Memory Instability After Loss: How We Remember Our Dead
When we’re grieving someone, recalling even the happiest days spent together can be intensely painful. While this pain can be easily understood on an instinctive level — we obviously expect some memories to hurt when a loss is fresh — memory can become so distressing that the grieving will build pathways of avoidance around them, actually avoiding thoughts about the deceased at any cost.
It’s normal and common.
Emotional memory
Memories of the people most important to us encode in our brains with close emotional associations that come along every time a memory’s called up. The mere thought of a beloved person’s death, as well as their life, and in particular our specific shared moments and experiences with them, wears a certain feeling’s “vibe.” That vibe, that emotional context of the memory, can be quite intense.
These are the memories about our lives that shape the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, linking closely to our own narrative conception of who we are. Known as “autobiographical episodic memories,” this type of memory can serve as identity landmarks for us. Neutral, factual memories, on the other hand (like the sum of 2+2, for example, or where the nation’s capital is located,) are typically stored without the same degree of charged emotion, though all memories may have a shade of emotional charge.
It’s a difference of degree, not of kind, but our strongest links to “our people” shape us at the deepest levels.
Shifting memories change the brain’s networks
The process of creating memories that shape our lives in a long-term way is complex and neurochemical. A long-term memory takes time to solidify over hours, days, even months, and involves multiple phases (sleep, for example, is a critical factor in memory consolidation). Something like how digestion works in stages to extracting nutrition from the food we eat, a cascading of processes creates the memories we can call up at will.
When we do, different regions of the brain activate, and activate differently during mourning. Research has demonstrated that we are physically changed by, grief, especially prolonged grief. Loss of a deeply loved person has the potential to negatively affect normal brain function by degrading memory retrieval. Parts of the brain specifically dedicated to the consolidation of memories may be physically changed:the hippocampus, for example, can actually shrink in volume under prolonged conditions of high stress hormone levels. And memory’s networks do more than help us remember things that affect us emotionally, and the loss of volume and revision of connections means there will be areas of the brain itself that can’t do the rest of their work as well as before the loss, affecting attention, judgment, and the ability to make decisions.
The neurochemistry of severe grief disrupts the performance of neurotransmitters associated with stress, emotional regulation, and the reward center of the brain. Intense grief becomes itself a building block of the emotional content of memory of the lost, altering and destabilizing memories of them, sometimes permanently.
Remembering our most precious lost under such conditions of emotional duress changes foundational memories at the cellular level for us. The absence of our beloved dead from our expectations of our own lives literally affects what we know about who we are. The way our grief alters their memory creates a sense of despair associated with remembering them that is, indeed, temporarily inescapable, and which may even leave deep, permanent scars.
Saying “I’ll never be the same” is not an exaggeration.
