“I Feel Broken.” Why the Sudden Loss of a Loved One Is Incapacitating
No one can tell you how you should feel in grief.
Why is it that when we lose someone we love, be that a person or a beloved pet, we feel broken, lost, incapacitated, even immobile?
When we lose someone we care deeply about, we literally have to learn how to function without them in our lives. To break this down into a metaphor, our lives run most of the time on autopilot thanks to the workings of complicated systems within the subconscious programming of our minds.
All the parts of our brain responsible for different functions (like the amygdala, mammalian, anterior cruciate ligament, prefrontal cortex, etc.) do everything from keeping our heart beating, moving one foot in front of the next, relaying from the stomach muscles and corresponding chemical reactions of digestion that we’ve had enough to eat, to thinking about how we are going to respond to something someone just wrote about our brains.
Various parts of our brain have been programmed over time to run behavioural routines that may show up as responses to patterns, like for example, that joy you feel when you open the door and your dog greets you, or the feeling you get when your partner gently scratches the hair on the back of your head, to the routines of your partner that you become mostly oblivious too the longer you live together.
One day, without warning, they’re gone — a sudden breakup or a loss of life.
You come home and they’re no longer there. You wake up expecting them to be there beside you. You go into a room and expect to see them. You pick up a shirt or a towel and you smell them, triggering deeply ingrained emotional memories that flood onto the movie screen of your consciousness, causing your heart to beat faster, your face to flush, and you experience a surge of emotions that overwhelm you.
Your subconscious programming is expecting a routine or an anticipated pattern; the rote programming you’ve been repeating every day without conscious awareness that is associated with that other person or pet from the last five, 10, 15, 25, or even 50 years.
If there was no warning, no awareness or indication of the coming loss, no time to start the impossible preparation for the knowledge of what was to come, you only find yourself, after the fact, lost.
In that moment — all those drawn out moments — we are literally broken. We find ourselves barely able to function at the end of the work day when we return to that place we call home; the container of memories, habits, patterns, and unconscious behaviours we have create around our now lost companion.
Syntax Error: our mental programming is broken.
It’s a simple statement that cannot explain how profoundly we respond emotionally to the dramatic and abrupt change of the sudden death and loss of someone we love.
The impetus for this article is because a friend of mine recently and unexpectedly lost his dog — his companion for the last 13 years with whom he created a home, a routine, healthy habits and behaviours that improved his life and well-being.
Listening to him share his pain, texting with him, empathizing with his loss, I have been encouraging him to be in the moment and feel whatever he needs to feel. No one can tell him otherwise. He feels, rightly so, that a massive part of his life has been inexorably ‘yanked away from him’. There has been a flow of love and care between my friend and his canine companion but now there is no where for that love to go.
We learn about who we are through loss.
I have my own experiences which are entirely my own and cannot be judged by anyone else. However you have experienced and dealt with loss is your own experience. How you handled yourself in grief is a product of your habits and behaviours associated with the companion, with the loved one you cared do deeply about.
I know how I felt after the loss of my dogs. Both were very different experiences. I recall how I suffered a lot of dysfunction — an inability to function in ways that I was used to because the stimulus that prompted various responses was no longer active in my life. All it took was a simple reminder about Reggie that would trigger emotional memory and loss, causing a metaphorical syntax error, and in that moment and inability to function.
Perhaps the hardest of the two was loosing Reggie, a stray my partner and I adopted from Boxer Rescue Ontario.
Reggie was about two years old when we adopted him and 9 months later at a vet visit, the doctor told us he had about two weeks left to live. Reggie had lymphoma that had progressed unnoticed and was much too far along to recover from. Three months later, when he told us in his own way that it was time to go, we went together to the vet’s for the last time.
It was the first time I’d ever seen my partner cry.
A few days later, Christiaan posted a long entry on Facebook about how much he had learned about himself, about being in a relationship with me, about us creating a family together with Reggie, his favourite memories, the rewards of adopting and giving a dog a loving home, and now the loss of the joy that Reggie brought in his and our lives.
It was a powerful moment in my relationship with Christiaan to see a side of him I had never met — an aspect of his character that made me fall more deeply in love with him, perhaps at a time when that both served us more than we realized.
No one can tell you how you should feel in situations of loss.
You can only feel in the way you feel able to in that moment. Feel whatever you need to feel. Allow yourself the time to grieve. If you need help, ask for it. I find it best to ask for non-judgemental help — empathy, understanding, caring, connection, and love — that allows you to feel ‘through the process of grief’ so that you can heal.
You will know when you are ready and when there is space in your heart for the next person or furry companion.
Darren Stehle is a coach, writer, and podcaster developing a human-hearted leadership philosophy based on the timeless wisdom of Tao Te Ching with a touch of neuroscience to cultivate acceptance, connection, and joy in humanity.
