can I do, what can I do? And I’ve been told by a number of people who are in that situation not to ask that question. Yeah. Because the person who is in it very likely doesn’t have the capacity to answer it, even though they really would, would appreciate and need your help in some way.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:47:02] I think this has a lot to do with what I might call attunement. Right. So there was some point with my partner that I realized, oh, you know what? I don’t always have to ask how he is. Sometimes if I pay attention, I can tell how he is. And this is similar with friends, I think. Hmm. I wonder if this would be helpful. And then I offer it and I say, hey, this may or may not land, but I’m sending you this book that I’ve read. I think it might connect with your experience. We can talk about it if you want to or not. Your choice. And you might throw the book across the room and not read it. And that’s fine too. Right. Like, I think it’s about offering, not just asking. Hey, if you’re having trouble getting your kid to their dentist appointment, I could pick them up on the way home or I don’t know what your grocery shopping is looking like these days, but I’m going to the grocery store anyway. Can I bring you X, Y, and Z healthy snacks? Because I know you’re not eating very much right now. You know, so I think some of it is about offering.
Jonathan Fields: [00:48:14] Yeah, I would imagine starting out with the phrase like like why don’t I dot dot dot.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:48:18] There you.
Jonathan Fields: [00:48:19] Go. You know, so so all the person has to do is basically nod.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:48:23] Yes, exactly.
Jonathan Fields: [00:48:24] You know, it’s sort of like you’re taking some of that decision making away from them at a point where like but the precursor to that is you’re describing is this attunement, which is like really paying attention. Like if you know this person, well, like, you know what they generally need and how they are and how they respond and how they recover, like, what do you sense would be helpful in this moment and trying to anticipate that and then offer it in that? Why don’t I type of language or whatever your version of it, because it just takes some of the burden off of them.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:48:54] But I will add one more piece and I’ll do it through a story because that that often works best. I teach this psychology of death and loss course to undergrads, and they often have a surprising amount of life experience. One of my students, she said that she and her boyfriend lived next door to this older couple, and at some point they realized that the husband had died. And so around Christmas time, her boyfriend went over and knocked on the door and said, hey, listen, I know your husband usually put up Christmas lights on your house. You know, I could do that if you want this year. And she said no and slammed the door. And he came back and he said to my student, he was like, oh my God, I’ve totally done the wrong thing. How could I be so insensitive? That was awful. And 24 hours later, the widow came over and knocked on the door and was like, hey, listen, I’m so sorry. It just makes me so angry that he can’t do this anymore. I just can’t believe or bear that that’s true. Of course, I would love to have you come over and put up Christmas lights, and I’ll tell you about how he did it and why he did it the way he did it, and you know, and share some of that story with you. I mean, think about all the courage that took on both of their parts, right? Because it’s just not easy. It’s just not. And so giving each other and ourselves a little grace, we may not react the way we wish we did, but we keep we go on.
Jonathan Fields: [00:50:25] You know that compassion that you referenced earlier? Self-compassion and also compassion for the other? Yeah. Is there in your mind when you think about the research that you’ve done and that you’re aware of? Is there a big lever here in your ability to fully experience loss and grief and then move, move with it, live with it, grow with it, and um, and not get sort of like in this stuck place of prolonged grief. Is there a big lever or like a big hammer in the toolbox that you seem to be sort of like most effective, most determinative at helping you move through this experience of loss.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:51:07] I think my gut answer, my first answer is no. That there’s lots of little tiny things. You know, a hammer is such a great tool, but doesn’t work for fixing a window. So I think on the one hand, it’s trying lots of different things. You know, if a child falls down on the playground and scrapes their knee, sometimes it’s the right thing to run over and scoop them up and hug them and tell them they’re going to be okay and put a bandaid and a kiss on it. And other times, it’s okay to look at them and be like, no, no, you got this. You’re okay. Try it again. Do it again. Right. Those are both two tiny tools, you know. But I guess I do think in the research we see two mechanisms that people struggle with. And one is avoidance and the other is Is rumination. And so avoidance is really being honest with yourself. What is the thing I’m avoiding doing that I’m avoiding feeling that I’m avoiding confronting. Because my loved one is gone and I don’t think I can handle it right. And find a way, maybe with support to start approaching it, you know. So that could be going out to dinner with your couple friends after your spouse has died, you know? Or it could be I’ve been driving an hour out of the way so I don’t have to go past the place where the accident happened. What would it be like to drive past? Or a woman told me, you know, I haven’t had any family photos, any family portraits because I feel like one of us is missing. What would it mean to have a family photo taken now? You know, so it turns out that we learn when we actually experience and allow ourselves to learn, even though it’s not pretty. And that can take support. Take someone with you. Be like, I need to do this thing and I really don’t want to. Will you come with me? Will you drive with me past the site, and then we can go pause by the side of the road and have a good crying jag or whatever.
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:53:21] The other one is rumination. It turns out that we get very caught up in our mind, in our thoughts. And one of the ways this happens is what a friend whose son died by suicide calls the would have, should have, could have thoughts, right? This is if only I would have gotten them to the hospital sooner, or the doctor should have known to run that test. You know, the thing about. And our brain is amazing, our mind can come up with an infinite number of these stories. Worries. And each of these stories ends in. And then my loved one would have lived. But the reality is, your loved one didn’t live. And all the time that we spend caught up in these other stories means that we’re not in the present reality, and it’s only in our present reality that we can connect with living loved ones that you see. You know, the beautiful cactus flower that flowers for 24 hours on your walk at night, or you see the puppy doing that hilarious thing in the park. If you’re caught up in your mind, if you’re caught up in these other thoughts, you’re not actually in the present moment. That yes, it does have grief and pain, but it also has love and joy and pride and silliness and and all the other things that come with life as well. So learning how do I get out of my head? Is that going for a run? Is that calling a friend? Is that drinking a cup of coffee? Although, you know, I don’t recommend that 100% of the time. That’s not going to help your insomnia. But my point is, how do I shift? How do I become aware? Oh, I think I’m ruminating. I think I’m doing that mind thing. And then how do I shift out of it?
Jonathan Fields: [00:55:15] Yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense. I’m guessing also really distills down to just a lot of classical techniques on how to stop spending and get present, like CBT, movement, things like that. I want to zoom the lens out a little bit here. So you have been studying bereavement and loss and grief and the psychoneuroimmunology of it and the neuroscience of it for a long time now and teaching this and as you shared earlier in our conversation, part of that means that you have been engaging with people who have experienced profound loss, hundreds of them, maybe more, for many years. How is that for you?
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:55:53] Mhm. That’s such a thoughtful question. People tell me my students are like, you are way too happy to be doing this work. And I tell them, that’s because I do this work. Jonathan, I got to work today. I made it into my office after a whole, you know, regular morning. But that was full of challenges and difficulties and emotions, and and I get to be here with you, and that’s amazing. So it doesn’t change that. I had all of these moments where I was like, my body’s never going to do what I want it to do, and I’m so sad about things. It doesn’t change any of that. It’s that I also get to be here. I have had the enormous advantage of getting to learn what human beings know about how grief works. And because of that, I feel like I can live my life pretty differently than when I was just ricocheting through my day to day. I feel very fortunate to have gotten to have the experiences I have to talk with the people and see the bravery that I’ve seen. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t have ups and downs exactly like everybody else. I think I try to connect with the grief experience in me, because it feels disingenuous to talk about this stuff without connecting on the inside. And at the same time, I also recognize when I’m doing it too much. I learned at one point I really need to go take care of a friend’s baby on Saturday mornings because I need some baby time, which is joyful and future forward. And so I think having boundaries as well about how much time you want to spend in different emotions is important too.
Jonathan Fields: [00:57:51] Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well. So in this container of Good Life Project., if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?
Mary-Frances O’Connor: [00:58:04] Mhm. I think for many of us who in our American culture are taught to strive, you know, we’re always optimizing and so forth. I’ve really had to learn that to live a good life also means to sit and have a bar of chocolate or a glass of wine with a good friend, feeling the weather of the day and being grateful and kind and savoring whatever it is that the moment you’re in has brought you to.
Jonathan Fields: [00:58:44] Mm. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, safe bet, you’ll also love the conversation we had with death doula Alua Arthur about how thinking about death can change your life. You’ll find a link to that episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by, Alejandro Ramirez, and Troy Young. Kristoffer Carter crafted our theme music, and of course, if you haven’t already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app or on YouTube too. If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did because you’re still listening here. Do me a personal favor. A seven-second favor. Share it with just one person. I mean, if you want to share it with more, that’s awesome too. But just one person even then, invite them to talk with you about what you’ve both discovered to reconnect and explore ideas that really matter, because that’s how we all come alive together. Until next time, I’m Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project.