What is Grief and What Causes It to Endure? Part 3

Learning from stories and music about grief

This article is the third excerpt published here on Substack from my book, Discontinuities: Love, Art, Mind’s chapter on grief. The previous article described grief in theoretical terms: as an extended period of mental reorganization triggered by the news of loss of someone or something clashing with an attachment structure to that thing, and characterized by a mental perturbance concerning the loss. My article before that one talked about love and attachment, which are pre-requisites for grief. The current article is meant to make our understanding more concrete by applying the Discontinuities framework to the interpretation of stories and music about grief.

Figure courtesy of ChatGPT

About the article. Some of the hyperlinks here do not work because they cross reference sections of the book itself. The book contains a template for processing stories, including important questions to ask with respect to any story one reads, sees or hears. This article is long because I meant to cover several genres: films, plays, dance shows, musicals, songs and real stories. And I wanted to provide enough information to show how to use the Discontinuities framework to understand these works. Even so, the individual commentaries are relatively brief.

Anyone who lives long enough will experience grief. Apt stories cannot innoculate us against grief, but I believe if grief is processed in terms of the schema from Discontinuities apt stories can help prevent grief from becoming unmanageable or pathalogical.

I welcome your feedback in comments below on this article and the previous two on grief.

Learning from stories and music about grief

Works of art can help us understand grief, but not merely by depicting people who have suffered losses. Their deeper value is that they can make salient patterns of mind that are otherwise difficult to observe clearly: altered salience, insistent motivators, attentional capture, disruptions of executive control, failures of reorganization, and the partial reconstruction of a life after loss. Stories and music can thus help us think more concretely about the very processes discussed above in more abstract, scientific terms.

The point, then, is not simply to assemble a list of moving works about bereavement. Nor is my aim to offer correct interpretations of these works, or to critique them as art criticism would. My concern is rather to use art to understand grief, and to use grief to understand minds. Art matters here because it often reveals the temporal structure, phenomenology and interpersonal consequences of perturbance more vividly than theory alone can.

At the same time, I do not want the brevity of some of the remarks below to suggest that one can learn much from cursory acquaintance with these works. On the contrary, I am advocating deep affective and reflective engagement with particular works. Only when one becomes intimate with a story, performance or piece of music does it begin to function as a serious aid to integrative design-oriented understanding.

Musicals

The musical is my favorite genre. It makes multiple media available at once—language, music, gesture, staging, timing, and silence—and is therefore particularly well suited to depicting and eliciting emotions. For a design-oriented theorist of mind, this is not incidental. Musicals often show how affect is distributed across multiple systems at once rather than being confined to a merely verbal or introspective level.

Onegin

The Veda Hill & E. Gladstone 2016 live adaptation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin novel is, among other things, a story about belated recognition, romantic perturbance, and grief for what might have been. There is no video publicly available online; however, it is now on Spotify. I highly recommend the soundtrack, which conveys much of the emotional force of the work.

The story goes roughly like this. The eponymous character, Eugene Onegin, and Tatyana Larina meet in a country residence and like each other. Tatyana is his best friend’s (Vladimir Lensky’s) fiancée’s sister. She makes overtures to Onegin in a love letter. One of the themes of this book, sapiosexuality, is relevant, because Tatyana is portrayed as bright and thoughtful. Onegin nevertheless rejects her overture, saying that marriage would kill passion. In a duel, Onegin kills his best friend, Vladimir, and leaves. While apart, his love for Tatyana grows; meanwhile she marries an older man. Onegin later writes to Tatyana, saying “I am interested in nothing else [but seeing you],” trying to regain her love. They meet, and he tries to woo her. She still loves him, but refuses him.

What makes this story relevant to grief is not only the death of Lensky, though that matters. It is also the grief of belatedness: the perturbance generated when commitments and motivators crystallize too late to be enacted. Onegin comes to be organized around Tatyana only after the practical conditions for union have changed. The result is not merely disappointment but a form of romantic grief structured by counterfactuals, regret, and insistent attention to an unavailable future. The mind continues to generate relationship-relevant motivators even though the relevant action path has effectively closed.

The work also shows how grief often does not occur in isolation. Onegin’s romantic grief is entangled with guilt over Lensky’s death, with shame, with self-reproach, and with the dawning recognition of his own immaturity. This matters theoretically because it reminds us that grief is often not a single emotional process but part of a larger perturbance involving multiple interacting motivators and evaluative systems. Onegin is therefore useful not only as a story of lost love but as a study in how delayed understanding can intensify and stabilize perturbance. Ironically, Pushkin himself died in a duel — showing the limits of learning from even one’s own stories.

Plays

Here are a few plays that I have found relevant to grief. Theatre can be especially revealing because it externalizes, through dialogue and staging, conflicts that in real life are often partly hidden within one mind or dispersed across families.

Rabbit Hole

Rabbit Hole depicts a family dealing with grief after young Danny is killed by a car while crossing the street—chasing after a dog. His parents, Becca and Howie, deal with the loss in different ways. Becca’s well-meaning sister, Izzy, is meanwhile pregnant. Izzy’s outspoken mother, Nat, tries to be helpful; Nat herself lost her son to suicide. The driver of the car, Jason Willette, a 17-year-old boy who probably could have done nothing to prevent the accident, is himself obviously distraught and tries, in his own way, to respond through creative school work and by relating to the parents.

Thus we have parents dealing with one of the most evolutionarily consequential losses, the loss of a child. We also have another young person, Jason, in an unspeakable position trying to cope with the aftermath. The play is especially valuable because it does not present grief as a uniform condition. Different people, bound to the same loss, manifest perturbance differently.

One parent wants to move house and move on. The other wants to stay put. What should be done with Danny’s things? Should they have another child? These are not merely practical disagreements. They reveal competing strategies of reorganization. One strategy seeks to reduce cue-triggered insistence by altering the environment and loosening ties to the old attachment structure. Another seeks to preserve traces of the lost child and to maintain continuity with the prior organization of life. The conflict between these strategies can itself become a further source of perturbance.

It is noteworthy that the entire play centers around grief. The parents, Nat and Jason are captivated by the loss of Danny. Nat is still grieving her own son. We can learn also from the stories of other parents who’ve lost a child: Shakespeare, Darwin, Antonín Dvořák and Eric Clapton the fictional Fisk Senior (Horatio) in Dean Spanley. Because parental grief is expected to be intense, there is a danger that we stop asking explanatory questions about it. We treat it as obvious. But this is exactly where theory must become sharper.

Lest we be like thinkers before Newton who did not pay enough attention to the obvious fact that things fall, we need to ask ourselves: why should the loss of a child be so upsetting, and for so long? We must not simply appeal, circularly, to the fact that it tends to happen. The questions are: why does this grief arise, what is happening in these grieving, partially hijacked minds, how does this hijacking occur, and why does it endure? Rabbit Hole helps with this “problem shift” because it makes visible not only sadness but prolonged executive capture, recurrent relational negotiation, and the difficulty of reorganizing a mind and household after catastrophic loss.

The Winter’s Tale by Shakespeare

The Winter’s Tale I take to be primarily a story about irrational jealousy, experienced by the main character, Leontes, the King of Sicily — itself an interesting emotion (perturbance). (An even stronger Shakespearian play about jealous is Othello, which is also about grief.) But secondarily and essentially The Winter’s Tale is a story of grief. That conjunction is important. Emotional episodes are often intelligible only in relation to one another. Jealousy, accusation, loss, guilt, hope and mourning form here a connected architecture rather than a sequence of isolated feelings.

The play illustrates the counter-productiveness and irrationality of some emotions, but it also illustrates that grief often comes entangled with guilt. Leontes’ delusional jealousy helps bring about what he then must grieve. In design-oriented terms, one might say that a maladaptive evaluative and motivational configuration generates losses that later reorganize the entire person. Grief here is not simply a reaction to fate; it is partly the downstream consequence of an agent’s own perturbance.

Like many famous stories about grief, including that of Jesus and Cinderella, The Winter’s Tale is also a tale of hope. This is a clue. Grief is not only about absence; it is also about the persistence of motivators whose object is no longer straightforwardly attainable. Hope, fantasy, denial, and the continuing felt presence of the lost are therefore not peripheral to grief but often part of the mind’s attempt to manage unsatisfied commitments.

There is also an interesting mixture in this play of romantic grief. Shakespeare repeatedly returns to both objects of grief. This invites comparison. How should grief for a child be compared and contrasted with grief for the person one was romantically attached to? The play does not answer that question theoretically, but it helps keep it vivid.

Pourquoi Tu Pleures by Christian Bégin

Pourquoi tu pleures…? is a thought-provoking French Canadian play about the execution of the will of a wealthy, authoritarian, and in other ways questionable French Canadian husband and father who left the following ambiguous instructions: “Let my assets be divided amongst my children and spouse in accordance with their needs.” Was this a final way of putting it to his family? Or did he think that this process would help unite and heal them?

Here is the French description of this play by Le Théatre la Seizième :

> The death of an authoritarian father, an estate of more than five million dollars to be divided “according to each person’s needs,” and suddenly the value system of a mother and her four children is put to a severe test. What is a need? An ambition, a compensation, a dream… In a back-and-forth between present and past, family secrets resurface.
> A biting and uproarious comedy, Pourquoi tu pleures…? marks the return of Christian Bégin and the Éternels Pigistes to Vancouver. Backed by a cast at the height of their craft, this production—first created at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde in 2016—confronts us with the individualism of our societies.
(translation from French by ChatGPT).

This play is useful because it shows that grief can be prolonged not only by attachment in the narrow sense but by unresolved social coordination problems. Even in complex grief — of a person towards whom one had a very ambivalent relationship — the dead do not simply disappear from the control architecture of the living. Wills, inheritances, secrets, resentments and ambiguous final acts can continue to generate new motivators, conflicts and interpretations. In such cases, grief endures partly because the lost person remains causally active in family cognition and interaction through legacy structures.

This matters for theory. If grief is a process of mental reorganization, then that process can be delayed or destabilized when practical, moral and interpersonal questions remain unresolved. Legacy questions must therefore be considered when we attempt to answer “What causes grief to endure?” Some grief persists not because the mourner fails to accept reality, but because the loss continues to ramify through commitments, identities and negotiations among the living.

Novels

Novels can be especially useful because they provide prolonged access to interiority, recollection, counterfactual reflection and the slow transformation of a life narrative. Grief is often extended and recursive; the novel is therefore an especially apt form for exploring it.

L’ignorance by Milan Kundera

On the surface, Milan Kundera’s L’ignorance only tangentially concerns grief: both main characters, Josef and Irena, have lost their respective spouses before the story begins. Yet this apparent marginality is misleading. Grief is not thematized directly so much as embedded in the conditions of the characters’ lives, shaping their perceptions, relationships and sense of self.

The most explicit theme of the novel is immigration. Josef and Irena have both emigrated from Czechoslovakia to the West, and Kundera explores in depth what it means to live as a stranger in a new land. This condition requires continuous adaptation. In this respect, immigration provides a powerful analogue for grief: both involve dislocation, reorientation, and the reconstruction of personal narrative in altered circumstances. In both cases, familiar expectations no longer fit the world one now inhabits.

The novel, a masterpiece of what Kundera calls the fugue romanesque, is part of his so-called “French trilogy.” Like other works from this period, it interweaves narrative with essayistic reflection—philosophy, history and especially psychology—commenting directly on the unfolding story. This hybrid form, blending fiction with conceptual analysis, aligns closely with the aims of the Learning from Stories project: it invites the reader not just to follow events, but to think with them.

As L’ignorance develops, Kundera reflects extensively on themes central to grief even if not labeled as such: memory and its distortions, nostalgia and its illusions, the fragility of personal identity, and the experience of solitude and loneliness[^^loneliness]. These are not merely background motifs but structural elements of grieving, understood as an ongoing process of negotiating one’s relation to the past, to others, and to oneself. The novel is thus valuable because it helps us see grief not only as painful attachment to the lost person but as a broader reorganization problem affecting identity, belonging and temporal orientation.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses by de Laclos

Les liaisons dangereuses (adapted to film as Dangerous Liaisons) is a late 18th century French epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos that, in my opinion, rivals the best of the English Bard’s work. (I suspect John Malkovich, who starred in that film and the novel’s English play adaptations, would concur.)

I cannot sufficiently explain the relevance of this story without playing some theoretical cards:

• from Michel Aubé we learn that emotions are social motivational systems that regulate interpersonal relations through the proxies of commitment and trust;

• from Sloman we learn that perturbance is a distinctive emergent property of human, and future sophisticated robotic, computational processes;

• from Geoffrey Miller we learn the importance of sapiosexuality in the distinctive evolution of human mating and cognition.

My own theory of perturbance, expanded upon throughout the current book, blends, extends and illustrates these key ideas. Some of the most fascinating human emotions follow from epistolary romance. The advent of email has exponentially multiplied examples thereof, as fictionally depicted in the first chapter of this book.

When the Canadian member of the Académie française, Dany Laferrière, whose impromptue speech matches the eloquence of Shakespeare’s most eloquent characters, was asked what works educated him sentimentally or with respect to love, Laferrière answered:

> L'amant de lady Chatterley m’a fait découvrir l’érotisme physique, et _Les Liaisons dangereuses_, l’érotisme intellectuel.

> “*Lady Chatterley’s Lover* introduced me to physical eroticism, and *Les Liaisons dangereuses*, to intellectual eroticism.”

This of course makes Les Liaisons dangereuses supremely relevant to Discontinuities.

For present purposes, however, the important point is that epistolary form, underlain by sapiosexual attraction, makes visible the recursive structure of socially mediated perturbance. Letters do not merely report emotions; they help generate, amplify and redirect them. The novel is therefore illuminating for grief in at least three ways: grief in betrayal, grief for lost innocence, and grief for damaged commitment structures. It shows how social intelligence, seduction, and strategic communication can produce not only desire but forms of loss that reorganize the self.

Les liaisons dangereuses is thus useful not because it is centrally a novel of bereavement, but because it reveals how some kinds of grief are rooted in the collapse of trust, the corruption of intimacy, and the painful revaluation of oneself and others. Grief here is inseparable from conscience, shame, betrayal and the social architecture of attachment.

Grief in dance shows

See Betroffenheit below. Dance is especially important for grief because some forms of perturbance are bodily and temporal before they become verbally articulated. Movement, repetition, interruption and rhythm can express disorganization and attempted reorganization in ways language alone often cannot.

Grief in classical music

Music is especially valuable for understanding grief because it can model temporal and affective dynamics without having to specify a narrative. A piece of music can enact suspension, recurrence, fragmentation, insistence, attenuation, release or the refusal of release. In this way it can illuminate grief not merely as content but as process.

The Messenger by Valentyn Sylvestrov

Valentyn Sylvestrov composed The Messenger after his musicologist wife died suddenly. Compare: Requiem for Larissa | gramophone.co.uk. It sounds like a musical attempt to portray grief.

Hélène Grimaud – Silvestrov: The Messenger (Piano Solo)

Silvestrov’s work is well suited to illuminating grief because it does not dramatize loss so much as enact some of its inner structure. The music is quiet, sparse and fragmentary, with gestures that seem to emerge only to fade or remain incomplete. This mirrors a familiar phenomenology of grief: something of high significance remains active while ordinary energetic and executive engagement is attenuated. Thoughts and feelings arise in partial, recursive forms rather than progressing toward resolution. The music feels less like an unfolding narrative than like a series of returning traces—echoes of something no longer present.

At the same time, the work evokes a striking sense of presence-in-absence: it sounds like remembrance itself, as if the music were recalling something lost rather than presenting something new. Its suspended temporality and avoidance of catharsis further align with grief’s lived dynamics, where time can feel stretched and resolution elusive. In this way, The Messenger does not offer release so much as a gentle stabilization of perturbance, allowing the listener to inhabit grief without being overwhelmed and to experience how loss can persist as a quiet, enduring form of cognition and feeling.

Films

A Single Man

Tom Ford’s A Single Man offers a striking portrayal of grief as a condition of altered salience and precarious control. Following the sudden loss of his partner, George (Colin Firth) inhabits a world in which ordinary affordances have drained of meaning, while selected stimuli—memories, bodily cues, fleeting human connections—become intensely charged. The film renders this through shifts in visual saturation, framing and temporal pacing: color blooms briefly when something pierces George’s emotional flatness, then recedes. This stylistic device captures a core feature of grief: motivators tied to the lost relationship remain highly insistent, but are no longer integrated into a viable action system. The result is a state poised between numbness and intrusion, where executive processes are intermittently captured by reminders that cannot be resolved.

At the same time, the film traces a fragile reconfiguration rather than a simple trajectory toward recovery. George’s day unfolds as a series of encounters—some accidental, some sought—that momentarily restore connection, suggesting that grief does not eliminate the capacity for meaning but destabilizes its organization. These moments do not culminate in catharsis; instead, they reveal how new or residual motivators can briefly counterbalance the insistent pull of loss. In this sense, A Single Man presents grief as a form of sustained mental perturbance that can be modulated but not simply extinguished—an ongoing negotiation between absence and the possibility of renewed engagement with the world.

The Demons (Les démons) by Philippe Lesage

Philippe Lesage’s The Demons (Les démons) is not, strictly speaking, a film about grief. It is, rather, a film about the emotional conditions out of which grief later becomes intelligible. Set in suburban Montreal, it follows Félix, a sensitive ten-year-old boy, as he moves through a world saturated with worry, confusion, sexual curiosity and menace; the film’s background of child abductions and Félix’s own excessive fear give it an atmosphere in which childhood vulnerability is constantly palpable. Lesage has described the film as being not only about children’s fears but also about a child discovering the sexual world of adults and, in that discovery, experiencing fear because he does not yet understand what he is encountering.^^Wikipedia1

That is precisely why the film belongs in a chapter on grief. We cannot adequately understand grief in adulthood if we detach it from the broader development of affect in childhood. Grief does not arise in an emotional vacuum. It emerges in minds already shaped by fear, attachment, shame, desire, secrecy, helplessness and the dawning recognition that the world contains threats one cannot fully comprehend or control. The Demons is valuable because it lingers within that formative emotional terrain. Critics repeatedly describe the film as an examination of childhood fears, of turbulence beneath the surface of ordinary suburban life, and of a child learning that the world is more dangerous and morally complex than it first appeared. ^^RottenTomatoes1

The relevance to grief, then, is indirect but important. The film illuminates the developmental background against which later grief must be understood: the child’s growing awareness of vulnerability, loss of innocence and the disturbing opacity of adult motives. Grief is only one powerful human emotion among others, and adult grief cannot be fully understood unless it is related to this wider emotional ecology. The Demons reminds us that if we focus only on adulthood, we risk forgetting how much of our emotional life—including our ways of grieving—depends on structures of feeling and forms of perturbance that begin much earlier.

Death at a Funeral (British version), and Fawlty Towers

To understand grief and its time course we also need to understand humor itself, and then understand how and why grief places bounds on humor. Death does not merely silence laughter; it also creates conditions in which laughter becomes unstable, risky, therapeutic or transgressive.

I doubt that we can find a funnier treatment of the initial stage of grieving than Death at a Funeral, which is why I do not understand why the Americans attempted to redo the film.

Aside. With apologies to my American friends, one only needs to watch international sports competitions to understand that many Americans think their country is, can and/or should be the best at everything. Meanwhile, the day I wrote this paragraph, [Canadian Bianca Andreescu apologized to Americans for beating American Serena Williams at the U.S. Open]( https://www.cbc.ca/sports/tennis/bianca-andreescu-us-open-canadian-apology-1.5275031). We can add grieving loss at sporting events to interesting forms of grief.

There is a version of the Fawlty Towers series that includes pre-episode commentary by John Cleese. There he explains how taboo is ripe for humor. The taboo of death, and how this plays out in humor, are important. He also suggests that serious matters call for humor rather than solemnity.[humor]

What is theoretically interesting here is that humor can temporarily reframe what would otherwise remain perturbing. It can relax certain control settings, permit the exploration of forbidden or threatening material, and create brief distance from insistent motivators. But grief also places limits on such reframing. Where commitment structures remain too raw and insistence too high, humor may fail, offend or intensify distress. These works therefore help us think about the boundary conditions under which perturbance can be modulated rather than merely endured.

Humorists often have an intuitive understanding of humor. But humor was poorly understood by humorists and scientists alike until the publication of Inside Jokes. Though not a work of fiction, it is loaded with stories that illustrate the theory. It does not deal centrally with grief, but it does have a few words to say about humor with respect to death. Their theory of emotion needs some work.

Mystical stories

Mystical spirituality may arise in part from the desire to deal with that which cannot be controlled, cannot be repaired, cannot be got again. Even the great Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan believed in his culture’s myths.

Many religions, Unitarianism aside, offer stories of life after death. These stories are deeply relevant to grief, not only because they console, but because they can help manage otherwise unsatisfiable motivators. If one cannot restore the lost person in ordinary reality, one may preserve attachment through narratives of continuation, reunion or transcendence. In design-oriented terms, such stories may function as culturally scaffolded ways of regulating perturbance generated by irrevocable loss.

Jesus Christ (by various authors)

One of the best known religious stories is, of course, that of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Many parents, while not truly believing in the story, teach it to their children, playing the long game, i.e., hoping it will assuage their grown children’s existential anxiety. That is what makes this type of story essential to understand for those wishing to understand grief.

Although there is much scholarship on myths of resurrection, Heaven and the like, it has not, to my knowledge, taken an integrative design-oriented perspective. That is yet another set of theoretical problems on which IDO may make a significant contribution. Such stories may be especially important because they do not merely describe comfort; they help generate socially shared ways of continuing bonds with the dead and of placing grief within a larger structure of meaning.

Real stories

Not all stories are entirely fictitious. One can learn as much about grief from real stories as from fictional ones. Conversely, most of our personal narratives are somewhat fictitious—a theme brilliantly explored by Kundera in L’ignorance, itself a mind-bending mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

Learning from a clinical case study: grief, guilt and “The Wrong One Died”

A potent way of learning from true stories is to learn from a clinical case study. A clinical case study is an account, written by a therapist or other clinician, of work with a particular client or patient, usually selected because it vividly illustrates some psychologically important pattern, difficulty, insight or therapeutic process. Such stories are typically altered in some respects to protect privacy: names, identifying details, and sometimes circumstances are changed. Yet they remain potent sources of learning precisely because they are chosen for didactic purposes. The clinician is not merely recounting what happened, but presenting a case that can help readers notice something important about the mind, suffering, relationships, or change.

For bibliotherapy regarding grief, one especially useful example is Penny’s story in Irvin Yalom’s Love’s Executioner, titled “The Wrong One Died.” Penny is a mother whose daughter, Chrissie, has died after a long and difficult illness. Her grief is intense and immobilizing, but it is not simple mourning. Her life has become organized around the loss: she idealizes her daughter, remains psychologically bound to her, and withdraws from engagement with her two surviving sons, who are themselves troubled and in need of attention. As therapy unfolds, it becomes clear that Penny’s grief is intertwined with exhaustion, resentment, guilt, and a deeply unsettling recognition. The daughter she mourns so intensely had been, in many ways, the easier child—the one through whom Penny could sustain a sense of herself as a loving and competent mother. Her sons, by contrast, present ongoing difficulty and strain. In a moment of painful honesty, Penny voices the thought she had been unable to admit even to herself: that, in some sense, “the wrong one died.”

The power of the case lies in its refusal to sentimentalize bereavement. It shows that grief is not always a pure expression of love. It may also involve ambivalence, moral shock, family role tensions, and the collapse of an idealized self-image. Penny is not only mourning her daughter; she is also struggling with what her reactions to the loss reveal about her attachments, her limits, and the structure of her family life. Her suffering is intensified by the belief that having such thoughts makes her a bad mother—someone who does not deserve to grieve.

This makes the story especially valuable for readers who are suffering not only from loss, but from the fact that their own responses to loss do not fit the culturally preferred script. Some grieving people feel not only sadness, but relief, anger, numbness, guilt about divided attention, or shame about the thoughts that arise under strain. A story like Penny’s can help such readers recognize that disturbing reactions do not necessarily cancel love. Human attachment is often affectively mixed, especially under prolonged burden or when relationships have been asymmetrical, idealized, or fraught. One may love deeply and still feel exhausted. One may mourn sincerely and still harbor forbidden comparisons.

That is one reason why this case belongs in a discussion of learning from real stories. It can help the reader move from self-condemnation toward more accurate self-understanding. Instead of asking only, “Did I grieve properly?”, the reader may begin to ask better questions: “What exactly am I grieving? The person who died? The future I imagined? The role I had in relation to that person? The version of myself I believed myself to be? The family story I can no longer sustain?” Such questions do not reduce grief to analysis, but they can help loosen the grip of undifferentiated suffering.

Penny’s story also illustrates something important about productive reflection on cases. The point is not to identify simplistically with the protagonist, nor to extract a neat moral. It is to use the case as a prompt for disciplined self-inquiry. A reader can ask: “What feelings have I declared unacceptable in myself? What have I not permitted myself to say? What mixture of love, guilt, resentment, relief, protectiveness, anger, or helplessness might be present in my grief? What aspects of my mourning have remained frozen because they threaten my moral self-image?” In this way, the case becomes not only moving, but usable.

For the purposes of bibliotherapy, I chose this story because it can help some readers bear the complexity of grief without collapsing into self-accusation. It offers a corrective to over-tidied accounts of mourning. It reminds us that grief is not always singular in feeling or simple in structure. It may be threaded through with conflicting motives and difficult truths about attachment. A clinically chosen case study can therefore do something that abstract advice often cannot: it can give the reader a psychologically concrete scene in which the mind becomes more intelligible.

Shakespeare and Darwin lost children

Consider how Charles Darwin was affected by the loss of his child. Grief contributed to his spiritual development: atheism and unitarianism. Shakespeare’s loss of his only son, Hamnet, arguably, helped shape later work, including Hamlet and Twelfth Night.

These examples matter because grief does not remain confined to feeling. It can reshape worldview, creativity, vocation and intellectual life. The attachment structure that has been ruptured does not simply disappear; its reorganization can ramify through thought, value, ambition and art. Real stories like these therefore remind us that grief is often architecturally pervasive. It can alter not only what one feels, but what one works on, what one believes, and how one interprets existence itself.

Winston Churchill and his father

Enough is known about how Winston Churchill processed his father’s death, Randolph Churchill, to find there matter for reflection about grief and its time course. Here we have the not uncommon situation of a child desperately wanting and failing to impress his father, and being enduringly affected by that. Winston named his first son Randolph—fittingly, perhaps, as neither Randolph was particularly kind to Winston. We know that Winston, with considerable effort, wrote a hagiographic biography of his father which was not well received. Winston’s writing about a more distant relative, Marlborough, in contrast, is acclaimed. Winston also recounted an encounter with the ghost of his father, The Dream. Whether it was pure fiction, a hallucination or a dream is not entirely clear or relevant.

The relevant point is that it is not uncommon for the grieving mind-brain to continue to produce dialogues with the deceased. This is something a theory of grief and its time course must account for. Such phenomena may reflect not pathology but the persistence of commitment structures and the mind’s ongoing attempt to renegotiate relations to a person who is no longer available for actual interaction. Churchill is useful here because his grief appears not as a brief episode but as an enduring organizational factor in identity, writing and self-evaluation.

My chapter on Jocelyn Morlock

Winter Journal by Paul Auster

Winter Journal is an engagingly personal and stylistically distinctive autobiography. Liszt’s Piano Concerto has no movements. Winter Journal has no chapters, but many unnumbered, unlabeled sections. These are things one notices when one is interested in discontinuities. The transition from life to death is, of course, a somewhat significant type of discontinuity.

Winter Journal is worth reading by men who wish to better understand themselves and other men, and by women who want to understand men. The book does not pretend to be of universal use—no one is everyone. But who writes and publishes a book about themselves just for themselves? Not Auster, evidently. (Once again I care not one iota for the Guardian’s critique.)

By the winter of one’s life one has become well acquainted with death. The précis of this particular life is, among other things, a kaleidoscope of mortality that is germane to our subject. Here I will only single out Auster’s depiction of a near death experience. To understand grief we also need to understand how we can be transformed by near tragedies, and by finding things we thought were lost. That too is a clue. Such experiences can recalibrate salience and vulnerability, thereby changing the background against which later losses are experienced and interpreted.

Song

I don’t know what percentage of pop songs deal with grief — romantic or mortal grief. However, it’s a high number. Some deal with the past, present and future of grief. I will just pull out a few songs.

Tears in Heaven by Eric Clapton

Eric Clapton’s Tears in Heaven provides a stark and intimate illustration of grief following the loss of a child, making visible the persistence of attachment structures even when their object is irretrievably gone.

video: “Tears in Heaven,”

The song centers on questions of recognition and reunion—“Would you know my name…?”—which can be understood as the continued activation of deeply embedded motivators oriented toward connection, despite the impossibility of fulfillment. This creates a poignant form of perturbance: the system continues to generate relationship-directed processes that cannot be resolved through action. At the same time, lines such as “I must be strong and carry on” suggest an effort at reorganization—a tentative attempt to regulate insistence and re-engage with other aspects of life. The song thus captures both the persistence of insistent motivators and the fragile beginnings of their gradual modulation.

The River by Bruce Springsteen

Let’s now consider The River by Bruce Springsteen:

video: The River

The River is not about bereavement in the narrow sense, but about a quieter, more pervasive form of grief: the loss of a hoped-for life. The song traces how early commitments—to love, work, and a shared future—become progressively undermined by circumstance, leaving behind a persistent sense of what might have been. In architectural terms, it illustrates how grief can arise when long-standing commitment structures tied to identity and future plans can no longer be enacted, yet continue to generate low-level, insistent motivators and counterfactual reflections. The result is not acute perturbance but a chronic, attenuated form of it—a background condition in which the past retains salience and the present feels comparatively diminished.

Jaques Brel’s Voir un ami pleurer

Jacques Brel’s Voir un ami pleurer (“To See a Friend Cry”) offers a particularly stark portrayal of grief as a uniquely powerful and disorganizing emotional condition. Here is a particularly high caliber translation:

The song proceeds by systematically dismissing other sources of human concern—politics, war, ambition, even death itself—as comparatively insignificant, only to culminate in the claim that seeing a friend cry is what truly matters. This rhetorical structure is revealing: it models a collapse of ordinary evaluative hierarchies, in which most motivators lose their salience when confronted with the immediate, relational reality of another’s suffering. In architectural terms, grief here is shown not merely as an emotion among others, but as a state in which attachment-based motivators become overwhelmingly insistent, reorganizing attention, valuation, and meaning across the system. Brel’s framing also invites comparison with limerence: both involve extreme prioritization of a particular person, such that other concerns recede dramatically. Yet grief differs in that its object is wounded or absent, generating not anticipation or longing for union, but a confrontation with vulnerability, loss, and the limits of control. The song thus points toward existential dimensions of grief: the recognition that what matters most is fragile, that suffering cannot be prevented, and that meaning itself is grounded less in abstract structures than in deeply embedded, interpersonal commitments.

> Some men are still at war in this land
> For certain songs and certain dates
> The tender gave way to the firebrand
> And Europe gave way to the States
> So now that money's all but scentless
> Noses and consciences are clear
> The pointless flowers can be dispensed with
> To see a friend in tears
> So our defeats are just reminders
> Of death that waits behind it all
> The body wilts before the mind does
> Surprised to see how soon it falls
> It's true our women have deceived us
> All hunted species disappear
> It's true we've shot the golden eagles
> To see a friend in tears
> It's true our cities are exhausted
> Made by and for the middle aged
> Our weakness gave them more than force did
> We thought that love could cure a toothache
> And in the underground we're drowning
> Accelerating through the years
> You think you'll find the truth by frowning
> To see a friend in tears
> It's true our mirrors don't show heroes
> We lack the courage to be Jews
> Without the elegance of Africa
> With our youthful fireworks all defused
> And all these men who are our brothers
> Wonder why we don't want to hear
> How their worst enemies are their lovers
> To see a friend in tears

Other relevant artifacts

There are several other artifacts pertaining to grief described elsewhere in this book:

• Betroffenheit: a dance show by Crystal Pite,

• Monsieur Lazhar: a film by Philippe Falardeau.

• Act in Three Acts: a unitarian service created by myself featuring romantic grief.

These deserve separate treatment, but they support the same general point as the works discussed above. Art helps not merely by depicting grief as sadness, but by revealing the organization and disorganization of a mind under loss: how attention is captured, how commitments persist, how the dead remain psychologically active, and how reorganization can be blocked, partial, socially scaffolded, or unexpectedly transformed.

Our papers on grief and attachment:

• Beaudoin, Hyniewska and Pudlo (2020). Mental perturbance: An integrative design-oriented concept for understanding repetitive thought, emotions and related phenomena involving a loss of control of executive functions

• Wright, Sloman & Beaudoin (1996) Towards a Design-Based Analysis of Emotional Episodes

• Petters & Beaudoin (2017). Attachment Modelling: From Observations to Scenarios to Designs | Springer Nature Link) (pp 227–271) part of the book, Computational Neurology and Psychiatry | Springer Nature Link.

Concluding note on art and grief

These works do not merely depict grief; they instantiate its dynamics in different media. Music can model its temporal recurrence and attenuation, narrative can track its interaction with identity and social structure, and performance can externalize its conflicts across agents and bodies. Taken together, they function as a distributed laboratory for observing perturbance, insistence, and reorganization—making visible aspects of grief that are otherwise difficult to isolate or describe within purely theoretical analysis.

[^^loneliness]: For a real life example of solitude and loneliness in grief, consider: The crack of a falling tree, the terrible loss – then the silence and How did we miss our colleague’s grief? | Ranjana Srivastava | The Guardian