The missing limb & texts to my dead husband

Why we feel lost when our brains are searching for our missing part.

There is a book that explains that when someone dies, our brains keep looking for them, much like a person’s brain keeps looking for a limb when they lose one. We exhaust ourselves looking for them and feel like we’re losing our minds because we can’t stop looking. Rationally we probably know they’re not there, but internally our brains are looking everywhere for them.

10+ years ago I was noticing that I kept describing the feeling of looking for my husband Jim after he died as if I was looking for a lost object. My brain was exhausting itself looking for him. I sort of dismissed it, because I thought it was just normal to be exhausted looking for someone who wasn’t going to come back. The reason behind it didn’t really matter to me in the moment.

I’ve written in the past about how an fMRI of a person's brain who has experienced traumatic loss looks similar to a person who has experienced a traumatic brain injury, but this “looking for a limb” concept is a little different. It’s less physical inflammation/brain injury and more background noise and distraction. Think of it like a computer fan that you hear getting louder and louder in the background because it won’t stop processing a program. That’s your brain looking for the thing that it has lost, and that’s why it is so soooo tired sometimes.

Because things work how they work in my life, about 10 years after Jim died, I was handed a person who understands (literally) a missing part. At the time, I thought we understood this concept in a very different way, until we started noticing similar “symptoms” in our conversations. Then I read The Grieving Brain and it all started to come together.

Background: My husband Sam lost his leg in an RPG attack in Afghanistan on Thanksgiving Day 2006. His brain is always subconsciously searching for that leg, sometimes in ways that are more painful ways than others.

Over the course of our relationship, I have noticed that Sam’s brain is sometimes searching for his leg in the same way my brain occasionally searches for Jim in places he’d normally be. Places like behind a boat on Lake Superior, in a blue ice fishing suit, or in a squad car in Bayfield as it comes around the corner. This is different than yearning for someone (though you can do that at the same time), it’s my brain remembering the patterns of him being in those places, and then continuing to look for him.

When it is searching for him at that moment, I honestly have this skip in my head like “oh I should text Jim and see where he is.” And then I kind of giggle and remember that he hated text messaging…

This doesn’t mean I am stuck or delayed in my grief 10 years later. If you have experienced this momentary brain glitch of wanting to text your person or call your pet from the other room, it doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with you. It simply means that your brain looks for the things it still thinks are there. For those of us who are farther along in our grief timeline, this feeling can be especially true if you are visiting a place that you identify with this person/pet and haven’t been back in a while.

Which brings me to why you may feel VERY lost, untethered, or even feel like you've lost your intuitive skills when a pet or a person dies, or if you experience a non-death loss.

Your patterns are off. Everything you've gotten used to is gone, and your subconscious is busy saying "what the actual #$@% is going on here" and searching for it. For some of us it is also taking your energy and learning new patterns AND searching for the old ones. (This may be part of why the second year of grief is so much more difficult than we expect.)

You may feel energetically like a live wire who is floating around, and man, are you just exhausted to the core. Oh, and now you don't know where your intuition has gone, so you don't trust yourself.

I promise you will eventually feel more grounded and less disconnected from the world. None of this is permanent, even if it feels like it.

You’re not broken and never were. Your brain is just very very busy.