Neuroscientist, grief expert, and psychology professor Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD, has written both The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss (2022) and The Grieving Body: How the Stress of Loss Can Be an Opportunity for Healing – A Psychology and Neuroscience Guide to Trauma Recovery (2025). Below are descriptions of each.
I. The Grieving Brain
As the publisher states, “With love, our neurons help us form attachments to others; but, with loss, our brain must come to terms with where our loved ones went, or how to imagine a future without them.”
Selected Quotes from The Grieving Brain
Grief is a heart-wrenchingly painful problem for the brain to solve, and grieving necessitates learning to live in the world with the absence of someone you love deeply, who is ingrained in your understanding of the world. This means that for the brain, your loved one is simultaneously gone and also everlasting, and you are walking through two worlds at the same time. You are navigating your life despite the fact that they have been stolen from you, a premise that makes no sense, and that is both confusing and upsetting.
Our loved ones are just as important to us as food and water. If I ask you right now where your boyfriend or girlfriend is, or where you would go to pick up your children, you probably have a pretty good idea of how to locate them. We use brain maps to find our loved ones, to predict where they are, and to search for them when they are gone. A key problem in grief is that there is a mismatch between the virtual map we always use to find our loved ones, and the reality, after they die, that they can no longer be found in the dimensions of space and time. The unlikely situation that they are not on the map at all, the alarm and confusion that this causes, is one reason grief overwhelms us.
Grieving requires the difficult task of throwing out the map we have used to navigate our lives together and transforming our relationship with this person who has died. Grieving, or learning to live a meaningful life without our loved one, is ultimately a type of learning. Because learning is something we do our whole lives, seeing grieving as a type of learning may make it feel more familiar and understandable and give us the patience to allow this remarkable process to unfold.
II. The Grieving Body
“As she did in The Grieving Brain, O’Connor combines illuminating studies and personal stories to explore the toll loss takes on our cardiovascular, endocrine, and immune systems and the larger implications for our long-term well-being,” states the publisher.
Healing can involve such things as simple breathwork, physical rituals, various forms of touch, attention to nutrition, getting rest, movement, going outdoors, and listening to music.
A selected and hopeful quote regarding recovery: “Because life continues on, and begs us to come with it, it reaches into the very core of our body and helps us to find new equilibrium eventually.”
Claire Bidwell Smith, author of Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief: “…O’Connor demystifies the grieving process like no one else, offering comfort and understanding when we need it most. The Grieving Body deftly explains the physical changes our bodies undergo after loss and gives us the tools we so desperately need to move through the overwhelming experience of grief.”
