The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 18 April 2025
by Mary-Frances O'Connor
Death sucks. There probably isn't anything more true in all our lives. We're all headed there, and we will all experience death and loss in one way or another. It is a part of life. It just happens to be the end. Grief, itself, is a major element of human emotional experience. It makes up half of all of romantic literature. There is a whole genre of movies, perhaps epitomized by Terms of Endearment. When James Bond blows up the evil villain's lair, you can wonder if anyone grieves the countless jump-suited minions who are killed. But, really, what is grief, and do we understand it and how it works? Is it an evolutionary trait of the brain's basic function? What function does grief have in our survival? Do the many self-help books have any real grip on this experience?
Psychologist Mary-Frances O'Connor sets out in this book to answer some of these questions. What is grief from a biomechanical point of view? How does it arise from the structures in the brain, and perhaps what evolutionary path has brought us here? (This gives rise to descriptions of testing on small mammals which may, or may not, make you grieve for their little lives!) There are physical structures to which grieving can be traced. There are structures that are changed by our attachments, love and, ultimately, loss. O'Connor takes us through these attachements and some of the history of her research that revealed some of what makes grief work, whether we experience it in a deep complicated fashion, or in a way more reslient (and apparently more common). And what can these researches tell us about how and why we grieve, and how we can recover from the losses we will all experience?
There's a lot to this story, but the gist of the argument is this: we love someone because we've gotten used to them. Love and devotion are, to the brain, as much habit as they are flowers and courtship. Marcel Proust, back in the turn of the twentieth century, said much the same. He was deeply romantic, obsessively so, but he nevertheless concluded that love was merely habit. Our brains become accustomed to the looks, sounds and smells of our mates, and their loss is felt as real damage to the circuits that have been created around them. This is no mere reductionist argument, that love is simply biology. The anguish and grief we feel are very real emotional states. We suffer. In many ways similar, small mammals have been sown to suffer, too. Mammals around the world have proven to experience grief and loss. It is part of who we are. Loss is part of life. O'Connor writes in a very sympathetic manner, relating her own losses in connection with her researches. The closing chapters of the book discuss behaviors that can ease the grief over time. And, based on the biochemical stuff we've read before this, we have a kind of basis of understanding. It's a pretty fascinating, if sad, journey.