The grief body
Grief is finally getting more airtime, with memoirs, podcasts and communities providing a platform for a subject that once flew under the radar. And yet, the physiology of grief remains under-studied. Here, one writer reports on what happens in your body and brain when you lose someone you love
A ll I could see was white. White tiles, white toilet bowl, white dots floating just ahead of me that remained even when I shut my eyes. I’d just thrown up and was wedged – knees to my chin – in the cubicle-sized bathroom of my uni halls. I was due in a lecture, but the nausea had been building all afternoon, climaxing just as I’d planned to leave. This wasn’t a hangover, or a bug. This exact sequence of events had happened at the exact same time the week before. In fact, the one time I’d made it into this lecture I spent the entire time swallowing down bile, holding the sides of the chair so as not to run out. As absurd as it sounds, there was something about that specific lecture that was literally making me sick.
It’s only recently, 16 years older than that quivering 21-year-old fresher version of myself, that I can see what I was experiencing: a physical reaction to the intense grief I was living through. You see, the module was an introduction to feminist theory. I’d signed up as I wanted to feel closer to my mum, a feminist writer, who’d died two years earlier and who I’d been struggling to remember. I can see now that my body flipped into a form of avoidance – the pain of that loss making itself known in physical and confusing ways.
TIME TO TALK
I’ve been unpicking that time a lot lately. After feeling a great deal of shame around my ongoing grief, I launched a newsletter – Crocuses In The Snow – as a means to better understand grief and how it manifests. And I’m not the only one talking about the topic. Grief is now a mainstay in popular culture. Last month saw the publication of You Are Not Alone by Cariad Lloyd, a book inspired by her hugely successful podcast, Griefcast, for which she interviews (mostly) comedians about their losses. A Heart That Works, actor Rob Delaney ’s memoir on the death of his young son, is now a Sunday Times bestseller, while actor Dan Levy recently announced that his latest Netflix project, Good Grief, helped him work through his own loss.
That grief is finally getting some airtime makes sense – and not just because we’re coming off the back of a period in which millions lost loved ones, along with the opportunity to say goodbye. Bereavement is a common experience, and one most of us will encounter multiple times over the course of our lives. It’s also a lonely one, in which
