Any time I hear the word “soccer,” I feel something like an electric shock. It reminds me of my son Brady and the countless hours I spent watching him practice and play the game from the age of 5 on. And of course it reminds me of his death at age 16 in October 2016.

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Something similar happens if I glimpse a soccer game in progress on a television screen, or see kids kicking a ball in front of a goal in a school yard. And many other words, images and feelings can also jerk me out of feeling relatively normal and back into the abyss of grieving my lost boy.

Other grieving survivors report similar experiences. Some call these words and images “triggers” and try to avoid them. Others welcome things that remind them of their lost loved ones.

I’ve sometimes considered with some unease the fact that since Brady died I have likely spent far more time and energy thinking about him than about my two surviving daughters. True, they are older and don’t need parenting like a teenager. But they’re here. I can still help them, while Brady is beyond my reach.

A Brain Study Of Thinking

These thoughts came again when I ran across a just-published study that asked the question: Do survivors pay more attention to reminders of someone who’s died than to reminders of someone who’s living? I was further intrigued when I saw one of the co-authors is George Bonanno, an active long-time grief researcher whose work I have particularly valued.

An unusual aspect to this study is that it used brain imaging – functional MRI scans or fMRI – to gather data. Almost all grief research to date relies on subjective data gathering. Usually this takes the form of questionnaires that research subjects fill out to provide measures of things like the intensity of their grief feelings.

Do survivors pay more attention to reminders of someone who’s died than to reminders of someone who’s living?

Subjective data sources are not worthless by any means. But an objective data gathering technique like reading a brain scan is different and, potentially at least, more accurate and consistent and less subject to distortion.

There are starting to be a few grief studies using neuroimaging, including another recent one that Bonanno co-authored. This is a new direction for grief research. It will be interesting to see if objective data supports or upends the conclusions based on evidence gathered over the last couple of decades using questionnaires and other self-evaluations.

This particular study examined 25 people who had lost a partner or close relative within the last 14 months. The survivors were classified using conventional assessments by traits such as their age, manner of loss and severity of grief-related symptoms such as depression.

Researchers used a psychological tool called a Stroop test – I don’t know what this is but like the name – to help determine how much subjects’ attention turned from thinking about a living loved one when they were exposed to a word relating to their lost loved one. The scans measured activity in various brain structures while this was going on.

Thoughts of Those We Lost

What they found was that, yes, people do tend to pay more attention to reminders about the recently deceased than about the still-living. Age, degree of depression, type of loss, use of medication and time since loss didn’t affect this. I’m not alone, it seems.

This effect did appear to be more pronounced among people with complicated grief, which is a longer, more severe experience of grief than most of us have. Another strong tendency was shown by people who suffered from intrusive thoughts, which is a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder.

I’d say this study confirmed for me that what I’m experiencing is normal. I’m far from the only one who seems to spend more time thinking about someone who is no longer walking the Earth than those who still are.

This study found that the passage of time since the loss didn’t affect this tendency. However, I suspect that as time goes by I’ll spend more time thinking about my daughters and less about Brady, even if he never leaves my mind completely.

What I’m experiencing is normal. I’m far from the only one who seems to spend more time thinking about someone who is no longer walking the Earth than those who still are.

By presenting this evidence, I’m not attempting to tell anyone they should or should not think about a lost loved one, or that it’s good or bad to think more about deceased people than living ones. Your mileage may vary. Different strokes for different folks. I hope that this will give you some insight and ideas to help you understand what you’re going through, ease your mind a little, and perhaps let you get through it sooner and with less suffering.

Thanks for reading, liking, commenting, sharing, re-posting and subscribing to Grief Science. This blog is more than place for me to share my thoughts on grief and loss. It’s also a place for everyone to share their thoughts on grief and loss. Your participation is valuable and appreciated. I hope you get some peace today, and I’m sorry for the losses that brought you here.