Grief is grief

When my friend, the minister of religion, bought me lunch a while ago, he expressed admiration for my reflectiveness in the face of loss. I took the compliment.

- Russell Brown

“But I have learnt that you can’t reflect your way out of this,” I said.

“No,” he said. “Grief is grief.”

Grief is discontinuous, contoured, unpredictable. Or, as someone who knew told me early on: “There are good days and bad days.”

It’s six months since Fiona died and the time is a blur, as if it all happened to someone else. In some sense, it did. In neuroscience, the theory of predictive coding, which developed as a way of explaining visual perception, holds that our experience of what the world sends at us is mostly a set of models about what we expect to experience. Those expectations, which may span our entire sense of ourselves, are based on the sum of all our experiences, material and emotional.