This Is Your Brain on Grief
If you knew and loved one of the 500,000-plus people lost to the pandemic, here’s what might be going on in your brain right now.
This is a modified excerpt from Inside Your Head 🧠, a weekly newsletter exploring why your brain makes you think, feel, and act the way you do, written by me, Elemental’s senior writer and a former brain scientist. Subscribe here so you won’t miss the next one.
Yesterday, the official U.S. death toll from the pandemic reached 500,000 people. Half a million husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, friends, lovers. Covid-19 is now the leading cause of death in the U.S., and more lives have been lost to the pandemic than to World War II and the Vietnam War combined.
Each of those 500,000 people was loved by others, leaving millions of us to grieve those lost lives. Artists, philosophers, and better writers than I will help place this loss in context and perhaps bring meaning and a kind of sharp, beautiful truth to the pain that so many are feeling right now, a pain rooted in love. What I can offer is to explain a little bit about what’s happening in your brain when someone you love dies, and I hope that sliver of science may provide a small amount of clarity and understanding about why it’s so awful and…
