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Years ago
while observing a troop of Barbary macaques for behavioral research,
I was surprised to see a new mother holding on to her obviously
stillborn baby. She clutched the corpse to her chest and made soft
cooing sounds, obviously in distress.
More remarkable, she held on to that dead baby for more than a week
as it began to decompose.
Eventually, the mother showed up alone, but then it got even sadder.
She began to haunt other mo-thers, those with live babies. She would
sit close to them and try to grab those babies and hug them, as if
to make up for her loss.
I was clearly witnessing a mother in deep grief, and I felt great
empathy.
After all, she had been stuck in an evolutionarily dilemma that all
of us, at one time or another, experience. Monkey, apes, humans and
all other social animals are born to attach to others because those
connections help keep us alive and up the chances of passing on
genes. But at the same time, we pay dearly for that advantage when
our loved ones leave.
Those of us who have lost a spouse, parent, sibling, child or
friend, are familiar with that monkey's heart. As described by
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, grief includes anger, denial, bargaining,
depression, and eventually acceptance, emotions felt in no special
order or sometimes skipped over. But all of them are low moods,
often paralyzing moods, and so why would evolution give us this
punch in the stomach, especially when death and loss are so common
over a lifetime?
University of Michigan evolutionary psychiatrist Randolph Nesse has
suggested that there might in fact be reasons beyond the usual
argument that grief is the price we pay for love. According to his
theory, grief itself may have been selected because those feelings
can have evolutionary advantages.
For example, when someone is lost, we expend energy looking for
them, trying to get them back. Under the great duress of grief,
people usually protect themselves from further losses, which must be
a good thing. We also warn our kin and turn to them for kindness and
protection, thereby binding our genes as we come together in
mourning.
And then we reach out. For some, grief is the first time they have
asked for solace or help, and that opens up whole new social
networks that might be crucial down the road.
Eventually, with acceptance, evolution pushes us to leave the house,
maybe look for a replacement, or at least go forward with life.
In other words, the roller coaster emotions of grief can actually
make a new, sometimes safer, life for the bereaved, a life where
genes are protected and passed on in the aftermath of loss.
Although that sounds like a reasonable scenario for the evolution of
grief, the best intentions of biology don’t, of course, always work
out.
Jane Goodall reported that after an elderly female chimpanzee named
Flo died her young son, Flint, exhibited all the classic signs of
human grief, and he eventually wasted away and died. And many people
are just as unable to cope with their crippling grief, and they,
too, get sick and die of a broken heart.
The rest of us swimming through a great loss have to cling to the
notion that although evolution has brought us these painful
emotions, it has also brought us the means to move on.
Meredith F. Small is an anthropologist at Cornell University. She is
also the author of "Our Babies, Ourselves; How Biology and Culture
Shape the Way We Parent" (link) and "The Culture of Our Discontent;
Beyond the Medical Model of Mental Illness."
Comments
This brief news item illustrates how
the media promotes the myth that grief is only
associated with death. The author being a veteran University anthropologist adds
authority to this misconception. The ar-ticle also promotes the widespread
illusion that the grieving process has only five emotional phases, in-stead of
two or three levels each with several
phases. These popular myths and illusions are part of the
unawareness
that burdens our families and society.
Online Lesson 3 in this non-profit Website focuses on bonding, loss, healthy grief, and how
psy-chological
wounds
can hinder mourning progress.
+ + +
Pause,
breathe, and reflect - why did you read this article? Did you get what you
needed? If not, what do you need? Who's
answering
these questions - your
true Self,
or
someone else?
The Web address of this article is
http://sfhelp.org/grief/news/grief.htm
Comments