When someone we love dies, we sometimes use language that sounds dramatic:
“I feel like half of me died.”
We usually understand what the person means. Their grief is enormous. Their life has been divided into before and after. They feel torn in two. Someone who occupied a central place in their world is suddenly gone.
But what if there is more truth in that statement than we realize?
Research into close human relationships suggests that people who spend years together don’t simply become emotionally attached. In subtle ways, their bodies, memories, behaviors, and even their sense of identity become intertwined. This can happen with close friends, parents and children, spouses and close colleagues.
Our Bodies Learn Each Other
Researchers have found evidence of what is called interpersonal physiological synchrony. During interaction, people who are connected to one another can show coordinated changes in such things as heart rate, respiration, heart-rate variability, and other measures of the autonomic nervous system.
This doesn’t mean that two spouses eventually walk around with hearts beating at exactly the same rate. No. Human physiology is much more complicated than that.
However, it does mean that our bodies respond to other people that we know well.
We calm one another. We excite one another. We recognize footsteps, voices, movements, and routines without consciously thinking about them. After years together, the presence of another person can become part of the environment in which our own nervous system operates. Anyone who has shared a home, a desk, a squad car, or many mutual activities with someone for decades probably understands this without needing a laboratory to prove it.
We Share More Than Experiences. We Share Memory.
Perhaps even more fascinating is something psychologists call transactive memory.
In close relationships, we don’t necessarily store all of life’s information independently. Instead, couples, close friends and families can develop something resembling a shared memory system. One person remembers which year the roof was replaced. The other remembers the name of the hotel in Boston or which state they were driving through when the car died.
One remembers birthdays.
One recalls how to fix a recurring computer glitch.
One remembers passwords.
One knows exactly where the warranty is.
One remembers exactly what the doctor said.
Eventually, we don’t even need to remember everything ourselves because somewhere in the back of our minds is another piece of information: They’ll know.
Over many years, this division of memory can become remarkably efficient. Two people aren’t literally sharing a brain, of course, but they may function as a cognitive team.
Then one member of the team dies.
Suddenly there are questions with no answers.
The surviving person may even feel less mentally competent than before. They may struggle to remember details that once seemed readily available.
Some of this undoubtedly comes from the neurological and psychological effects of grief itself. But researchers studying cognitive interdependence have suggested another possibility as well: part of the survivor’s accustomed memory system is simply no longer available. The person who remembered that part of their shared life is gone.
We Also Become Part of Each Other’s Identity
There is a third kind of interdependence that may be even more profound.
People in close relationships gradually incorporate one another into their understanding of themselves.
We become someone’s wife, husband, mother, father, daughter, son, partner, or best friend. Our routines are built around them. Decisions include them. Plans assume their existence. Even our language changes.
He or she becomes “We.” “What are we doing for Thanksgiving?” “We don’t like crowded restaurants.” “We always go there in September.” “We both love coffee with double cream”
Then death comes, and we abruptly becomes “I.”
That isn’t merely a grammatical change.
For someone whose identity has been constructed partly within a relationship, the death can create a bewildering question:
Who am I now that you are no longer here?
The Work of Becoming “I” Again
This may help explain something bereaved people have been telling us forever.
When someone says, “Part of me died with her,” perhaps our first response shouldn’t be to reassure them that they are still whole.
For the moment, they may not feel whole at all.
Their world has lost not only someone they loved, but someone who participated in regulating daily life, holding memories, maintaining routines, making decisions, interpreting experiences, making plans and reinforcing their sense of who they were.
Their nervous system has to adapt.
Their memory has to reorganize.
Their routines have to be rebuilt.
And, eventually, their sense of self has to accommodate an identity that no longer includes the physical presence of someone who had become woven into it.
None of this means that the relationship disappears.
The memories remain. The influence remains. Habits and expressions acquired over years may remain. We may hear ourselves saying something exactly as they would have said it. We may continue making a recipe their way, repeating one of their expressions, or looking at something beautiful and immediately knowing what they would have thought about it.
Perhaps that is another form of integration.
We slowly learn which parts of the person are truly gone—and discover which parts have become part of us. So when a grieving person says, “I feel like half of me died,” perhaps we should listen carefully.
Science increasingly suggests that human beings are not nearly as psychologically independent as we sometimes imagine.
We attach. We synchronize. We share memories. We build identities around one another.
And when one of those people dies, grief may involve more than learning to live without someone we loved.
It may also involve learning how to become ourselves differently.
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For more information see:
Bo et al. (2021). “It’s not who you lose, it’s who you are: Identity and symptom trajectory in prolonged grief.” Current Psychology. October; 42(13): 11223-112233. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-021-02343-w
Related reading: What Homicide Survivors Keep to Themselves and Overturned Murder Convictions: The Fallout on Homicide Survivors.
