To Be Without You

The science around grief and loss

I have never lost someone close to me. It actually worries me, because that is a special kind of cosmic privilege, and even mentioning it makes me feel as though I’ve jinxed it. The time will come. It just hasn’t for me yet. We all know people close to us who struggled through the untimely death of a spouse, child, parent, friend, or a particularly charming uncle. I’m 33, so I have been to a few funerals and said my goodbyes to several of my grandparents. But I can’t say we were close. They weren’t losses that rocked me to my core and left me bedraggled for days, weeks, or months.

I’ve wondered at times if I even understand what grief is. There’s some fascinating research being done on grief to try and spell out what it really is, and why it affects us not just mentally, but physically. The bonds we form are biological and happen in the brain — our hormones change, and our genes adapt and express themselves in new ways when we become linked to another person.

Our brains literally change based on the people we’ve become attached to.

When we’re connected, we experience not just a hit of dopamine (pleasure chemical) when we see the people we love, but we also yearn for them in their absence. It’s chemically very similar to what drives substance addiction.

Zoe Donaldson, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Colorado Boulder, studies grief. She calls prolonged periods of grief "unrequited yearning" — a state in which we seek someone but the brain isn't rewarded with their presence. It can register as physical pain and torment.

I’ve never “lost” someone. But I have grieved, without knowing it.

In 2019 I had a falling out with my closest friend of the last several years. He came into my life as a listener of my podcast, Beltway Banthas, and then became a co-host on my show. We did Thanksgivings together, pool days, restaurants, and long drives up and down the east coast for events. We were very close, and I loved him a great deal.

To this day, I don’t quite know what happened. My friend was making new friends online, friends way way way to the left of me politically. Our friendship was based on being political opposites, but still sharing a heart for people, Star Wars, and building goodwill across political fault lines. I could tell his new online tribe was becoming a bigger part of his life, but thought nothing of it at the time.

Eventually, he wanted to leave our podcast and go start a new project. I was happy to see him go do a new thing. The falling out came when we scheduled a final episode to send him off and say goodbye to our listeners, and he refused to do it without a reason given.

I got angry via text and told him I didn’t want to speak to him again.

Much to my current dismay, he complied. I never heard from my friend again. It took me about a year till I cracked and tried to make contact. Thos texts went unanswered, and handwritten letters crafted in the Thomas Jefferson to John Adams vein were not responded to. He might as well have been hit by a bus. I lost him. And I was so sad, for so long.

It’s hard to describe the grief, but perhaps people who have grieved an actual death can relate to the phantom wound that continues to ache. There’s that persistent feeling that you’re forgetting something, that you have plans with that person that slipped your mind. You look at your phone in your missed texts and expect to see their name, and you don’t. They’re gone.

That loss shut me down spiritually, creatively, and emotionally. It was a relationship that gave me faith in people, and in the virtues of empathy-courage-humility-redemption that I so often talk & write about. Yet in my own life, my one close friendship based on those things couldn’t be saved. There was shame in that. It made me not want to do podcasting, TV or writing. I almost quit writing my book, because it felt fraudulent to talk up bridging divides when I had apparently failed.

The brain has to learn that people in your life are no longer with you.

"Grieving takes a long time to resolve these two streams of information and for the brain to be able to predict their absence instead of predicting their presence," says Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor, who conducted early studies on the neuroimaging of grieving 20 years ago. She describes it as a process akin to learning.”

That’s the sensation of a husband expecting their wife to be in bed next to them when they wake, but she’s not. That’s the parent who hears the sweet laughter of their child in the house, just for a moment, but then they remember their child was taken away from them long ago.

I still feel you, and I wish I didn’t

You have to relearn everything about your expectations for what a day will hold. Who you’ll see….What texts you’ll receive….What friend or family member will be forwarding you emails or goofy news stories to read.

I’ve been thinking again lately about my lost friendship.

Because only four years later am I starting to feel better again. There are some new people in my life who make me happy and are fun to spend time with. It’s strange to me that it took this long.

This is why closure counts for so much in a loss. It’s why we value the opportunity to say goodbye to someone we love. Because we get the chance to set the terms of that person’s departure from this life or our world. It makes the learning curve of their absence easier to overcome.

If you’d like to watch a new movie about this journey of grief and acceptance, I recommend A Good Person, by Zach Braff (Scrubs, Garden State). Check it out.

This is the way.

I am going on a vacation next week in Iceland

So things might be quiet here for a little while. I’m planning to unwind and not do much of anything, but who knows, that might just mean I want to write. I’ll leave you with this song that ties up all of this nicely. It’s by Ryan Adams, titled To Be Without You.