What Is Grief, If Not Love Persevering?
By Julia Kuczynski
10/1/26
“What is grief, if not love persevering?”
Is a line spoken by Vision in Marvel’s WandaVision, and somehow, in seven words, it explains something about grief that is incredibly difficult to put into words. We usually associate grief with death. We grieve someone when they are physically gone and are forced to figure out how to continue living without them. But I don’t think someone has to die for us to grieve them. Sometimes grief is deleting the conversation with someone you once talked to every day. Sometimes it is realizing that your best friend has slowly become someone you barely know. Sometimes it is the end of a relationship and accepting that the future you pictured with another person is never actually going to happen. And sometimes it is death. These losses are obviously not equal, but they have something important in common: attachment.
When someone becomes important to us, our brain does not simply remember facts about them. It learns them. Their presence becomes part of what our brain expects from the world. Neuroscientist Mary-Frances O’Connor and psychologist Saren Seeley describe grieving as a form of learning. When we form a close attachment, our brains develop expectations about that person’s presence and availability. After a significant loss, those deeply learned expectations do not disappear the moment reality changes. In a way, reality can change faster than our brains can.
I think this explains one of the strangest parts of grief. You see something funny and instinctively think about sending it to them. Something exciting happens and, for a second, you want to call the person who used to be the first to know. You hear a song and suddenly remember a version of your life that does not exist anymore. Then, almost immediately, you remember what changed. This is most obvious after someone dies, but I think the same basic process can help us understand other forms of loss. After a breakup, you can know perfectly well that the relationship is over and still expect their name to appear on your phone. After a friendship ends, you can still instinctively think of something you need to tell your former best friend. Your conscious mind understands that something has changed, but the patterns your brain created around that person take longer to catch up.
There is evidence that our brains take these kinds of social losses seriously. In one fMRI study, people who had recently experienced unwanted romantic breakups were shown photographs of their former partners while thinking about their rejection. Researchers found activity in some regions also associated with physical pain. That does not mean heartbreak and physical injury are neurologically identical. In fact, later research has shown that physical pain and social rejection also have distinguishable patterns of brain activity. What the research does suggest is that social loss is not something our brains simply shrug off. Close relationships become intertwined with systems involved in attachment, reward, emotion, memory, and our expectations of the world around us.
That is also why I think friendship breakups deserve to be included when we talk about grief. There is something uniquely strange about grieving someone who is still alive. There is no funeral for losing your best friend. Nobody sends flowers because the person who once knew every detail of your life now knows almost nothing about it. Sometimes there is not even a specific day when the friendship ended. Maybe the texts became less frequent, your lives moved in different directions, or one day you realized you had both changed. Eventually, someone who was once built into your everyday life becomes someone you only know through memories. Romantic relationships can end the same way. You are not only grieving a person; you can also be grieving routines, inside jokes, places, traditions, and even a future you had unconsciously started expecting.
All of this raises a question that I find fascinating: if grief hurts this much, why are our brains capable of it in the first place? The answer is not that grief itself is automatically “good for you.” Grief can be overwhelming, and for some people it can become prolonged enough to seriously interfere with everyday life. But in its adaptive form, grieving appears to serve an important purpose. It helps the brain learn. O’Connor and Seeley argue that adapting after a loss involves gradually updating the brain’s predictions about the person who is gone. Every time you encounter something that used to involve that person and experience life without them, your brain receives new information. Slowly, the world it expects begins to resemble the world that actually exists.
That sounds incredibly clinical for something so emotional, but I think there is something beautiful about it. At first, everything can seem to lead back to the person you lost: their favorite song, a restaurant, a photograph, a certain time of day, or a random street you used to drive down together. Then, slowly, those things become part of your life again. You hear the song and make it through. You survive the birthday. You go back to the restaurant. You make a new memory in the same place. The old memory has not disappeared, but your brain has learned that a new experience can exist beside it. Healing is not necessarily the destruction of an attachment. It can be the process of learning how that attachment fits into a life that has changed.
There may also be psychological growth that occurs alongside this adaptation. Researchers studying bereavement have examined what is sometimes called post-loss or post-traumatic growth, in which some people report changes in their priorities, relationships, sense of meaning, or understanding of themselves after loss. This idea has to be treated carefully. Suffering does not automatically make someone stronger, and nobody needs to be grateful for losing someone, having their heart broken, or watching a friendship disappear. Growth is not guaranteed, and finding meaning in grief does not somehow make the loss itself good. What it does show is that pain and growth are capable of existing at the same time.
Maybe that is one of the valuable things grief can give us: perspective. Losing someone can expose what we took for granted. Heartbreak can teach us what we need from future relationships and what parts of ourselves we should not lose inside another person. The end of a friendship can teach us what we value in the people we choose to surround ourselves with and what kind of friend we want to be. Death can make an ordinary conversation with someone we love suddenly feel much less ordinary. Grief reminds us of something we spend most of our lives avoiding: people are not permanent. But realizing that does not make loving them pointless. If anything, it can make the time we have with them feel more important.
We also have a tendency to measure the value of relationships by how long they last. If a romantic relationship ends, we call it a failed relationship. If friends grow apart, we sometimes wonder whether the friendship was ever as real as we thought it was. But permanence and significance are not the same thing. Someone can have been incredibly important to one chapter of your life without appearing in every chapter afterward. A friendship can end and still have shaped who you are. Someone can break your heart and still have taught you something about love. Someone can die and continue influencing the way you live for the rest of your life. An ending does not erase everything that came before it.
This is why I keep coming back to that line from WandaVision: “What is grief, if not love persevering?” Maybe grief hurts because attachment does not disappear at exactly the same moment circumstances change. The friendship ends, but the memories remain. The relationship ends, but part of you will always care. The person dies, but the love you had for them does not suddenly disappear with them. The brain is then faced with an extraordinary task: it has to accept a new reality without erasing the significance of the old one.
Eventually, something begins to change. You stop reaching for your phone. You find someone new to tell the story to. You hear the song, and it becomes a memory instead of something that ruins your entire day. You build new friendships and new routines. One day, you realize that you have become a version of yourself that the person you lost might not even recognize. That does not mean they stopped mattering. It means your brain did exactly what it is capable of doing: it adapted.
Maybe grief, then, is not something we are supposed to defeat. In its healthier forms, it is one of the processes through which we learn to live after something meaningful changes. We grieve because we are capable of attachment, and we heal because we are capable of adaptation. Moving forward does not require pretending someone never mattered. We can miss who someone was to us, appreciate what they gave us, and still accept that they no longer occupy the same place in our lives. Maybe Vision was right. Love perseveres. We just have to learn how to persevere with it.
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