Grieving With(out) Rationality

A few days ago, my friend’s little sister killed herself. I hadn’t seen my friend in awhile—her family moved away from Michigan, my home state, some years ago. I still think of her sister as a bouncy 12-year-old who loved 4-H, with a special fondness for pigs (the smartest domesticated animal, she said). When my friend and I used to play cards, we’d never let our younger siblings play with us. After hearing the news, I went on Facebook—the girl was 17, looking beautiful and confident on her profile page, set to graduate high school next year. Looking at her Facebook page, you would never know she used to grub around on a farm.

I wanted to call my friend, but I couldn’t decide whether or not she’d be in the mood to talk. I wanted to call my mom or my own sister, but I didn’t feel like explaining the story. I returned to Facebook—my friend had a growing number of sympathetic wishes from friends on her Wall. One person had given her one of those Facebook Gifts, little cartoon graphics that cost about a dollar. The gift was a pair of angel wings—right then, Facebook seemed, to me, like the mankind’s worst invention to date.

I cried, but, to my dismay, I couldn’t stop thinking critically and rationally. My own self-analysis disgusted me—did my emotions only run so deep before logic and education took over? I found myself judging the decency of Facebook, weighing the pros and cons, as if this were a time for cultural criticism. At that moment, I couldn’t stop thinking about my psychology class this semester. I did not want to be thinking about psychology.

The same thing has happened to me all my life. During my biggest fights with friends or parents, there’s a part of my brain that sits back and observes—no matter how upset I am.

I look at the pronouns in my thoughts so far—all “me” and “I”—and I grow impatient. What does that say about me? I begin to think of my psychology class again, and begin to make some sense of the matter.

Psychology, as I’ve discovered this semester, is certainly not my strong suit. I expected the class to be about dreams and social dynamics, with lots of focus on weird experiments and rhetorical questions. The textbook for Mind, Brain, and Behavior is straight-up biology; I stepped out of my comfort zone after the Emily Dickinson poem on the first page. But today, I need those hard cold biological facts.

In one scientific experiment discussed in class, scientists electrically shocked a girlfriend and her boyfriend, and measured the girlfriend’s brain reactions. When she felt pain, her rostral anterior cingulate cortex fired. When the girl saw her boyfriend in pain, another part of the brain kicked in: the caudal anterior cingulate cortex. We have a part of our brain reserved for what I thought of as “true” pain, and another reserved for “imaginary” pain: all pain that doesn’t apply directly to us. At first, this truth seemed horrible and impersonal to me (like the time that class seriously compromised my idea of true love, by charting how women were attracted to men’s pheromones based on their immune system—pure evolutionary benefit). Today, I need my empathy, but I also unwillingly feel other parts of my brain working, the parts that analyze tragedy reduced to a post on Facebook, the parts that write this article. But I have another way of thinking—separate, more sensitive. I like the idea of a caudal anterior cingulate cortex. This part of me can even shut down the pure reasoning parts of my brain (the parts I used to think about tragedy reduced to a Facebook post, or to write this article).

So when I talk to my own sister on the phone—with all this stuff running through my head, stuff that’s better suited to midterm cramming than the grief process—I don’t feel as bad. Maybe my brain is slightly messed up; maybe my reasoning cortices don’t shut down as fully as they should, producing this disturbing tendency to over-think in emotional situations. We college students sometimes depend on rationality, and now I know why or at least can guess, with half-baked pieces of scientific information absorbed from my classes. Anyway, the self-conscious, logical part of my brain can mull this oddness over. Somewhere, some other part of my brain traffics in empathy. I have a caudal anterior cingulate cortex, and I know it’s working.

The author is a Columbia College first-year.