Mary-Frances O’Connor: ‘People struggle to understand grief, but it is a byproduct of love’
Mary-Frances O’Connor is an associate professor at the University of Arizona, where she leads the grief, loss and social stress (Glass) lab, investigating the effects of grief on the brain and the body.
Why do humans grieve? One of the earliest things that we learn is that we’re all going to die, so when it happens, why is it such a shock?
I think a lot of people historically have struggled to understand why there is grief, and in a funny sort of way, it is a byproduct of love. What I mean by that is, when we bond with another person, our spouse or our child, the way that gets encoded includes this belief that they will always be there for us and we will always be there for them. This is why we can kiss our partner goodbye in the morning and go on our separate ways to work, with the deep knowledge that we will come back together again at the end of the day.
But in the very unusual, thank goodness, cases
