by Victoria N. Shi
Drawing on scientific research and examples from her own life, Victoria N. Shi explores the role of death and grief in the human psyche in this thoughtful feature. Check out her story “Patient Was the Doctor” in our [July/August issue, on sale now!]
(Note: this post briefly mentions cancer and other deadly diseases, as well as trauma and mental illness)
Death is one of few domains of human knowledge where religious thought and scientific inquiry share equal authority and power, both while instilling terror. Though spirituality is the institution commonly associated with solace-seeking, empirical research on death is disturbing and demands vulnerability, exposing how even scientists typically seek haven from squeamish and embarrassing emotions by engaging in rationality. (Not so, in my short story! No spoilers.)
However, in the words of Portia Elan, writer and friend, such avoidance risks becoming a story about how death does not matter. What we need, instead, is to get better at telling stories about death.
So here is mine, as I understand it after a decade working in mental health. During grad school, young people in my life died every few months for three years. Cancer killed most of them, but there was a little gun violence thrown in, as well as two shocking cases of pneumonia. Before that, I’d say I was pretty avoidant of discomfort, if discomfort could be avoided. Believing myself a low-energy person, I made rule-based determinations on what sounded fun or interesting enough to be worth the effort and found myself very discerning about trying anything that required struggle or even cognitive load.
I liked to box up my problems and ignore them until they didn’t stress me anymore. My professional training, alone, was not enough to divert me into new habits despite plenty of peer-reviewed evidence suggesting I do so.
The Research Overview
Time and time again, psychology research on loss and injury has shown ‘walling off’ parts of ourselves has harmful outcomes, because it’s a short-term solution, a single phase of healing, like clotting or fever. Too long in one phase of recovery means we never actually recover.
This applies to almost any kind of psychological separation: avoidance of memories, emotional repression, thought suppression, simply changing the subject in conversation. In samples of cis men, Dr. Matthew Genuchi et al. (2025) found that using punishment and anger to shut down sadness, grief, or depression led to more alcohol use, aggression, and other risky behaviors, putting many at risk of addiction, injuries, and mental illness. Dr. Qian Lu et al. (2015) studied Asian breast cancer patients, discovering that the more they feared others would judge them for expressing emotions, the more they catastrophized about pain, the poorer their reported quality of life, the worse their depression symptoms, and the more frequent their intrusive thoughts about the illness.
Naturally, the antidote is generally the opposite: to reconnect internally and come into balance, made whole. For example, gold standard post-traumatic stress disorder treatments mechanistically work by unifying the suppressed, ‘forbidden’ memories and pre-traumatic ‘naivete’ with the new, hardened survivor self. But this theme transcends trauma work.
I know big fans of the original Mass Effect video game trilogy, where the character Legion was a gestalt entity of over one thousand programs working together without hierarchy. His every decision arose from a quorum of the multitude within, unique among the Geth. One friend was particularly fascinated, noting, “Legion’s consciousness is so different from the way we think.”
But are we truly so different from Legion? Internal family systems (IFS), a therapy currently on a well-earned streak of popularity, would argue otherwise—this therapy identifies, humanizes, and harmonizes the ‘sub-personalities’ or families within each person’s mental makeup. Some of us have a neglected ‘inner child’ acting out because negative attention is better than none at all; within that same person, might be a perfectionistic manager trying to run twenty trains on time. Perhaps Freud’s good ol’ psychodynamic work offers a parallel to Legion too, conceptualizing three components of consciousness, and desire and death drives.
Human beings have limited cognitive load capacity and we cannot be fully conscious of everything operating on or within us at a given time. Internal consensus is harder to achieve than chaos, especially when we avoid discomfort. Any haven becomes a prison when you don’t let yourself out of it, regardless of nice furniture or how free you’ve convinced yourself you are inside. This applies to logic and objectivity. Likewise, to emotional expression. However, giving ourselves grace for a moment, it is empathizable for one’s inner coward to manifest in the face of the ultimate existential threat.
Sometimes, death is not death. We grieve for losses other than the lives of others: mementos that break or mold, dreams unfulfilled, drift-off friendships, bygone homes, even the lives we once wanted for ourselves. Even the loss of a life is mingled, like cement, like earth, with the loss of countless potential futures. Psychologists may never determine whether this is because we, complicated as our minds are, live in a reality of symbols and predictions, or if the reason is not higher cognition. Children around the world engage in ‘symbolic play,’ using objects and actions to represent other things. Dr. Mohamad El Haj et al. (2016) found that his sample of adults hallucinated in absence of company even when they did not feel lonely. During 2025 renovations, even the Kaikyokan aquarium’s captive sunfish mourned the loss of human visitors enough to stop eating and drag its body along the wall, only for cardboard cutouts to restore normal behavior. We are not the only ones who grieve when bereft of community.
Any haven becomes a prison when you don’t let yourself out of it, regardless of nice furniture or how free you’ve convinced yourself you are inside. This applies to logic and objectivity. Likewise, to emotional expression.
Even people who declare themselves afraid only of fates worse than death are fundamentally talking about death. Betrayals, humiliations, the loss of human rights or the kind of abuse that grinds without apparent escalation, are all fundamentally made of the same stuff: despair. The end of happiness is the threat. The end of happiness forever, which is technically two redundancies, because the end—death, and death alone—makes happiness impossible forever.
In his 2021 work, New Techniques of Grief Therapy, Dr. Robert Neimeyer writes:
We are wired for attachment in a world of impermanence. […] If living well implies investing ourselves in our lives with others, it also implies cultivating the grace of relinquishing the concrete expression of our attachments to our worlds and reconstructing them in more sustainable terms as we move forward through an unending series of life transitions.
Dr. Neimeyer and many other psychologists offers ways to hold our awareness of death in everyday life in a way that is enriching and optimistic. Almost everyone knows about Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ five stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Most of us know don’t know the context: that she was a groundbreaking researcher in palliative care, her work centered the experience of the person dying. Yet we intuit the relevance to those who remain because those five stages are sewn up in the struggles of attachment and survival.
When Dr. Neimeyer talks about ‘reconstructing’ what was once concrete, he is referring to our abstract, symbolic reality, including ‘core memories,’ ‘lessons learned,’ habits flavored with culture and context, even moral principles bestowed by experience and learning, rather than strictly physical objects in spaces. Loss challenges the meaning we make in life. That meaning, we may then richly recreate through two processes: first, shaping a narrative—a story—about the event-level incident of losing the thing we loved; second, establishing the retrospective story of our relationship with the beloved now gone, resolving both ‘unfinished business’ and our need to resecure attachment.
Story is everything. Unluckily, negative emotions, according to Drs. Felicia Pratto and John Oliver, tend to leave stronger memories than positive ones. A snide remark received at work is more likely to rattle around in our heads for hours at home than a compliment.
Yet as all lovers of literature know, we can—and do—derive far more than pain from grief. When we lose someone to terminal illness or even suicide, to know a deceased person is finally free of pain is powerful understanding. To remember that silent strength was the gift of a stoic parent can mean that person is, in a sense, still with us, helping us carry the sorrow of their passing, even in absence of clear memories of affection. In death-unrelated loss, divorce can be framed as the final stage of hard-won self-growth, recontextualizing previous unwillingness to recognize incompatibility, or it can be a values-consistent sacrifice made to protect oneself or one’s children. It’s one thing to outlive a relationship, thus losing the opportunity to forgive someone, request a change, or express love and vulnerability; it is another to have never even considered trying. But even after death, meaning must be made. Of course, the nuances are infinite and story cannot be prescribed, whether in therapy or community. It must be uncovered on a person-by-person basis.
One of the best places to start such meaningful stories about death is to do it while we are still alive. That is, to spend enough time thinking about decision and consequence, especially in relationships, so we can be intentional about using the limited time we have. To prioritize financial success is one person’s prerogative; family may be paramount to another. Equally, families often need resources to survive and one pursuit will serve another, so much so that working overtime and displacing emotional connection with material support can become a vicious cycle with mindless, self-reinforcing inertia. But we can choose to be mindful.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy experts like Drs. Robyn Walser and Russ Harris emphasize the need for acceptance, not in order to reinforce passivity and a stagnant sense of normalcy, but to create flexibility, the willingness to take risks in service to deeply held values and reevaluate when patterns of behavior that once served us well don’t seem to do so any longer. Keeping your brain turned on, being acutely aware of your values, principles, goals, and the balance between them is a dynamic process, demanding discomfort and introspection.
This is particularly difficult for us in, or even after, acute crises. Author Meredith Mooring, also a friend, observes we often trap ourselves in catastrophic stories, lacking the flexibility to accept the stressor has happened or the resulting feelings. In this rigidity, we actively prolong despair and distance ourselves from valued action. The problem is not that turmoil and panic are undeserved; it’s not even that they are unhelpful. Rather, fatalistic emotions are no replacement for self-compassion and vulnerability. Victoria Yu, another brilliant friend, put it best: “That black-and-whiteness is not a state of truth.”
But even after the crisis, the ending, through grief, we can still experience wisdom and growth. Whether or not we are ready is hard fought at every stage.
The Conclusion
After the tragic deaths of my friends, coworkers and family members, laissez-faire avoidance stopped being an acceptable code of conduct. There’s something about hollering like a jackal as you scrub your bathtub floor that really reframes what you’d consider ‘good,’ ‘healthy,’ or even ‘safe.’
I would give a lot to bring those people back, but that is never the choice. The choice is what to do now that they’re gone. I choose to try harder than I did before, to be generous with my effort, integrate the art of writing with the community of artists and, of course, to tell better stories about death.
(This was written with thanks to all friends credited above, as well as Shen Tao, E.S. Hovgaard, Misty, and Julia Vee.)
References
- El Haj, M., Jardri, R., Larøi, F., & Antoine, P. (2016). Hallucinations, loneliness, and social isolation in Alzheimer’s disease. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 21(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/13546805.2015.1121139
- Genuchi, M. C., Oliffe, J. L., Rice, S. M., Kealy, D., Walther, A., Seidler, Z. E., & Ogrodniczuk, J. S. (2025). Thought suppression strategies as mediators between traditional masculinity ideology and externalized depressive symptoms in men. Current Psychology, 44(8), 6646-6661. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-025-07542-3
- Ewe, K. (2025, January 19). Lonely sunfish in Japan gets cardboard human friends. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqjv4lz7g57o
- Lu, Q., Man, J., You, J., & LeRoy, A. S. (2015). The link between ambivalence over emotional expression and depressive symptoms among Chinese breast cancer survivors. Journal of psychosomatic research, 79(2), 153–158. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychores.2015.01.007
- Neimeyer, R. A. (Ed.), (2021). New techniques of grief therapy: Bereavement and beyond (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351069120
The Astounding Analog Companion 