Mind-Body

I’m reading a new book, The Grieving Brain, that talks about how the brain responds to grief and loss and how grieving changes the brain. I’m only about 30 pages into it but it’s making me cry a lot. So far the book is talking about how we have a primitive part of our brains that has a mapping feature for people who are the most important for us and we have to know those people are present and close to us. Although our higher brains can receive information that those important people are dead and gone, this more childish part of our brain, I guess, keeps looking for the person that has died and believing this person must still be locatable nearby, and hence all the questions grieving people have about whether their loved ones are really dead, and where they are now.

That makes me feel very sad. Like there’s a little girl inside of me, and it’s her who keeps asking “Where is Sarah?” And I have to keep on making up stories to satisfy her. Sarah is on a soul journey. Sarah is with Stuart in the Sky. Sarah is in Stampy’s underwater palace in Minecraft.

The author of The Grieving Brain talked about how sometimes when chimpanzee babies die, the chimpanzee mom will carry around her baby for a few hours or days until she feels able to give up the dead baby, until she has accepted the death. Her conscious brain knows the baby is dead because chimpanzee babies cling on to their mothers and do not ordinarily get carried around, so she is doing something different and unusual. When this more primitive part of her brain has mapped and accepted that her child has died, she will lay the body down.

Maybe I didn’t spend enough time with Sarah’s body. Maybe doing a wake or a viewing is actually a good idea, although I’ve always hated those traditions and in general, Jews do not practice them at funerals. We do not embalm and we are supposed to bury our dead within three days. I have hated looking at the prepared bodies of Sarah’s friends who died when I went to their funerals. It did not look like them at all. But maybe that was the point. Maybe your brain is supposed to see that the body is not your child, that your child is truly gone, that you are not burying or cremating your living child.

Probably it would have been an awful idea and pretty upsetting for Max and everyone else if I had carried around Sarah’s corpse for a few days, letting my primitive brain absorb her death. In fact, there’s probably no way to rush this process, although I haven’t finished reading this book yet.

When Sarah was alive, I always let her know where I was if I got up and left the room, even for a minute. “Mommy’s going to check the laundry, I’ll be right back.” Or “Mommy’s going to the potty.” I didnt want her to wonder where I was and not know. One of us was always with her. I just have to keep telling myself that she doesn’t need us so much anymore. Otherwise I just start to feel too anxious. Dammit, I thought I was starting to get past this.