A year ago today, a great love of my life died. Today, I planned to tell you all about him. But I can’t. The gulf of grief that sits just offshore is far too choppy and raw to go near today. Plus, I have people in the house where I’m writing, and I’m not about to be a crying mess. It’s a shame, because I was really looking forward to telling you all about Paul. One day.

Until Paul died, I had surprisingly limited experience with grief. I’ve lost family members, but never a close friend, much less someone you’d describe as a “love of your life.” So I had little to draw on to manage the grief that settled like a thick fog. The best I could do was turn to old memories of painful breakups and tell myself that this loss, like those, would get better over time. I just had to endure. A year later, that perspective was mostly true. 

Grief is one of those human experiences we all encounter, but it’s also one we’re not particularly great at supporting each other through. It’s as if the pain of the griever is so intimidatingly insurmountable it stunts our ability to help, so we don’t. Or we do, but we know we’re not actually helping much. The best I’ve been able to come up with is to tell the grieving friend I care, am available to listen, and offer to help with day-to-day responsibilities while grieving and family take priority. If asked for my advice, I’d just say: Time is the main thing you’re up against. It will get better over time. You just have to endure.

Paul was a dog, and Paul’s beautiful body was riddled with cancer. We learned quickly that cancer would win; it was just a matter of when. So the grieving process began long before Paul died. I looked for resources. I texted friends who had lost childhood pets, asking “How did you get through it?” I googled poetry about grief. And, somewhat predictably for my personality, I looked for information about the neuroscience of grief to try to better understand what the hell was going on in my body. 

From time to time grief has struck like a sudden summer storm and just as surprisingly abated seconds later. Because of its intimate relationship with love, this kind of grief can feel beautiful and terrible all at once. 

The best I can tell, Mary-Frances O’Connor is the leading scholar of the neuroscience of grief. She’s a psychology professor at the University of Arizona and the author of “The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss.” In it, O’Connor explains that the brain is a prediction machine that is constantly referencing patterns it’s learned and maps it’s made of the world and relationships around us. When a pattern breaks unexpectedly or the map proves suddenly unreliable, the brain doesn’t know what to do. (The brain does not like it when it doesn’t know what to do.) She likens it to how easy it is to find your way to the bathroom in the dark: Over the course of many repetitions, your brain knows exactly how to get there, even with the lights off and obstacles like furniture and walls in the way. Now, imagine one night you wake up and not only is the furniture rearranged in your room, but the bathroom is also now in the basement. Good luck finding your way. That’s grief. The first many attempts to the basement would be slow-going and toe-stubbing, but eventually your brain would remap the course and you’d find your way, as easily as you did when the bathroom was down the hall. That’s the healing process – your brain learning “a revised cartography” of your new life.

Over the past year, I’ve had a few occasions to share my learnings from “The Grieving Brain” with friends and anecdotally seen it help. My “you just have to endure” is O’Connor’s “you have to wait for the brain to update its map of the world.” Like other maps in our lives, the most updated version is usually the one best suited to help us find our way. 

Another observation that O’Connor makes is that the death of a loved one is illogical to the brain. This is because the repeated closeness of a beloved pet over many years, for instance, trains the brain to reasonably expect that this pet will always be close, regardless of whether we also know that all living things die. When I read that, I was comforted to know that my brain thought Paul’s passing was illogical.