Author, neuroscientist and psychologist Mary-Frances O’Connor has looked at how grief affects the mind and body.
Her research is found in her sophomore book “The Grieving Body: How the Stress of Loss Can Be an Opportunity for Healing,” released in February.
She will participate in the Tucson Festival of Books, which runs Saturday, March 15, and Sunday, March 16. She will moderate “In My Time of Dying,” featuring bestselling author Sebastian Hunger, at 11:30 a.m. Sunday, March 16.
O’Connor will also participate in a panel called “Navigating Care and Loss” at 2:30 p.m. Sunday, March 16. She and another author, Jessi Gold, will discuss grief and caregiving’s physical and emotional impact.
After this panel, O’Connor will sign books.
Both discussions will take place in the festival’s Science City area.
UA professor O’Connor combines storytelling with research in her new book. In “The Grieving Body,” she shares how the immune, endocrine and cardiovascular systems are affected by grief, and the importance of having support systems during the healing process.
She said that friends and family members shouldn’t be afraid to talk with a loved one who has experienced loss.
“It helps to connect you when someone is vulnerable and sharing their experience with you. It’s not your job to fix it…A supporter is there to just witness the grief that they’re experiencing and let them know that you’re with them,” O’Connor said.
She also discusses how grief can lead to personal growth and behavioral changes, both positive and negative.
O’Connor shares her own journey of experiencing grief following the loss of her mother and her struggles with being diagnosed and living with multiple sclerosis. O’Connor said it was important to include personal anecdotes to make her book more relatable to readers.
“It’s not something that scientists are trained to do, to share their own personal experiences, for good reason,” O’Connor said.
“I found that telling my story of how I used this information made it easier. It wasn’t self-indulgence. It was a different way to explain the information that would resonate with people…People need to know that this isn’t an abstract academic topic. They need to know that you have also felt grief because we interpret things differently when it’s our own experience.”
She said she hopes that readers learn about how symptoms like cardiac events and high blood pressure are the body’s natural response to loss.
“Although it can feel horribly difficult, our body is really built to absorb the blow of loss. Most of the physical symptoms that people have are the normal process of grieving. I make this analogy to pregnancy,” said O’Connor, who released her first book, “The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss,” in 2022.
“Pregnancy is a normal process, but we also keep an eye out to make sure that things haven’t gone wrong, like hypertension or gestational diabetes. I think helping people to recognize that the physical aspect to grieving is very normal may be very reassuring and even validating.”
The University of Arizona will sell both of her books throughout the weekend of the book festival.
O’Connor said that researching grief was emotionally difficult yet rewarding.
“I think studying grief has made me a less anxious and more joyful person, because you’re constantly faced with thinking about why life is meaningful, which adds a lot of richness to life,” O’Connor said.
“When I’m speaking with people who are grieving, or when I’m talking with reporters about the books, I try to tap into that feeling of grief in myself because that’s what makes it authentic. I do try to make sure there’s balance in my life.”
O’Connor has been interested in the neurological and physiological effects of grief since she was a UA graduate student. She was at UCLA for 10 years before returning to the UofA in 2012.
She has been studying the effects of grief for about 25 years.
“I think on one hand, the scientist in me is so fascinated by how our brain understands relationships that we’re in and bonds that we form,” she said.
“Sometimes, that is revealed when we have loss. But on the more personal side, my mother died when I was 26 while I was in graduate school, and I think it made me very comfortable talking with people who were grieving. I had a unique opportunity to both interview people who were bereaved while also matching up what they were telling me with their blood tests and MRIs.”
She first became interested in the topic of grief because of longstanding research on how people can “die of a broken heart.”
“We think of that as a metaphor, but actually it’s in the epidemiological evidence again and again. So for example, a man is almost twice as likely to die of a heart attack in the first three months after the death of his wife It’s a little less for women but present for women as well. Knowing that this piece of data has been around since the late 1960s, it made me then want to ask questions about why is that happening, when and how does this experience of loss get into our heart muscle,” O’Connor said.
O’Connor has recently been presenting her new book to various audiences. She recently did events at Changing Hands Bookstore in Phoenix and Antigone Books in Tucson. She will also give talks in Seattle, St. Louis and Montana at bookstores and libraries.
She has discussed her book on podcasts for the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, the Association for Psychological Science and the Family Action Network.
She said her book was meant for different audiences, including those experiencing grief over chronic health issues. Another neurologist recently shared with her how her book has helped his patients with MS.
“When we deal with chronic illness, whatever kind that might be, whether it’s MS, Long COVID, rheumatoid arthritis, there is grief that comes with the loss of health. It’s a near neighbor to the kind of grief we experience when we lose a loved one. Many of the lessons we’ve learned from grieving people can be applied to people with chronic illness in a way that might help them to see their experience differently and to find ways to pursue a meaningful life,” O’Connor said.
This article appears in Mar 6-13, 2025.