Does Grief Affect Brain Function?

So, how does grief affect brain function anyway? I have seen on many medical and psychology websites (accredited ones) that grief literally rewires our brains. My therapist and psychologist has told me this as well. But to tell you the truth, I don’t really know completely because I’m not a doctor and I have no idea what the data and science really is behind it. I can only speak from experience. And one of my biggest side effects from grief has been losing some of my normal brain capabilities. I never really knew this could happen until I lost my spouse and my mother. It may not be something we even consider as a possibility until we or someone else we know has a significant loss and begins to act in ways that seem alien to what used to be the norm. But again, as I always will say on this site, how could you or anyone even know this would happen? No one ever really knows how grief is going to affect us until it’s there and in our faces. But one common thing I have observed is that everyone suffering from it, almost always goes through some form of literal brain rewiring in response to the trauma.

Some examples of this might be:

• Inability to focus
• Memory loss
• Scatterbrain/confusion
• Intense feelings of sadness or shock
• No energy
• Headaches
• Nightmares
• Anxiety
• Sudden clumsiness
• Sudden increase in temper and irritability
• Awareness that you are a completely different person and you don’t have any idea who that is and maybe you don’t care

Whenever I have read more about how grief affects our actual physical brains, it seems like everywhere stresses that this is only temporary and in time, as you process your grief, you will regain your normal functions. That may happen for some people but I’m pretty sure that’s not true for everyone. I have known people who essentially did not ever fully recover mentally and I will speak of one later below. I also know that for me, I am nearly seven years out from losing my spouse, ten years from losing my mother, and two years from losing my grandmother, and I am still not functioning at my previous mental state.

Most of mine began as a direct result of losing my spouse. But some of it was also on top of losing my mother before that. When my mother died, I never went to therapy, never really got a chance to process it because it was all so sudden and out of the blue. Also, I was in the middle of being a full time caregiver for my husband through his very quickly worsening cancer, as well as taking care of four small children. I had no moments to think or fully deal with the loss of my mother. It was a terrible time. So, because of that, when I lost my husband, all the grief from losing Mom got piled on top of my spousal loss. After that, my head seemed to pretty much detach from my entire body.

Grief Brain – You Are Not Crazy

I learned this term when I finally went to therapy and grief support groups. And it was a relief to hear it. Because before that, I really felt like I was either insane or very quickly approaching it. Well, I was told that I most definitely was NOT crazy and in addition to that, what I was going through mentally, as well as emotionally, was totally normal. And many people in my group were having some of the same issues.

The fog of grief brain had already begun creeping in on me sometime between my mother’s death and my husband’s death. So, between 2013 and 2016. But once I lost him, it hit me fully and pretty hard. I was in some kind of daze and denial about all that then and didn’t really want to think about any of it too much.

But as I ran around relentlessly, trying to adjust to this new, unsettling life after death, a lot of troublesome things kept happening to me. And until I learned about the effects of Grief Brain, I really didn’t fully understand why.

I Lost My Memory

I used to be one of those people with a photographic memory. One of my favorite memories was how I could endlessly entertain my mother with this ability when I was a kid. On nights that she had to work late or had some engagement that would make her miss her favorite show and she couldn’t record it for whatever reason, I would watch the show for her, and then literally recite the entire thing to her back to her when she came home.  Some people would not like this and would want to watch the show themselves but she loved it when I did this, so it became one of my favorite memories. I remember that for a long time, I wasn’t even aware that not everyone could do this. At least, that’s what Mom told me. I was able to do it with music, too. Play me a song and I knew all the lyrics after listening just once.

Well, all that stopped sometime in my caregiving days and I have lost most of it since she died and my husband died. For awhile, I thought it was just a result of not being a kid anymore. That your brain ages and you have other stuff to think about as a grownup. But now, that I’ve written this, I realize that if I connect the memory of my actual memory to my mother, then it would make total sense as to why I started losing it altogether when she died.

Instead, the complete opposite began happening to me. People would tell me things or ask me questions and I would totally forget anything they said, sometimes within just a few minutes. It made a lot of people angry with me. I wrote somewhere on here before in passing, that once, a family member asked me to get some paper towels when I went to the store. There was no emergency or anything, she just needed some paper towels because she was out. I completely forgot and she got extremely angry at me. She said she only wanted that one thing and why I couldn’t remember just that one thing and what the hell was wrong with me anyway? She demanded to know why she couldn’t rely on me to remember anything anymore. And I was like, gee, I don’t know, maybe because my husband died and I’m a single mother of four children now? She only replied that I couldn’t use that as an excuse forever.

But it wasn’t just her, this kind of thing happened everywhere I went, no matter who I interacted with. I was a total scatterbrain and I couldn’t seem to do anything about it. It was like a giant fog was following me around and enveloping my entire brain and being. I started trying to keep to myself as much as possible. During this time, so many people got mad at me over things that were just other versions of “paper towels” that I spent even more time crying than I already was. So, I didn’t want to be around anyone anymore.

I Became Extremely Clumsy

This one not only drove other people crazy but it drove me crazy as well. I could escape some of the scatterbrain memory loss by keeping to myself and not bothering other people. But even alone, I got furious with myself. I kept dropping things, spilling things, breaking things, and tripping over things. I was careful not to touch anyone else’s stuff if possible, which was easy if I kept to myself and didn’t go out too much. But in my own place, I still kept accidentally destroying stuff.

Some things I was able to prevent. Like I’m typically a good cook. Well, I started burning stuff up by accident because I kept forgetting about it. So, unless I had to stand over it constantly, I had to make sure I set those timers. Oh, and not forget to set the timer in the first place.

But there were some other things I couldn’t seem to stop, no matter how careful I was. I was always tripping, stubbing my toes, knocking my knees and elbows into tables and walls. I sliced my hands and fingers so many times with kitchen knives while preparing dinner. I remember one time I sliced my hand on the edge of a can that I was opening. The wound wasn’t very big, thank goodness, but I recall I got so incredibly dizzy that I had to lie down.

Then, I kept breaking my things. The biggest thing I broke was my laptop computer. I was taking it to another room. Well, I tripped on a cord, fell and dropped it. And I mean, really dropped it. It slammed down on a hard floor and refused to work soon after. I remember crying a whole lot when that happened. That computer was one of the last big things my late husband had bought before he died and now I had busted it. I hated myself for a long time after that.

I Kept Having Fender Benders

If it had been possible, I should have stayed far away from cars, roads and anything having to do with them. At least, until the grief brain eased up. Again, I tried to drive as little as possible but when you have four little kids, that just couldn’t happen. I had to take them to lessons or parks or school events. I had to run out to stores after one of them sprang last minute school needs on me at 8 or 9pm. I had to chauffeur them to friends’ houses. And I had to do it all myself.

I tried to be as careful as I could but things kept happening to me like:

• bumping the car into parking dividers or poles in the parking lot and scraping it up.
• Crashing into the back of someone in traffic.
• Someone backing into me and denting my bumper (okay, that one turned out to not be my fault but it felt like a great big shadow of bad luck was following me around then. Or maybe it was just karma for all the other foggy brain stuff I had done so far).

But the worst one was when I was in the middle of a very stressful move, one of many, to another state. The moving truck was already freaking me out because it had broken down somewhere in Arkansas and the company was having to transfer all of our stuff to another one. I was in my regular car with my children hundreds of miles away and they were screaming non stop for food and the bathroom. With my now foggy brain, I made a way too hurried and stupid attempt to get off at the next exit on the highway. In doing so, I nearly sideswiped another car. It swerved into the shoulder and sideswiped the guardrail. Horrified, I pulled off on the shoulder and ran down the side of the highway, tears streaming down my face and holding the woman’s hands once she got out of the car and asking if she was okay and endlessly apologizing to her. Luckily, she was okay but oh my gosh…I hated myself more than ever. I could have seriously hurt someone or worse. I gave her all my insurance information and we called the police and luckily, I had enough insurance to pay for all of her damage.

But to this day, I still cringe at the memory and feel absolutely ashamed over it. I had gone from having had only one ticket in my entire life and no other car mishaps to being an absolute menace on the road. Again, as a griefstricken, scatterbrained widow with four little kids, I wish I could have stayed far, far away from operating large machinery of any kind.

How Grief Affected My Grandmother

As long as I had known her, my grandmother had always been a pretty sharp lady. And everyone else who knew her confirmed this. But after my mother died, I noticed a substantial decrease in her mental function. In the beginning, when it first happened, she kept telling me it was nothing more than old age. Sure, that could have been some part of it but I thought it was way too coincidental that it would happen right after Mom passed. My mother was her daughter, after all and she loved her. And they had a pretty close relationship. My mom often visited her in TX, where she lived, and my grandmother often flew up to see my mom, who at that time, lived in North Carolina. They also spoke frequently on the phone.

Well, my mother’s death was so sudden and shocking that it sent all of us reeling. I had already mentioned that it affected my own head physically but with my grandmother, it was much more sharp. She immediately began a descent into what eventually was just labeled as dementia. At first, she wasn’t too bad, she forgot things but was still able to drive and do some regular day to day stuff. But then, she started forgetting significant things. Like she had lived in Austin, TX for decades and one day, she got into the car and got lost. She had never gotten lost before. So after that, she stopped driving altogether. A few months after that, she was no longer going out much at all. And she didn’t like hardly any food. She kept claiming that nothing tasted right anymore.

Eventually, she had to move to assisted living, and her condition declined more and more. She forgot almost everything. If you told her something, it was gone within seconds. She kept some of her long term memory but even that was foggy.

It got to a point where she forgot my children existed. She’d always been so proud of them and used to show their pictures everywhere she went. We kept the pictures by her bed but she still didn’t recall who they were. It was heartbreaking. And then, she actually forgot that my mother died. Maybe that’s good, though? I don’t know. Sometimes, when I came to visit, she’d ask me how my mother was doing and a couple of times, I reminded her that Mom was gone. And she’d always look shocked and say, “Oh, no! When did that happen?????” After that, I started just telling her that Mom was fine and then I’d change the subject.

Thankfully, she never once forgot me. I will always remember that up until I lost her, her face still lit up whenever I came to visit her.

Oh my gosh, this is making me cry all over again to write about.

But she never really recovered from that grief and its side effects.

Does Grief Brain Ever Get Better For Anyone?

Of course. Some people do find that over time, some of their normal mental capabilities return and they can function a little more like they used to. I knew someone in my caregivers group who was a remarried widow who had suffered from a lot of memory loss the way I had after losing her first husband. But after some years had passed, she was able to regain some of it back. She said, though, it had never been the same since. She was still not nearly as sharp as she used to be. But some did manage to return.

And I have to admit, this is currently my experience. I have gotten back some of my mental function. I am not quite as scatterbrained and foggy as I was during those first 2-3 years after my husband’s death. I do not break things or trip as much. I also do not cause any car accidents like I used to. In fact, that awful incident that I mentioned above, which was now five years ago, is thankfully, the very last time I’ve had a problem on the road (knock on wood, right?). But, I still don’t have the memory I once had. In fact, that’s the one thing I feel like has not improved all that much. My kids or anyone at all can ask me things or tell me things and I still just forget a whole lot of them. I don’t mean to, and I try very hard not to. But it’s just not there, unless I write it down. I still do things like go into rooms or open the fridge and forget what it was I wanted, even if I knew literally a split second before. Or I go to the store to get something specific, and totally forget what that thing was. You’d think writing it down would help, but I have been known to make a list and go to the store and STILL forget items on it.

Another thing I am still plagued by are nightmares. This is something I will go more in depth with in another article but this is another side effect of grief that has not really improved all that much for me.

How have you suffered from Grief Brain Fog? Has it ever improved? Let me know your experiences in the comments below.

As always, supportive comments from me and others and take good care of yourself!