Book 329 - A Year of Magical Learning

Reflection Title: The Ultimate Learning Journey!

Book – The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss by Mary-Frances O’Connor

Book Description:

A renowned grief expert and neuroscientist shares groundbreaking discoveries about what happens in our brain when we grieve, providing a new paradigm for understanding love, loss, and learning.

For as long as humans have existed, we have struggled when a loved one dies. Poets and playwrights have written about the dark cloak of grief, the deep yearning, how devastating heartache feels. But until now, we have had little scientific perspective on this universal experience.

In The Grieving Brain, neuroscientist and psychologist Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD, gives us a fascinating new window into one of the hallmark experiences of being human. O’Connor has devoted decades to researching the effects of grief on the brain, and in this book, she makes cutting-edge neuroscience accessible through her contagious enthusiasm, and guides us through how we encode love and grief. 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 that encompasses their absence.

Reflection:

GRIEF SUCKS!!!

Grief changes everything!

The analogy that I’ve created in my mind is that of an atomic bomb hitting Hiroshima. Just close your eyes and imagine you are a citizen of Hiroshima, Japan on August 6th, 1945. One totally average morning, same as you had experienced for 30+ years, you wake up and are doing your normal routine in your house. You make a cup of coffee, do a little bit of journaling, make some lunches for the kids, take the kids to school, take a jog around the local park, get cleaned up in the shower, change for work, and then sit down to eat some breakfast.

All the sudden…boom! Everything changes in an instant.

Now open your eyes! You survived, somehow, but as you walk out the door of what is left of your house you see that nothing is the same and never will be ever again. The trees in your front yard are gone, your family is nowhere to be found and you will most likely never see them again, your neighborhood is gone, your city is in ruins…everything is different and nothing will ever be the same again.

That is how grief feels to me! Maybe not this extreme of a circumstance, but you get the point.

For a long time after Emilia passed away, I dreamt about being back in the NICU again, in my happy place on that purple recliner right next to her as she grew bigger and bigger each day. I swore I was there, until I woke up and realized I wasn’t. A few times I actually had to ask my wife where we physically were as I couldn’t figure it out. It was one of the most disorienting experiences I’ve ever had in my life.

Losing something you love so much metaphorically blows up the virtual maps that you have depended of for your lifetime to ensure safety, security, and know where all the things that you care about in this world are physically located and will be okay. Then, that something you care about more than life itself mysteriously vanishes from your life. You desperately search and search to find what your brain new was once there, but it is no more. Eventually, you come to the inevitable reality that what you loved so dearly is never coming back and all you are left with is this thing called grief.

Grief is the ultimate learning test.

Figuring out how to regain a sense of safety, security, and putting a new life back together again has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. The first book Emilia and I wrote was processing what happened to us and then setting the foundation for a way to move forward in life. The Year of Magical Learning is next step in that journey as we continue to rebuild the virtual maps that had been blown up in my mind back on April 22cd, 2020.

We’ve come a long way on this adventure together and we’ve found a way to carry forward a relationship with each other by leveraging the values Emilia shared with me and making them a part of my everyday life to stay tethered together forever.

I can’t wait to see what we do next as we learn together and find ways to reinvent our shared virtual world.

Question: How have you learned from Grief?

---

Links:

What is The Year of Magical Learning? An Introduction

YOML Podcast Discussion - Coming Soon

YOML Bookstore - The Grieving Brain by Mary-Frances O'Connor