Mary-Frances O’Connor is a neuroscientist at the University of Arizona where she studies the impact of grief on the brain. Her work helps explain things like why we still expect our dead loved one to walk into the living room and why grief can feel so disorienting. As Mary-Frances explains, grief is a hormonal event, and understanding how it shows up in our brains can help us make sense of our own grief experience. In this episode, we cover how grief is really the brain learning to imagine a life with the absence of a loved one. Our brains know how to grieve. In fact, resilience is the most typical brain pattern of grieving.
You can learn more about Mary-Frances’ work and find her book, “The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss,” at https://maryfrancesoconnor.org/
This podcast is produced by Larj Media.
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Sarah Cavanaugh: If you like Peaceful Exit, you might also be interested in The Heart of Hospice. The host, Helen Bauer, who is a really thoughtful, amazing human, she interviews a wide range of experts about end of life care. It's come up again and again in my work that people don't really know what hospice is. They wait until the eleventh hour to call because they don't know the critical role that this care can play and there's a real fear there as if hospice is the absolute end.
So, Helen's work explaining and examining end of life care is really, really important. If you're a patient, caregiver, anyone working with hospice team, this podcast is for you. You can learn about hospice basics, advanced care planning, patient and caregiver advocacy, grief and bereavement care, and so many resources for caregivers.
I just had the pleasure of being on the Heart of Hospice podcast and Helen and I talked about my personal experiences. that put me on this path and why we need to access our full range of emotions, especially while grieving. We also connected on how did we find joy and humor and lightness in talking about death, because it feels pretty dark sometimes, but not always.There's lots of great episodes, so go check it out.
Sarah Cavanaugh: Hi, I'm Sarah Cavanaugh, and this is Peaceful Exit. Every episode we explore death, dying, and grief through stories by authors. Familiar with the topic. Writers are our translators. They take what is inexpressible impossible to explain, and they translate it into words on a page.
My guest today is Mary-Frances O'Connor. She's a brain scientist at the University of Arizona, where she studies the impact of grief on your brain. Her work helps explain things like why we still expect our dead loved one to walk into the room. And she talks about how grief is really just our brain learning about our new reality.
We talk about the important distinction between depression and prolonged grief and important signs to watch for. Our conversation takes grief literacy to the next level because by better understanding ideas like yearning and rumination, we have a deeper understanding of the grief process and are better able to realize when our emotions or our actions are not serving us.
Our brains know how to grieve, especially if we can lean into it. In fact, something that gives me a lot of hope is that the most typical pattern of grieving is resilience. Welcome to Peaceful Exit.
Mary-Frances O'Connor: It's so nice to be here.
Sarah Cavanaugh: There are so many parts of your book that I love. So I guess let's just start with, how did you fall into studying grief?
[00:02:53] Mary-Frances O'Connor: I am fascinated by the brain and the idea that our brain can somehow encode these people that we love who walk around in the world is just amazing. And then thinking, well, how does the brain understand that they're not out there in the world anymore? How does the brain understand that? In reality, the reason for grief, maybe as opposed to other questions I might have asked, is that when I was 13 years old, my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer.
I didn't understand this then, but that meant they knew it had metastasized. Now, her oncologist described her as his first miracle. She lived another 13 years, which is just amazing. Unheard of. Yeah. But it meant that grief was familiar. When I was interviewing people, when I was learning to be a clinical psychologist and working with people who were grieving, it just felt normal to me that people cry uncontrollably.
That doesn't put me off. You know, perhaps I had a unique lens where I understood what grief felt like and was like in other people that I was close to, and I could somehow map that on to the neuroimages and blood draws that I was doing. I think somehow that combination of curiosity and compassion really came together for me.
[00:04:24] Sarah Cavanaugh: So your book really deepened my understanding of grief. I love the brain as a frame of how things work and you put words around feelings, but you're missing dining table metaphor. How did you come up with that?
[00:04:40] Mary-Frances O'Connor: I vividly remember the day in 2017, I was sitting in a lecture put on by an older faculty member in our department whose colleagues had won Nobel awards for the neuroscience they did.
And they were talking about mice moving through the world and remembering where to go and having an internal map that enabled them to figure out where to go to get food. And it just really struck me, the importance of the people in our lives. They are as important to us as food and that we carry this map around with us of where they are.
If I ask you right now, where's your partner? Where's your child? You could probably tell me pretty quickly how you would get to them. So then the question of, well, if we're carrying this map around, then Initially, in grief, it just feels like they're missing. They're lost. We literally use the word lost.
Not that the map couldn't possibly exist anymore. And that that might help us to think about why grief is so tough. Why grieving takes so long.
[00:05:52] Sarah Cavanaugh: And there's also this sort of missing table metaphor of like, I was at my father's house recently. My mother passed away 22 years ago now. And still, when I'm standing in the kitchen, there are moments when you expect her to walk in.
Yeah,
[00:06:08] Mary-Frances O'Connor: my sister and I do an annual event in my hometown for first graders. giving them books in the way that my mother, who was a teacher, would have wanted them to have books. And my little hometown is about 5, 000 people. And suddenly when I'm there, my parents are so alive for me because everyone knew them, because they mentioned them, because I see the tree that dad planted or the way I used to walk with him to the library.
They're suddenly just there in a different way, and I think that's exactly the point that our brain retains all of that. The brain really continues to keep that person as important in our mental life, and that it doesn't take very much to cue them, right, to cue them to come into the mind, and that when we're in those environments, that is the time when they feel most alive.
So you can think of grieving as a form of learning. Learning, what is this world like now that I'm walking around in? Who am I in this new world, right? If a child has died, if my child has died, am I a parent? Do I describe myself that way? If my mother has died, how do I make sure I'm a good daughter, right?
How do I even do that in the world? And so, the idea, yeah, I think is, You're in this foreign place. You have to have experiences for your brain to understand where you are, how it works, what might possibly feel meaningful. And that's why it takes time, but it's actually, if you're avoiding those experiences all the time, then the time itself doesn't really help that much.
Your brain needs experience in order
[00:07:49] Sarah Cavanaugh: to learn. So if you're just under the covers in bed all the time and not having new experiences in life, you're not myelinating new pathways in the brain.
[00:08:00] Mary-Frances O'Connor: That's right.
[00:08:01] Sarah Cavanaugh: You need to have some experience in the world without that person who's fallen off the map.
Exactly. So
[00:08:07] Mary-Frances O'Connor: there's a way in which you can just keep them alive in your mind in a sense. There was a woman who was being seen in treatment here at the university, who described herself as being on a conveyor belt from work to home and back. And she slept in her daughter's bedroom instead of with her husband.
And she said, I'm just going through the motions. And so this idea of retreating from the world Because it is so painful, right? There is a reason people are retreating from the world. There's a reason we're avoiding driving by the hospital where they died or whatever it is. But the key is that without those experiences, how does your brain know that that map isn't still working just fine?
They're just missing. And rather, if we can live in the real world, the painful, grief filled world, it's also the place that we can connect with living loved ones. It's the only place in the world where we can share positive feelings as well. Compassion and love and silliness and impromptu dinner parties and things like that.
We have to be present in the world in order to have that. You can't just shut off the negative feelings. Human beings, if they shut off one channel, they just shut off the emotions. And then they feel like they're going through the motions.
[00:09:31] Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah, that was a revelation to me when I studied DBT. You know, yeah.
Say these positive affirmations and you won't have any other emotions except for these positive ones, right? Grieving really is this form of
[00:09:42] Mary-Frances O'Connor: learning about how do I reconstruct a life for myself? How do I make something feel meaningful again? Grief is sort of the product of what is happening when it isn't working right, when your current life is not working properly.
Grief is just the output of that. It's the fixing. The way that your life works so that you have living loved ones, so you have meaningful work, so you have creativity and so forth. I think of it this way, yearning to some degree means there's something wrong in the present. It isn't just about wanting the past.
Because if things were okay in the present, then you would just have these wonderful, maybe bittersweet, but you would just have these wonderful memories that you could call on. You wouldn't want to be back there if the present was very full and vibrant already.
[00:10:36] Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah. This goes back to the idea that you can have a full range of emotions, joy, excitement, sadness, all at the same time in the present.
You don't need to grieve you. heavy all the time, but you will be sad and you don't have a lot of control over when that comes up for you.
[00:10:56] Mary-Frances O'Connor: What most people don't recognize is that bereavement is a huge hormonal event for us. So we know, say for example, that having a child is a huge hormonal event. And not just for the woman, we know from research that men's oxytocin goes up and their cortisol changes when they have an infant that they're caring for.
At the same time, we know that there are big shifts in hormones because this is a bonded relationship that is now not normal. present for us, but people don't think of grief as a physiological event, even though it very much is and is probably related to a lot of the behavior we see. Crying is in part motivated because of hormones.
Many people find it validating to know that this isn't, you know, I'm choosing to cry, I'm choosing not to cry. It is partly simply a physiological response, just like I should retain more water, or I should not retain more water. It's just a part of the normal physiological response to this change in your bonded relationships.
[00:12:03] Sarah Cavanaugh: I don't know if you found this when your mom died, but the quality of my tears changed. Did that happen to you as
[00:12:10] Mary-Frances O'Connor: well? So crying is fascinating. We have zero research studies of crying in bereaved people. Zero. What we do know from research on crying is that irritant crying, like you're cutting an onion, does have very different content than what they call psycho emotional crying.
So you're watching a really sad movie. And one of the differences is there's a much higher hormone content in those psycho emotional tears. And so I think the idea that crying is a part of Our physiological response for many people, not for everyone, is probably something that would be helpful to know a
[00:12:52] Sarah Cavanaugh: little bit more about.
So I would say that mine just, they felt like they were leaping up, you know? Yeah. And they were endless. Endless. Am I not dehydrated
[00:13:04] Mary-Frances O'Connor: by now? I know. It's so interesting, isn't it? So a dear friend whose husband recently died completely unexpectedly. in their mid 40s. She said, I have never been a person who cried and I'm constantly crying.
What I think is important and that I tried to reassure her is this is a normal response. Our body kind of knows how to do this and the more that we can kind of stay out of the way, I think that it, it, Does it the way it's supposed to? So another dear friend who decades ago, her husband died, she described that she cried every day and just thought, I'm never going to stop crying.
And then one day she realized she hadn't cried in a number of days. And you know, it's not like it turns off like a tab, but for the vast majority of us, as painful as grief is, We really do see this decrease over time in the intensity and the frequency. As it becomes familiar, we learn this world we're in, we start to feel a little bit comforted again.
As that happens,
[00:14:15] Sarah Cavanaugh: the physiology changes. And as you were saying, leaning into those emotions and feelings and not trying to cut them off. Yeah, the two most frequent
[00:14:24] Mary-Frances O'Connor: questions perhaps are Am I grieving too much? And why am I not grieving more? These are the questions people ask me because I think everyone feels abnormal.
So for the vast majority of us, your grief response is your normal grief response. To the degree we can give ourselves a little grace and say, Well, This is apparently what it looks like. What does it feel like? How has it changed since a month ago and just letting it kind of be?
[00:14:54] Sarah Cavanaugh: Beautiful. So since you're a brain scientist, do you feel like your experience of grief was different?
[00:15:02] Mary-Frances O'Connor: When you have more grief literacy, as I like to call it, when you understand a little bit more maybe about how it often works and how much variability there is and how it often works, it makes it easier. Primarily what I can compare is when my mother died, I was still in graduate school. I didn't have a lot of grief literacy, although probably more than many people, in part because of having done some hospice work.
But when my dad died, of course it's conflated with I was an older person, I'd already had one big loss, and I was a clinical psychologist by then. But even so, This internal way of describing it is that grief felt cleaner. Like it was just passing through me and it was painful and there was a lot of crying and a lot of trying to figure out who I was now.
You know, do you call yourself an orphan when you're 40 some years old? I don't know, right? So there was still all of that, but because it felt normal, because it felt kind of expected. It just didn't stick in the same way that grief had stuck with me when my mom died when I was younger.
[00:16:19] Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah, well, having that grief literacy, one of the reasons we have this podcast is so people can increase their grief literacy, and having that, it sounds like, allowed you more self compassion through the process.
[00:16:34] Mary-Frances O'Connor: Absolutely. and I still needed all of my friends and my sister just as much as I would have without grief literacy. Um, it wasn't that I didn't feel grief in any dimension, but rather that I was okay with the fact that I was feeling grief and that I could lean on them, that I knew that I needed to lean on them.
[00:16:58] Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah.
[00:16:59] Mary-Frances O'Connor: Was very helpful.
[00:17:00] Sarah Cavanaugh: That's awesome. You had a more complicated relationship with your mom. Yeah. and a more complicated grief experience, I would imagine. I'd love to dig into prolonged grief. What is prolonged grief disorder?
[00:17:16] Mary-Frances O'Connor: For decades, clinicians, family members have recognized that there are some people who seem to be struggling for longer and in a different way than others who are grieving.
I mean, here's the thing with prolonged grief. It's not about your grief at any given moment. It's not about your grief the day you're in your psychologist's office. It's about the trajectory of grieving. And so if you walk into my office and you're having really severe grief, it doesn't tell me anything about whether you have prolonged grief.
What tells me that is, has there been any change? in the last month, in the last six months, in the last year. And if there has been some change, then you're probably on the normal trajectory. But if there has not been any change, if you are still on that conveyor belt, back and forth to work, not able to feel anything, or feeling so much that you've lost your job, or you can't take your children to church, or you can't listen to music, then that trajectory means there's something getting in the way of your typical normal process.
And evidence based psychotherapy was developed that can help to identify what those barriers are and can help teach people and encourage them into experiences that allows them to learn how to navigate grief. So on the intervention side, that was really critical that we identify something called prolonged grief.
On the physiological side, it was so useful for me, coming from a hospice background, I definitely had this view of like, everyone's grief is normal and everyone's grief is valid, but there is variation. We can see patterns when we look across hundreds of people. And what I came to find was that I kept coming up with these differences physiologically.
That my neuroimaging studies showed differences. My automatic brain attention tasks. had differences and other researchers were finding differences as well. And it really encouraged me to think, gosh, we're all walking around in different bodies. Maybe there's some people who are perceiving their experience differently that we might be able to identify.
So the hallmark of prolonged grief is yearning. It is that just heart wrenching desire to have that person back. And that was not actually my experience when my mother died, as you said, because we had had a very complicated relationship. And So I did actually develop depression. And what we know from really careful research now is that depression and prolonged grief are not the same thing.
We can actually have both, right? Just like you could have depression and anxiety, you could have prolonged grief and depression. But in my case, I only had depression and it was related to her loss. And fortunately, I was able to get Terrific treatment for that. One of the helpful ways to think about this is in careful intervention, randomized clinical trials, we know antidepressants, for example, do not change the experience of yearning.
Antidepressants don't work. for grief, the way that evidence based psychotherapy does. If you have both, or if you just have depression, then we see the impact of antidepressants, right? So, not that antidepressants are even for every depressed person, but I just mean even identifying that the brain process might be somewhat different, that we might be dealing with different systems, I think is quite helpful.
So, hopefully, separating those out a little
[00:20:59] Sarah Cavanaugh: bit is useful. It's super helpful to know the difference between depression and grief.
[00:21:05] Mary-Frances O'Connor: Depression is that more sort of metastatic experience where I feel guilty about everything. I feel worried about everything. I can't stop. ruminating, but it's not just about the person who's died.
It's about everything in my life, and that's a different beast we have to deal with. So that's depression. That's depression. Yeah. And prolonged grief is really about Just focused on the person. focused on the person. I yearn for them so much that I cannot have a normal life. I cannot do the things that I want to do because of the pain or because of not feeling like I could give up the pain because I would lose my connection or I'm just so avoidant of everything because it's all too much.
That's more what prolonged grief is.
[00:21:55] Sarah Cavanaugh: You have a wonderful example of someone who cooks twice as much food as she needs. Yeah. And throws it out every night as if this person will show up to eat.
[00:22:05] Mary-Frances O'Connor: Yeah. I think sometimes it's identifying those behaviors that aren't working. You know, if emotions aren't necessarily the thing distinguishing.
people who are grieving. To some degree, our behavior helps us to see things. So the person who drives an hour out of their way to work because they won't drive by the hospital, and it's been over a year since the person died. Or the woman who told me that she couldn't have a family photo taken because there was someone missing, because her husband wouldn't be in it, and so she wasn't going to have photos.
and her kids. They won't have photos of those years. And so it really is, in what way is this
[00:22:50] Sarah Cavanaugh: interfering with your life? I think it's so important that the distinctions that you're making between depression and grief are really important today, too, because there's so much existential Grief. Yes. And it's characterized as depression oftentimes.
[00:23:06] Mary-Frances O'Connor: Right. Absolutely. And this is one place where grief in some ways is very instructive. So the ironic thing maybe about having our Diagnostic Statistical Manual, the Bible for Psychiatrists and Psychologists, has now listed prolonged grief with these set of experiences. And what's interesting is now a lot of people with grief won't be accidentally diagnosed with depression.
But also interesting, people with depression will now be recognized that actually they have grief.
[00:23:38] Sarah Cavanaugh: In Peaceful Exit we talk a lot about the importance of feeling your feelings. How it really, expands your emotional capacity. And as we started talking today, instead of shutting down one part which shuts down everything, you feel this grief and it just expands your ability to feel empathy and compassion and fully live in our lives.
Are there any downsides to feeling those feelings and brain development perspective?
[00:24:08] Mary-Frances O'Connor: People don't think of it this way, but bereavement is a health disparity. In the sense that if we know mortality rates are really different in our different communities, that the Black community and the Native American community, death rates are just much higher, then it means that people are losing too many and too soon, right?
In those communities. And we know it affects their health, both mental health and physical health. So what I think about is when you ask, is there a downside? The downside is if you're having these big feelings and you have no support. If you're having these big feelings and you don't have someone who could comfort you or could help you to even talk through what your experience is so that you can understand it.
[00:24:53] Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah. So if you feel alone, reaching out to some community or some person is so important. It's so important.
[00:25:02] Mary-Frances O'Connor: It's best to reach out to someone who's had some grief in their life and seems to be doing okay now. That could be a grandmother. That could be a pastor. That could be a neighbor. The strange thing is, once you sort of walk through this door of bereavement, it turns out there's a whole lot of people on the other side.
You joined the club. You joined the club. It's not a club you want to be in, but you would never have known. You would never have had a reason to connect. with these people, but you have to find them and you have to be brave to talk with them. You have to tell them what you need. There's a wonderful book. I just met the author, Colin Campbell, and he talks about having your grief spiel, which is this is kind of what I need from you.
So I want to talk to you. only if you're willing to. And so for his example, he really wanted people to use his son and daughter's name. They had been killed as teenagers. He wanted to hear stories about them. He wanted people to say their name. He wanted his friends to bring it up. And if you don't know that, you can't necessarily be the right kind of support.
So having your grief spiel, this is kind of what works for me. My close friend from childhood, a dear friend of hers, lost her husband, and they have a system where she sends a heart by text. That's it. No follow up. The heart means, I'm available to talk if you would like to, but there is no pressure. And sometimes her friend responds, and sometimes she doesn't.
And so that's a system that works for them, right? So trying to figure out what's the support I need and how could I ask for that is important.
[00:26:48] Sarah Cavanaugh: I was really good at that. grieving this year after 22 years. And so I texted someone who knew my mother and I said, do you have any pictures of you with her? And it turns out that he has a picture of her on his desk all these years later with the two of them.
And I got a, I got a copy of the picture. And it was like, that's so lovely. I know it was, it was awesome.
[00:27:13] Mary-Frances O'Connor: Yeah. We want to know that we are not the only one carrying their absence, that these people matter even though they're not walking around on the earth, and that they belong. They still belong. They are in my mind, they are in your mind, and they live there together and that brings us closer.
[00:27:33] Sarah Cavanaugh: I love what you say in the book about resilience being like the most typical pattern of grieving. Yeah. Where I think we might have a different idea about that.
[00:27:44] Mary-Frances O'Connor: Yeah. And it's interesting. So George Bonanno, who did these really groundbreaking studies that did what we call random sampling in science. So he was a part of this very large study, 1500 people, who had been invited to participate when both members of the couple were still alive.
So one of them had to be over 65. That was the entry criteria. Then they followed these couples for 10 years, and when one of the spouses died, they went back and re interviewed the surviving spouse. And we had all this information about who these people were before grief happened, so you don't have to rely on leaky memory.
And what he discovered was the vast majority of them in the 6 months, 18 months following the death of their spouse, they were actually okay. It was painful, but they did not have depression. They did not have prolonged grief. And when this research came out, of course, psychologists were like, that can't possibly be true.
And then we realized it's because we only see the help seeking bereaved people, which makes sense. That's our job. But it means that you develop a bias about the world. where you think everyone is incapacitated by their grief. But that's not true. Most people are not incapacitated by it, even though they have to express it and deal with it and cope with it and feel it.
It's not incapacitating. So why
[00:29:12] Sarah Cavanaugh: is taking a break from grief important in the brain, like from a brain perspective? Well,
[00:29:19] Mary-Frances O'Connor: even if you just think about it from a learning perspective, when you were learning calculus or even your multiplication tables, if you just sat there and studied and studied and studied, That's not actually a great way to learn.
You need to take a break and come back to it the next day. We know that repeated doses is the best way to learn. And you need things like sleep, which helps your brain to learn. You need positive activities in your life that helps to broaden your attention so you're not so focused. Having that broader attention allows us to see new perspectives.
And so going to a party or going to a funny movie, there's nothing disloyal about that. you're gonna have the grief come up again. But in the meantime, your brain has gotten to rest, it's gotten to restore, it's gotten to learn in the background, make new connections, so that the next time you confront it, it understands it a little bit better.
[00:30:17] Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah, I interviewed Leslie Grace Streeter and grief to her was really funny at times, like completely hilarious and absurd. Many people
[00:30:28] Mary-Frances O'Connor: who work in hospice develop what we call gallows humor. And it is important to
[00:30:32] Sarah Cavanaugh: laugh. Yeah. Yeah. And it gives you the ability to take a rest from it too. That's right.
Yeah. The heaviness of it. That's right. Yeah. There's so many insights in your book, which I so appreciate, but I am fascinated with your analysis of rumination. That I think I assumed ruminating is just a form of anxiety. But you present it as a form of avoidance.
[00:31:00] Mary-Frances O'Connor: So, we do think of worry as being a form of what psychologists would call perseverative thought.
So, rumination and worry both fit under the category. But more to your point, we've recognized that there is this flavor of rumination that's very common in grieving. So common that it's totally normal initially where it's the would've, could've, should've, right? A man I know whose son died by suicide first described the thoughts that way and boy it just really clicked.
So this is, you know, the doctor should've known to run another blood test. If only she could have known not to have that last drink, or if only I could have gotten her to the hospital sooner. All of those scenarios that go round and round and round in our head. And the brain is an amazing place. It has an infinite ability to imagine.
But in this case, it gets in the way. So if you think about each of those stories, the end of each of those stories is, and then my loved one would have lived. Your loved one didn't live. And this is the reality we have to live in. And no amount of scenarios is going to change it. And so I think the way in which it can become avoidance Because I do think it's pretty typical in the beginning.
Very common. Most people don't get stuck there forever. If you think about it, there's a sense in which you're trying to control the situation, even after the fact. And there's a way in which sort of being in your head like that, in your imagining, it keeps you out of your body, right? Where your emotions mostly can be found.
And it keeps you out of the present moment of the life that you're in, of the people in your space. So If I'm going round and round and round in my head, worrying, working up, doing some thing with thoughts, I may not notice the person who's just smiled at me. And so I miss the opportunity for that lovely feeling, just that blip of connection with someone, because I'm stuck in my head.
I did not rumination as avoidance hypothesis. Maggie Stroba. And her former post doc, now psychologist, Martin Isma, came up with this term, and they did some very clever studies where they found if they showed grieving people a photograph of the deceased and a photograph of a stranger next to each other, and they used this eye tracker so they could see where their eyes were focused, what they were looking at.
They found that people who told them, I try to avoid my grief, they often, they were looking more at the photo of the stranger, avoiding looking at the deceased. And so this idea that avoidance and rumination are sort of connected, that often the way to get out of ruminating. If you come to recognize your own thought patterns and you think, oh, I'm doing that thing again that the podcast was talking about.
Often changing your environment can help, but also sometimes trying to get into how your body is feeling, what your emotions are, can help to cut off that tirade of verbal thinking.
[00:34:37] Sarah Cavanaugh: You talked about the imagination. It's one of the joys of being human. Yes, it is. Imagining a path to a more, a meaningful life when you've lost someone, how do you get your brain to do that?
I think
[00:34:49] Mary-Frances O'Connor: about it in a couple of ways. You gotta try stuff. It turns out the only way you're gonna know where something feels meaningful in this new reality you're living in is if you try it. So you gotta get off the couch. You gotta go out and do things. You gotta have conversations with people. and actually discover, not whether you think it's going to be meaningful, but actually discover whether it is or not.
And then follow the path of the things that feel most meaningful. They may be different things than used to feel meaningful. So that's sort of the bottom up way. Try a bunch of things, see what is working. The top down sort of way is thinking about who am I? What is important to me? What are my values? I remember clearly realizing that, you know, one of my values was curiosity.
Another of my values was learning. And I realized I need to be doing new things. I need to be learning new things. So sometimes your values can lead you. You can say, Oh, I need to figure out how to do things that will feed this
[00:35:57] Sarah Cavanaugh: that is important to me. You're reminding me of my grandmother. She was very curious about the world.
So when my grandfather died, she started traveling the world. Yes. Brilliant. Brilliant. Yeah. Taught her brain to live fully. That's right. Yeah. It can be taught. For sure. I'd love to read a passage in your book. Sure. I love this passage. There is grief in this world. Not just yours in particular, and feeling grief at some point is one of the rules of being human.
What that allows, on the other hand, is that when we feel grief, we are suddenly joined by hundreds of people who have known grief, from your ancestors, to your neighbors, to perfect strangers. This river of people may or may not understand you and your particular grief, but they have struggled with grief themselves.
You are not alone. And I love that passage because it speaks to what we were talking about when you join the club. Yeah, that's right. You join a whole river of people. So what are you working on
[00:37:00] Mary-Frances O'Connor: now? Well, I have a new book that's going to come out in 2025. called the grieving body. Half of my work, my research has been in neuroscience, but the other half of my work has really been in cardiovascular physiology and the immune system and how those are interrelated with our psychological state.
[00:37:22] Sarah Cavanaugh: Fabulous. Yeah. I can't wait to read it. Thank you. So the question I ask all my guests is what does a peaceful exit mean to you? I
[00:37:32] Mary-Frances O'Connor: think for me a peaceful exit is that the people who I love, the people who I know, will know how much I loved them and how much they mattered to me. And I think that I will in that moment remember and know that my own life mattered and that this was a wonderful instance of a human being.
That I passed on some things I learned along the way and I hope I'm able to have that knowledge as I go into the twilight or Directly into the exit.
[00:38:18] Sarah Cavanaugh: Wonderful. Well, it's such a pleasure to learn from you today. And thank you for joining me. Thank you so much. Thank you for bringing this to people.
Sarah Cavanaugh: Thank you for listening to Peaceful Exit. I'm your host, Sarah Cavanaugh. You can learn more about this podcast at peacefulexit.net, and you can find me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram @APeacefulExit. If you enjoyed this episode, please let us know. You can rate and review this show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
This episode was produced by the amazing team at Larj Media. You can find them at www.larjmedia.com. The Peaceful Exit Team includes my producer Katy Klein, and editor Corine Kuehlthau. Our sound engineer is Shawn Simmons. Tina Nole is our senior producer, and Syd Gladu provides additional production and social media support.
Special thanks to Ricardo Russell for the original music throughout this podcast. As always, thanks for listening. I'm Sarah Cavanaugh, and this is Peaceful Exit.