Ep #310: The Grieving Body: An Interview with Mary-Frances O’Connor

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, Episode 310: The Grieving Body, An Interview with Mary-Frances O’Connor.

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, the only podcast that offers a proven process to help you work through your grief, to grow, evolve, and create a future you can truly look forward to. Here’s your host, Master Certified life coach, grief expert, widow, and mom, Krista St-Germain.

Hey there, welcome back to another episode of the podcast. I have been waiting on this one, y’all, waiting on it. So, credit to one of my Mom Goes On members, Judith. Shout out to Judith, who told me, because I didn’t even know that Mary-Frances O’Connor had released another book called The Grieving Body, until Judith mentioned it to me, credit to her. So happy to have her back on the podcast. 

If you have not listened to the episode, let’s see, 170, that I did with Mary-Frances O’Connor on her first book, The Grieving Brain, definitely go and listen to that. You can listen to these in either order, it doesn’t matter. But if you haven’t listened, definitely go listen to that one. It was September of 2024. That book is – it is a must read, I think, for anyone who is in our shoes, for anyone who is experiencing spousal loss, partner loss, please go read this book. It is, it sounds like it’s going to be heavy. I promise you, it’s, it’s not. It’s easy to read, it is valuable, and it, it has just been so helpful to me and to so many of my clients.

So, on this episode, we are going to talk about Mary-Frances O’Connor’s new book called The Grieving Body. If you don’t know her, she is a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona. She directs the Grief, Loss, and Social Stress, or GLASS Lab there, which investigates the effects of grief on the brain and the body. And her book, The Grieving Brain, which I didn’t know until recently, was actually included on Oprah’s list of best books to comfort a grieving friend. So, definitely, I think we should be friends to ourselves and go read that book.

Mary-Frances holds a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Arizona and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in psychoneuroimmunology. That’s a mouthful. At the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. And, um, she shared this before, but she grew up in Montana and she now lives in Tucson, Arizona. And I cannot wait for you to learn from her about the grieving body. So, let’s get into it. Enjoy my interview with Mary-Frances O’Connor.

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Krista St-Germain: Mary-Frances, welcome back to The Widowed Mom Podcast. 

Mary-Frances O’Connor: It is so nice to be back, Krista. Thank you for having me again.

Krista: I am jazzed to have you back. I was saying before we hit record that episode is one I’m constantly referring people to. Also, so that you know, I did a certification, advanced coaching certification in grief and post-traumatic growth coaching that I facilitated. The only required reading was The Grieving Brain.

Mary-Frances: Wow. That’s amazing.

Krista: That was the required reading. Yeah, I actually bought copies for everyone and sent it. So, we’re going to have a good conversation because if you don’t know listeners, now the grieving brain is not the only book. The grieving body has entered the world.

Mary-Frances: Yes. 

Krista: Kind of quietly, by the way, in my world. 

Mary-Frances: Kind of quietly. You know, there’s a few things going on in the world, so I’m not totally shocked by that. Just a few. Just a couple things.

Krista: Well, I was grateful that one of my clients actually said, “Did you know The Grieving Body is out?” And I did not. So, yeah. So what made you want to write The Grieving Body after The Grieving Brain? Tell us all about that.

Mary-Frances: Well, what’s funny, Krista, is that when I was writing The Grieving Brain, I had been doing research on the immune system and the cardiovascular system and those responses during loss for, well, since the beginning of my graduate work. And so when I was writing Brain, I thought I would include everything in one book. But then I got about two thirds of the way into that book and I said, oh, there’s more here than I have room for. 

So it wasn’t that I turned my attention to the body afterward, rather I’ve been doing both kinds of work sort of simultaneously because as it turns out, our body and brain are utterly interconnected and it doesn’t know that we put psychiatry in one department and neurology in a different department and, you know, oncology in a different department. So they are all interconnected.

Krista: Yeah. What was your working title when you were writing The Grieving Brain then, if it wasn’t your intention to just make it brain focused?

Mary-Frances: You know, that’s funny. I was just looking back to help a new aspiring author, and it was Walking in the Night, which is very much about the metaphor from the dining room table and yeah. So it was just more about sort of the experience of loss and then having to learn a new world that I used as the working title.

Krista: That’s actually one of my favorite stories from the book and one that I tell a lot because it’s so relatable and that is what it feels like. It just doesn’t make sense to your brain when something that you think should be there or someone that you think should be there just isn’t.

Mary-Frances: Well, and you know, in the in the beginning of The Grieving Body, I use a metaphor, another little concrete story to try and help us sort of connect with the way that grief is such an embodied experience. So I’ll tell the story if that’s okay.

Krista: Yes, please do.

Mary-Frances: So imagine that you’re cycling down a city street. Lovely day, trees by the side of the road, and you’re cycling along and you realize that the intersection is coming up and so you need to stop. And so you clutch at the handlebars to push the brakes, and there’s no hand brakes there. And you sort of panic a little bit, and then you remember that this is like a beach cruiser bike where you pedal backwards to slow yourself down and stop. And so you do, and you stop before you get to the intersection. 

But what’s important here is you have to learn how to be in the world physically in a different way. Nothing works the way it’s supposed to work. And more importantly, you may just go on in your ride, but you’ve, your body has witnessed this experience. Your body has been through the moment of panic and stress and figured it out and managed it. But all of that takes effort and energy and attention. 

And so when we have brain fog or we have aches and pains or our blood pressure is a little higher when we’re bereaved, it’s because every day there’s moment after moment after moment like this where our body is absorbing the blow when a loved one has died.

Krista: I feel that.

Mary-Frances: Yeah.

Krista: I feel that. And it’s so surprising.

Mary-Frances: Yes.

Krista: To people who don’t expect it. I didn’t expect it.

Mary-Frances: No, I think none of us do. None of us imagine, oh, it will feel like my heart is being drawn out of my chest, or I won’t be able to keep any food down. I’m going to have diarrhea over and over and over again and lose 10, 15 pounds, right? Nobody thinks that is what grief is going to be like for them. Although each of us has a different experience because we walk into the moment of loss with a different body, right? 

We each have predisposing, you know, we have a personal history or family history of different parts of our body that have a difficult time under stress. So we each may have different symptoms, but the fact that it is so physical is very, very common.

Krista: Yeah. Also, I’m imagining each time we experience a different grief, we are in a way in a different body.

Mary-Frances: That is so right. You know, it was funny, a friend recently, Megan Riordan Jarvis, who’s written, Can Anyone Tell Me, which is a wonderful book, which is very short for those of us who are having brain fog with grieving, it’s like, you know, two-page chapters that answer our question. Can anyone tell me?

Krista: Loves those.

Mary-Frances: Yes. Megan was talking about the fact that she experienced the death of her mom when she was in early menopause. And that it had not dawned on her until years later that her experiences of loss were very colored by the fact that it was happening in a perimenopausal body, you know? And that’s just going to be a different experience than other losses she had at other points in her life when she had a different body.

Krista: A lot of the women that I work with are in that place, perimenopause, menopause. And as someone who is almost 49, it’s a running joke with my clients that I can never remember how old I am. So I think I’m about to be 49. But yeah, I’m just now starting to appreciate the chaos of that and only imagining then the chaos of the grief as well in terms of what happens in the body.

Mary-Frances: Yeah. So it’s very common for us to actually feel a lot of anger when we’re grieving. And that can be anger at the person who died while simultaneously knowing that doesn’t make any sense to us. It can be anger at ourselves, it can be anger at God, it can be anger at doctors, it could be for a host of different reasons. The volume dial gets turned up on our emotions and many of us experience anger. 

But think about the idea that many people who are going through menopause are experiencing waves of anger as their hormone shift. And so if you’re in a place where that anger is sort of being catalyzed, you know, is sort of being leapfrogged, then anything that we feel that’s a part of the grief might really be exacerbated in that circumstance. And now you’re left with a very different understanding of what grieving means than, for example, when I, when my mother died when I was 26, you know, that wasn’t a big part of the experience I was having day-to-day.

Krista: Yeah, and then maybe couple that with some of the socialization that we get around anger as women and what it means to feel angry and how we might judge ourselves or resist against that.

Mary-Frances: Yeah. And I think this is really, at some level, the bigger picture that I’m trying to convey to people is first, probably what you’re experiencing is pretty normal.

Krista: Say it louder, Mary-Frances.

Mary-Frances: Your experience is pretty normal. And more importantly, if you can talk with a range of people, you can find out if your experience is pretty normal. And at the same time, you get to feel grief with someone at the same time. So, you know, on the one hand, it’s the idea that these symptoms that we have, whether it’s anger or an upset stomach or a lump in your throat or, you know, whatever your particular reaction is, is probably pretty normal for some group of humans. 

And then the second thing though, that I don’t want to downplay, is that bereavement is also a time of medical risk. So because the body is having to absorb this blow, this amputation of our loved one, it means that it’s a time, well, for example, one research study showed that a person is 21 times more likely to have a heart attack on the day that their loved one dies than any other day of their life.

Krista: That is wild. 21 times.

Mary-Frances: 21 times. It’s an insane statistic. I literally keep going and reading the research article because I think I must be misquoting that. But that’s really it. And it drops off after the first day, pretty quickly. But even within the first three months, for example, big epidemiological studies, multiple studies have shown, a man whose wife dies is almost twice as likely to suffer a fatal heart attack in the first three months as compared to a man who remains married during the same time.

Almost twice as likely. So again, an insane statistic. And actually very high for women as well, 1.8 times more likely than a married woman during that time. And so here’s the conundrum in trying to explain this grief research and it’s its consequences for our body. On the one hand, I don’t want to make people develop health anxiety, right? 

Every time you feel something in your body thinking, oh, I’m dying of a heart attack. On the other hand, if you are having a physiological response, if in those waves of grief, your body gets outside the bounds of normal human physical functioning, we have to take that really seriously. We have to make sure that we get medical care for that. 

So it’s a tricky line to walk in trying to communicate. But I think it is most helpful to recognize I have to pay attention to what my body is telling me to figure out how to respond, to come up with the ways to calm and soothe ourselves and to seek treatment if that is necessary.

Krista: What do you feel like the level of understanding in the actual profession of medical doctors is relative to this?

Mary-Frances: Well, unfortunately, grief literacy is pretty poor in general in Western culture. But in addition, our helping professions, nursing, psychiatry, psychology, social work, regular family medicine, we don’t get training in grief research, in grief supportive care. And we’re just at the beginning of that starting to change. The research evidence base is getting big enough that we are starting to make inroads, but it is very new. 

And I think about it this way. This might be a helpful analogy. So, this may make you laugh, but I think there’s a way that bereavement and pregnancy could be thought of as similar. And what I mean by that, what I mean by that is, you know, grief is not a disease. Pregnancy is also not a disease, but no one would say that pregnancy wasn’t physiological.

Krista: Yes. Or doesn’t have risks.

Mary-Frances: And doesn’t have risk. Exactly. So pregnancy is a time, even though it is totally normal, it is also a time of increased medical risk. And so we’ve developed prenatal care where we provide education for women about these are the weird symptoms you can experience and they’re totally normal. Oh, and also, please come in for checkups to see if you have developed gestational diabetes or hypertension because you’re at higher risk right now for those things happening. And then we can intervene with those appropriately if that is the case. 

So now, imagine a world where bereavement care also meant education about the fact that you’re going to have insomnia for a while and here are the steps you can take to re-regulate your sleep cycle, or your appetite is going to be reduced for a period of time or increased. And if your weight changes more than 10 pounds, 15 pounds, we need to see you back because we want to be able to adjust the coping strategies you’re using to learn how to be in this new world where your loved one has been, yeah, I use that term amputated from your life, you know?

Krista: What an amazing idea that we would move to such a reactive way of caring for people to such a proactive way of caring for people who are grieving.

Mary-Frances: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Because not everyone needs hypertension medication. But risk of hypertension goes up during bereavement. And what I like to say is, so people will say to me, well, is it caused by the grief? And my response to that is sort of, you know, your heart rate can only go up or down. Your heart rate is not super complicated. And so your medical doctor, if you have hypertension, the hypertension should be treated. 

Now, does that mean that in six months you shouldn’t be assessed again to see if your new restored life has helped your heart rate to find a better place? Your blood pressure has dropped again to where it might have been before? Well, yes, of course. Just like we wouldn’t keep treating hypertension for pregnancy after there was no need for it anymore. But it doesn’t mean we don’t treat the hypertension.

Krista: Right. Yeah, that makes so much sense. Can you talk more about what is happening in the heart with grief?

Mary-Frances: Yeah. Well, I think this is one of those situations where it’s very helpful to remember we can’t talk about grief without talking about love and bonding. And the reason is, most of us don’t think of it this way, but when you fall in love with your spouse or you fall in love with your baby, you become a we. And that we means you are in a dynamic physical relationship as well. 

So think about it this way. If you went home to your partner right now and got a hug, your blood pressure would drop. Exactly. Your heart rate would drop a little bit. And we can anticipate, I know that I can get a hug from my partner and that my body will feel better, right? And so we are in this gravitational pull where they are an external pacemaker for our heart.

Krista: Right.

Mary-Frances: Like their presence is actually the medicine. Do you see what I mean?

Krista: Yes.

Mary-Frances: And what that means is, even though we’re not really aware of that when that’s a normal healthy functioning living relationship that’s been going on for years and years and years. No one thinks about the fact that their heart rate is accelerating and decelerating based in part on how close they are to their partner. 

But what becomes revealed when our partner is gone is that our heart has been using that way of regulating and now has to discover, how do I regulate without that being true? And so there’s going to be a natural adjustment period as our body and our brain tries to figure out, how do I do this given that part of the we has been taken away?

Krista: Yeah. And what I really look forward to because of people like you who are writing on subjects like this, right? Is that someday that can be done without the, what’s wrong with me? What’s my problem narrative that so many of us have because we don’t know that makes total sense.

Mary-Frances: That’s right. Yes. And this is the problem. People think, oh, I feel broken, right? Like, things aren’t working right in my body. But they are working right. They are working right given that this person is missing. Given that our body really is resilient. So what’s crazy is that we know in the first six months on average that heart rate goes up and blood pressure goes up. 

And we also know that by the end of six months for the vast majority of us, our body has figured out how to regulate. And so we go back to the blood pressure either that we had before or as a non-bereaved person would have, however you want to say it. And so a lot of the physical experiences that we’re having in grieving, it’s not that we’re broken. It’s that our body is changing to accommodate this new reality that we’re in.

Krista: Yeah. Does that make sense? It makes so much sense. And it feels so uncomfortable and we’re so ill-prepared that we assume it means we’re broken.

Mary-Frances: It assumes we think there’s something wrong with us.

Krista: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That makes so much sense. Earlier you used the phrase, I think you said amputation of my loved one?

Mary-Frances: Yeah.

Krista: Yeah, I really want you to talk more about that phrase.

Mary-Frances: We think of our body as ending at the edge of our skin. But it’s just really not how it works. I mean, we know that co-regulation is a part of how human beings survive. Think about what they call kangaroo care, right? If you put an infant skin to skin on a mother or a father, that infant is better able to regulate their temperature, their digestion, they have less pain, they find it easier to breathe, simply by being skin to skin with an attachment figure. And so we know that the body doesn’t end at the edge of our skin, that the body is actively taking in information from the world around us. And when a loved one is present, it finds it easier to manage our, what Lisa Feldman Barrett calls, our body budget, right?

Krista: Yes.

Mary-Frances: If someone is there with me, it’s easier for me to get motivated, or it’s easier for me to calm down, or it’s easier for me to savor whatever meal I’m having, right? And so I think that word amputated fits because it reflects the fact that in a relationship, we are two bodies, you know, like electron around nucleus. We are two bodies bound together in a system, and the amputation feels like sort of the right word somehow when part of that gravitational force is removed.

Krista: Yeah, and just to know that and to treat yourself with such compassion and kindness.

Mary-Frances: Well, this is the thing. Our body, our mind, our brain are remarkably resilient. As much as it does not feel like that on, you know, day one, day 120, day 3,642. The reality is that human bodies and minds and brains and relationships and communities are remarkably resilient. But the key is figuring out how to work with those systems instead of against them, right? 

So, I’ll give you a really simple example. When a loved one dies, most people develop insomnia for a period of time, acute insomnia, we call it. And it’s devastating, right? The idea that you would get some sleep as a way to not have to think and feel for a while. Sleep feels so important, and yet we can’t get to sleep, right? Now, that’s probably related to the fact that our heart rate and our cortisol and so forth are elevated. But acute insomnia is very typical. 

We have to figure out, how do I fall asleep without my loved one, without that text from them before I go to bed? Or how do I stay asleep without them next to me in bed where I can hear and smell and feel them? What’s key is, if you know a few things about how our human circadian rhythms work, you can’t force yourself to fall asleep, it turns out. We can create the circumstances that are most likely to enable us to fall asleep, but we can’t force ourselves to fall asleep. What most of us can force ourselves to do is get up at the same time every day. 

So the feeling of I didn’t sleep well, I didn’t get to sleep last night, I’m just going to sleep in for an extra hour, actually doesn’t help work with our circadian rhythm. Whereas if we get up at the same time every single day, that helps to reset our hormone systems, it helps us to get re-regulated, re-established with the light-dark cycle. And that is going to be better for our sleep system as we’re trying to regulate, as we’re trying to adjust going forward. So it’s just a one of many examples of kind of working with the body.

Krista: Yeah, that’s such an actionable thing that people can take away too. I also think, I’ve seen and I’ve done it myself, if we’re not prepared for insomnia to be part of it, then we get anxious about it.

Mary-Frances: Yes.

Krista: And then it makes it even harder because the amount of worry that we spend.

Mary-Frances: Yes. Yes. These are the beliefs we have about sleep can really get in the way. So, you know, watching the clock is just a terrible, terrible use of your mind when you can’t sleep. It turns out that we want to associate the bed with sleep. And so if it has been more than 15 minutes or so, estimated, not by looking at the clock necessarily, it’s better to get out of bed, but not to do something active, not to turn the lights on, not to get involved in some doom scrolling or something. 

But to get out of bed and wait till we feel sleepy again, to get back into bed, so that we associate getting into bed with feeling sleepy and falling asleep. And that might mean that for a number of nights, we’re not in bed as long as we usually would be. It builds up what we call sleep pressure and that works to our favor, in our favor because over time then, we start to feel more tired when we go to sleep. And so the likelihood of falling asleep becomes stronger and we associate that with getting into bed.

Krista: That makes so much sense. You said six months on average? Did I make that up?

Mary-Frances: Well, so there’s a naturalistic study that was done just following widows to see what was their sleep like. The vast majority of them did have insomnia, so that’s just the normalization piece. By one year, almost all of them had normal sleep again. But for most of them, it happened long before a year. So there was a lot of variability when it happened. And so I’m using six months as just the average then basically.

Krista: Got it. Okay. Got it, got it. We talked about impacts on the heart, and I realize all of these things are so connected and it’s probably hard to just really say one system by itself. But can you talk to me about the immune system and what the effect of grief is on the immune system?

Mary-Frances: Well, you know, as a researcher, one of the things that really struck me, the piece of data that really struck me was that bereaved people have what they call all cause mortality. That is to say, bereaved people are at risk for higher death and diagnosis for all sorts of different illnesses, from pneumonia to COPD, to heart attack and stroke, as I mentioned, to cancer recurrence, to – and, you know, I thought, well, I know how the physical body works. This doesn’t make any sense. Why would an event like this affect every single organ system? 

And then I started thinking, oh, wait a minute. What about the immune system and the endocrine system? Because those systems, of course, affect every single organ. And so research in my laboratory back when I was at UCLA found that bereaved people do in fact have higher levels of inflammation. That’s the messenger system that our immune system uses. Bereaved people have higher inflammation than their non-bereaved counterparts who are similar. 

And what that means is, you know, if you have asthma, more inflammation means it’s harder for you to breathe. But if you have rheumatoid arthritis, it means your joints hurt more. Right? So you take two people, one of them is having trouble breathing and the other one is having achy joints, and you think, well, that can’t both be from the same thing. But in fact, it can be. And so other larger studies now from other labs has replicated what we would say, has repeated this effect that bereavement is associated with an increase in inflammation.

Krista: So somebody’s listening to this and they’re thinking, okay, great. So everything’s harder and worse in my body. Now what? What do I do?

Mary-Frances: Yeah. That’s right. And I think about that in a couple of different ways. In fact, toward the end of The Grieving Body, the book, there’s a section called To Have and To Hold. And I talk about the idea of, or I ask readers really, what does it mean to have a grieving body? And I think of this in the kind of owner’s manual kind of way.

I say, many of us actually know how to take care of a body. I will say to myself, what does Mary-Frances need to eat today? What would be the healthiest things for Mary-Frances to eat? It’s a very problem solving kind of perspective, right? So if I have low appetite, for example, perhaps I should be eating more snacks rather than trying to eat a whole meal. But then I should make sure that the snacks have protein and are healthy and I remember to eat them through the day and so forth. So that’s kind of how to have a grieving body.

And the next one is, how to be a grieving body? What does it mean to be a grieving body? And I think this shift in perspective helps us to see that what you’re going through is normal. But how you want to be right now might take a little extra time, a little extra attention, a little extra thought of, oh, wow, I’m really reacting strongly to what that person said. Probably in part because my nervous system is jangly right now. 

So maybe I just need to take a few extra minutes before I send off that email reply. So allowing that you, who you are is a little different right now, allowing for that to help you interpret the world around you can be very helpful. But the third perspective is, what does it mean to hold a grieving body? 

And what I mean by this is, if you imagine yourself as a motherless child, can you offer that kindness to yourself? Can you offer yourself compassion for the fact that you are going through this very difficult time that has the emotion volume turned up and the physical aches and pains that come with it and the thoughts that won’t stop running through your head? 

Instead of worrying about them, can you just be kind and accept that this is the new normal for a minute. This is where you are right now. And just give yourself love and care. And hopefully along with that, something that soothes you or calms you because that also is going to help our body. The reason that we hold on to a child who is crying is not because we’ve changed the fact that they’ve scraped their knee or something, but we’re giving them the support to get through this moment. Those are the perspectives you can think about. The only thing that’s different there is kind of the way you’re thinking about what you’re going through.

Krista: And what have you found to be some of the things that are the most soothing?

Mary-Frances: Well, it’s interesting. A graduate student in my lab, now a psychologist at University of Washington, named Lindsey Knoles, did a randomized clinical trial for bereaved widows and widowers. And in that, she compared a mindfulness training with what we call progressive muscle relaxation. 

So, PMR, progressive muscle relaxation, is actually a very old technique, started in the 1970s, where people are taught to clench and then relax the different muscle groups through their body, sort of a body scan, and doing that very intentionally in order to really understand what does it feel when my muscles are relaxed, when they are actually, when I let go of the tension in them. And in this study, we had originally used that as a control condition. We were really interested initially in the mindfulness training. But the results of the study showed that the progressive muscle relaxation was incredibly helpful. 

And people’s grief decreased over time as compared to people we just followed without any intervention. So it wasn’t just the improvement that happens with time naturally. But the people in the progressive muscle relaxation actually improved in their grief scores more rapidly. And they told us that the capacity to do something, to soothe themselves, in any situation, right? 

This is something you can do at the grocery store, this is something you can do in a work meeting, this is something you can do when you get into bed at night, that new skill set to really soothe and calm the body made them feel a little less out of control, gave them some time to pause and check in and connect with their body, and then away to really, yeah, change their physical experience. And it was incredibly effective.

Krista: So is it less about the soothing tool that we are using and more about that we are using a soothing tool?

Mary-Frances: I think that’s well put actually. So it turned out that the mindfulness training was also effective, but was not as quickly, it took longer for it to be effective. And it in the end was not quite as effective. But here’s the key. So I tell this story sometimes. A very close friend of mine. So I love yoga, for example. Yoga really helps me to breathe deeply, to connect with the body I’m in today and what it can do, and helps me to stretch and soothe and so forth. 

This friend of mine, yoga just makes her angry. She gets really annoyed at the pace of class. And it just does not soothe her whatsoever. And so to your point, we have to try a bunch of new things, which, you know, requires a lot of courage and bravery. And then most importantly, have to see, was that helpful? Because not every tool is going to be helpful for every person. And there’s something about learning authentically. This is what my body needs when I’m grieving. This is how I respond when I’m grieving. There’s something quite, I don’t know, validating about understanding your own experience, I think.

Krista: Yeah, and letting it be okay that some things work for others and not for you.

Mary-Frances: That’s right. Letting it be okay. This is how it is.

Krista: Yeah. Okay. I feel the clock is ticking. There’s so many more questions I have. Okay, so one of the things I really want to hear about from your perspective is social support and community and what you have learned about the importance of that as it relates to the body and grief.

Mary-Frances: You know, we know that loneliness can be a real problem in bereavement, the sense of social isolation. We know on the flip side in research studies that people who have social support really do have a more resilient response, that they adapt or rebuild, restore a meaningful life. And so we know how important community is.

 And at the same time, when you are grieving, when the most important thing in the world has been ripped away from you, it is often very difficult to connect even with people who are well-intentioned, even with people you are close with. It is part of the nature of grief. We are just raw. 

A friend of mine whose husband died very suddenly, she talked about how angry she felt with people, how difficult it was for her to hear anything pretty much that they said to her. And about six months into her experience, we had another conversation and she said, I’m just starting to be able to give people the benefit of the doubt. When they say something to me, it is not any longer my immediate reaction. They don’t know what they’re talking about and how could they be so insensitive?

Krista: Yes.

Mary-Frances: It’s not that she wanted to feel that way. And at some cognitive level, she knew that they were well-intentioned, but she was just so frustrated and felt so isolated from the people around her. So, it’s a challenge. It’s a very, very difficult challenge. And some of it is allowing that a lot of things are not going to feel right now. Trying, if you can, to connect in whichever ways you can. That might mean, you know, I want to see you, but let’s not talk about this. Or I want to see you, but it’s really only worth it to see you if it’s okay with you, if we talk about this, if I get upset, and I don’t need you to fix it for me, but I do need you to be there while I’m upset.

Krista: What you’re saying is kind of what you were saying earlier about knowing yourself.

Mary-Frances: Yes.

Krista: And the importance of knowing what it is you need and communicating that.

Mary-Frances: Yeah. And knowing that relationships are likely to be a little rocky for a while. And to some degree, that’s not anyone’s fault. That’s not your fault. And it’s not necessarily the fault of the person who may have good intentions. I mean, I can tell you, Krista, I talk to bereaved people all the time, and I say the wrong thing all the time, right?

Krista: Same. Yeah.

Mary-Frances: Yeah. And part of that is because there is no right thing to say. There is nothing that words can convey that really solves anything. And so I think about the idea that what’s most important is to be attuned to when something doesn’t land right. I will say something to a friend and then I’ll say, wow, I can tell that did not mean to you what I intended that to mean. So help me understand why what I just said was hurtful. Or help me to understand whether there’s something else I could have said that would have felt different than what I did say. Because it’s about being there. It’s not necessarily about the words themselves.

Krista: 100%. Yeah. The being there cannot be underestimated sometimes. It’s so valuable.

Mary-Frances: And it’s interesting because I teach a psychology of death and loss course to undergraduates here at the University of Arizona. And I’ve learned that many of them have already had loss experiences and many of them have supported friends and family through loss experiences. And they have some wisdom sometimes. They talk a lot about, every day I would go over and play video games with my friend because I didn’t want him to be alone. We didn’t talk about it, but I didn’t want him to be alone. Or going for a drive together, right? Or just saying something on a regular basis. Hey, I’m still thinking about the fact that your mom died last semester. And I’m just sort of wondering, anytime you want to talk about it, I’m here, you know?

Krista: Yeah. I’m curious to know, as you’ve done several decades of work in this space, what has surprised you maybe the most? And specifically something that’s in The Grieving Body that you’ve addressed there.

Mary-Frances: I think one of the things, the first reaction that I had was, we are really in a pendulum swing. People are willing to talk about grief and loss now in a way that they were not willing to talk about it 25 years ago when I started this work. And there were not podcasts, there were not internet sites, there were not even support groups in the way that there are now. 

But what has surprised me most, I think, about The Grieving Body is that we can see it in blood tests, we can see it in neuro imaging scans, that people are having a physical response. I think grief feels so ephemeral, you know, it feels like it’s sort of constantly changing and hard to describe and to be able to see it in the numbers, in the research is still surprising to me somehow.

Krista: Yeah. Is there anything that feels really important to you that I didn’t ask you about that you think listeners should know?

Mary-Frances: I think we’ve hit on most things. I think really accepting that this is maybe the new normal for the moment, while also getting your regular doctor’s checkup. It doesn’t have to be about grief. It does need to be, will you just do my regular blood draw for the year and test my blood pressure, right? Get your teeth cleaned, go to your mammogram. These are just the ways that we care for the body. And if something is going awry, it will show up on these tests as being outside the normal human bounds.

Krista: Yeah. That’s such good advice. I noticed that it’s already hard for a lot of women to prioritize that on a good day.

Mary-Frances: That’s right. Let alone when you feel unmotivated and lack of energy and, yeah. I agree. And so this is maybe also something that friends can do. Friends as a way of supporting can just say, hey, listen, I know now is not the time you’re thinking about this, but I’m going to ask you next week if you made that mammogram appointment and we’re going to make sure that you get that done this month. Yeah.

Krista: That is brilliant advice. Yeah. I love it. Thank you so much for being willing to come and talk about your book. I really appreciate it.

Mary-Frances: Krista, it is so wonderful you bring this conversation to people. Thank you.

Krista: Oh, it’s, it is my jam. So if people want to learn more about you, besides just buying your books, which you should totally do, where should they go?

Mary-Frances: Well, I also read the audiobook version of this new book, The Grieving Body.

Krista: Oh, well, I have to get that now. Okay.

Mary-Frances: And there’s ebook versions as well. And then my lab is at MaryFrancisOConnor.org. 

 Krista: Very good. All right. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

Mary-Frances: Thank you, Krista.

Krista: All right. Be well.

Mary-Frances: You too.

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If you like what you’ve been hearing on this podcast and want to create a future you can truly get excited about even after the loss of your spouse, I invite you to join my Mom Goes On coaching program. It’s small group coaching just for widowed moms like you where I’ll help you figure out what’s holding you back and give you the tools and support you need so you can move forward with confidence. 

Please don’t settle for a new normal that’s less than what you deserve. Go to coachingwithkrista.com and click Work With Me for details and next steps. I can’t wait to meet you.