SUPERGRIEF · Virtual Retreat · 6 September 2026
The new science of grief, and the questions it can and can not answer.
Rev. Rabbi Henry-Cameron Allen, OCP, ICGC
The frame
Before we start
Nobody here is being fixed.
There's no diagnosis in this. No stages. Nothing telling you how you ought to be doing it. You're not a case. You're a person carrying someone.
Movement
I
What your body's been doing all this time, without asking you.
Movement I
It doesn't feel like sadness.
It feels like hunger.
Sadness sits still. This doesn't. This is a reaching. You want them, the way you want water.
What the researchers found
Two big reviews came out this year and both found the same shape, across dozens of studies. Scientia Professor Richard Bryant of UNSW Sydney led one of them, and his own way of putting it is that the grieving brain is saying it wants to be with the person again. He also says plainly that there isn't enough data yet to be certain, and he's asking for bigger studies. Trends in Neurosciences, February 2026; Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews.
Movement I
Nothing in there is broken.
It's all still running.
Why you feel it in your chest
There's a part of you that handles how bad something feels, separately from where it's happening. That part is doing a lot of work right now. The ache in your chest isn't your imagination and it isn't you being dramatic.
This is about the distress side of pain, how much it hurts, not the part that tells you where you've been touched. Those are two different systems and researchers keep them apart on purpose. So do I.
Movement I · Landing
You're not malfunctioning.
You're doing the same thing you did when they were in the next room. Reaching for them. That worked for years. Nobody switched it off.
Movement
II
Why you're so tired. Why some days are so much worse.
Movement II
You built a whole world with them in it.
Where they'd be at four in the afternoon. What their feet sounded like on your floor. Which chair. Which mug. You never sat down and learned any of that. It just went in, over years. And it doesn't update itself.
Movement II
You know.
And something in you still doesn't.
You can know they crossed. Completely. No confusion about it at all. And still look up when the door goes at the hour they used to come home. That isn't confusion. That's two different parts of you, and only one of them got told.
One way of understanding it
Careful here. This one is a way of understanding grief that a lot of researchers find useful, and it is not settled science. I'm offering it because it explains something, not because anyone has proved it.
Movement II
If that's right, it explains the first of everything.
The first birthday. The first Christmas. The first time something good happens and you've got your phone in your hand before you remember. Every one of those is you expecting them and finding out again. Usually with no warning. Often with people watching.
Movement II · Landing
This is the most tiring work a person ever does.
You're not learning the world again because you failed to accept something. You're learning it again because you loved them into every corner of it. And every corner has to be walked into.
Movement
III
And how much they can't. Honestly.
June 2025
Both sides agreed beforehand what would prove them wrong. Then the results came in and neither side got what it needed. Published in Nature, June 2025.
Movement III
They don't know how consciousness works.
The people who do this for a living, with the best equipment on earth, still can't tell you how a brain turns into somebody being someone. And they said so out loud, on purpose, in public. I have a lot of respect for that.
Movement III · Careful here
An open question is not a hidden answer.
"Science can't explain consciousness" does not mean "so something must survive." Those are two completely different sentences, and sliding from the first to the second is a trick. It's still a trick when we do it sincerely. It's still a trick when we do it because we need the comfort. We're not going to do it tonight.
Pause.
Cameras off if you want them off. Nothing to do here.
Movement
IV
The floor under all of it.
Movement IV
Energy doesn't get destroyed.
It changes form.
That's not a theory anyone's fighting over. It's the first law of thermodynamics. It's been sitting there quietly since the 1850s, never once needing a headline.
Movement IV · The seam
What the physics states
The energy of a life is not subtracted from the universe.
Where I begin
What that energy now knows is a larger question, and I have not settled it. That part is mine, and you are free to disagree with me exactly here.
Movement IV
Reachable, not proof.
None of tonight makes this work truer than it was. What it does is make it reachable, for someone who got here through a doctor's office, or a scan, or a headline, or a doubt they couldn't put down. That's a different thing. It's the thing worth having.
Held
·
I'm going to ask you a few things you might not have found words for yet. If one of them is yours, you don't have to say so.
The question underneath
"If it's all just brain chemistry, was my love only chemistry?"
Describing how something works doesn't make it smaller. We can describe exactly what music does in a brain, and nobody walks out of a concert feeling cheated. What the scan is looking at is a person who loved someone so much that their brain rearranged itself around them.
The question underneath
"Am I taking too long? Is there something wrong with me?"
A lot of this research is studying one specific diagnosis, and it fits about one in twenty people. It exists so anyone who wants help can get it. It is not a clock, and nothing in any of this says grief is supposed to take a certain amount of time.
The question underneath
"Does still wanting them back mean I haven't accepted it?"
No. Accepting it was never the same thing as the wanting stopping.
The question underneath
"Is this going to take my faith?"
Nothing tonight is being asked to settle anything about faith. The physics says what it says. Everything past that is somebody's interpretation, mine included, and I'll show you the seam every time so you can always see where the science stops and I start.
The question underneath
"Is it a sign, or am I making it up?"
There's a filter deep in your brain that decides what reaches you, and it tunes itself to whatever matters most. After someone crosses, it tunes to them. Tara Swart is a neuroscientist. Her husband Robin crossed, and she kept seeing robins in the garden. She'll tell you what that filter explains, which is why you notice. Then she stops, because it doesn't tell you whether anything is being sent. I think that's the honest place to stop.
The one you will ask
"Does the science say my person is still somewhere?"
No. And I'm not going to pretend otherwise, because you'd know. Not one study we've looked at tonight says anything about where anybody went. What the first law says is that the energy of a life is not subtracted from the universe. What that energy knows now, I haven't settled. My answer is mine. I'm not handing it to you as though somebody measured it.
The floor is open
Your turn now.
Doesn't have to be a question. Doesn't have to be about the science. If something moved in you tonight, say it. If you'd rather sit and listen, sit and listen. Quiet is allowed here, and I won't fill it for you.
SUPERGRIEF · 6 September 2026
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