Grief and the Human Animal

My wife Tracy passed
away in 2008.

According to Ruth Davis Konigsberg's Valentine's Day article in the New York Times, people recover from grief faster than one would generally expect. I’m not surprised. Our expectations about grief are romantic stories that we tell ourselves, but those stories are no match for biological reality. After a personal tragedy, it seems like we should never be able to laugh again or love again. How could we? But our animal selves have no time for drama or romantic narratives. Our capacity to recover from grief is a primordial instinct grounded far more deeply in who we are than any narrative we can spin with our newfangled forebrains.

A few years ago, my wife died under exceptionally miserable circumstances. Friends would say that they couldn’t imagine what it must be like for me to suffer through my wife’s decline and doom, and I agreed with them. In fact, I would say, even I couldn’t really imagine what I was going through. I was living through it day by day, but the loss was so profound and the details so tragic that it was fairly well beyond comprehension. There was no sensible story I could tell myself about how I was going to recover or about how things were going to be OK. But somehow, as they say, life went on. Without really trying, I did the inconceivable, and I got better.

The process of recovery defies rational explanation. That’s because it’s not rational in the first place. The rational parts of ourselves like to think that our lives should be rational, but rationality is an extremely recent invention, as far as evolution is concerned. The instinct to persevere and to heal oneself goes back to our proto-mammal ancestors or before. Our ancestors, all the way back to the beginning, were all special in at least one way: every single one of them survived long enough and succeeded well enough to generate at least one offspring. Our ancestors were all survivors. Whether we understand our own power or not, we’re each born with the predisposition to recover from the most serious tragedies, if tragedy should ever strike. Our ability to rebuild our lives is fundamentally biological. Recovery from loss is not rational any more than digestion or color vision is rational.

We never evolved the capacity to fully comprehend the enormity of personal tragedy. Why would we have evolved any such capacity? What good would it have done our ancestors to have a clear understanding of monstrous, personal loss? When things get bad enough, comprehension falters. But it’s not our understanding that heals us anyway. It’s not our conscious awareness of loss that gets us past grief. Instead, what takes over is the perseverance that we evolved from an unbroken line of ancestral survivors. Without permission from our conscious selves, and without even full awareness, the more ancient parts of who we are set about the practical business of rebuilding broken lives.


Life, Death and Religion: my wife passing away helped me appreciate being part of a church community.