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Day 34

Passover begins tonight and I made 30 hard boiled eggs for the Seder I’m attending. I had briefly considered hosting my own Seder, but then everything happened and I also still don’t have a dining room table.

I started reading The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss by Mary-Frances O’Connor last night and a particular passage struck me:

After decades of research, I realized that the brain devotes lots of effort to mapping where our loved ones are while they are alive, so that we can find them when we need them…But it struggles to learn new information that cannot be ignored, like the absence of our loved one. Grieving requires the difficult task of throwing out the map we have used to navigate our lives together and transforming our relationship with this person who has died. Grieving, or learning to live a meaningful life without our loved one, is ultimately a type of learning.

Reading this made me feel a little better about how badly my brain is not working. Of course my brain isn’t functioning the way it used to, it’s still processing the trauma of losing my mom, the one person who was there from day one. How could I expect myself to go back to normal so soon?

One comment

  1. You got this! That passage reminded me of something I’ve seen and heard…- grief is love with nowhere to go… Time and patience, and deep breaths. Chag Sameach????

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