grief {and love} in an ice cream cone
Everything I've learned about love, I've learned through grief. Most of my posts are twisty-turny, but if you're willing to navigate the labyrinth of my mind, the payoff is (often?) worth it.
Buckle up, kids.
Let's simplify the economy of love -----> grief (using an ice cream cone)
You longed for ice cream, you were filled with anticipation when ordering, and then the acute, profound joy of receiving. The experience of the first bite. A contract engaged: I have this delicious thing, I will find joy in eating this delicious thing. One received, mine.
You LOVE that ice cream cone.
Suddenly, it falls off the cone. There's a Bluey episode about this, for any parents reading; yes, I know it is melted ice cream, but the lost ice cream consequence remains remarkably consistent.
A dropped ice cream brings a range of feelings for a child: rage, crying, frustration, despair. Perhaps they seek comfort in shared experience: 'oh, I've had that happen to me' or perhaps a solution seeking moment: 'oh, let's get you a new one'. If an adult doesn't snow plow away the emotional experience, children watch as others move on to enjoy their treat, while feelings the sting of missing out.
You, as that child, GRIEVE that ice cream cone. Disappointment is an apt word - I know we're talking ice cream, so realistically we say 'I am so bummed it fell'... but the emotional journey is one of grief. And no, for goodness sake, if there is an ice cream party with extra ice cream, please give the kid the ice cream.
Even in this simple example, there lies a profound experience of knowing that we cannot replace that ice cream cone. We may get a new one, but that one... is gone. We each learn to navigate this disappointment differently. Ever wonder why toddlerhood can be so intense? Whelp, it's one big, unfiltered, experience of disappointment. We shape how we cope, our caregivers shape how we cope, the world shapes how we cope. But the earliest lessons of disappointment, OF GRIEF, have been learned.
We do ourselves a disservice when we do not allow the grief process to play out. I notice this most in adults, whom want to shelter their children from the hardships of life. I understand this, on so very many levels. However, we are wired to grieve. We learn it as early as we learn to enjoy ice cream.
Grief is oft under explained, oft misunderstood, following the broad interpretation of the work of psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969. Best known for the '5 Stages of Grief', Kübler-Ross's theory spread as blueprint for the grief experience (and the one shared generations). Those stages, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, absorbed other understandings of grief, and became the clinical model with which our modern world understood "On Death and Dying."
While ocean sized waves continue to shift this narrative, with the author herself going so far as to explain the over-application of theory, it is reasonable to want to a plan to grieve.
We CRAVE a plan. To be human is to accept swathes of uncertainty. Our time here is short, and to spend large amounts of it feeling anything other than HAPPY feels disgustingly unfair, does it not? And yet, that is what grief demands of us.
I have yet to meet anyone that's traversed a landscape of grief, and not come out the other side of the path a different version of self than the one that went in. And more than just "Thursday me is different than Monday me". Grief alters the landscape of the emotional experience. We have come to understand this biologically.
Sophia R. Evstigneev, Mary-Frances O’Connor, Frank H. Wilhelm, David Blum, George M. Slavich, Annina Seiler's 2025 review of neuro imaging demonstrates that grief changes the topography of the brain quite profoundly. Quite convincingly, that grief alters our brain: notably, in areas related to cognition, reward, and emotional regulation.
PLEASE find their article here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763425005366?via%3Dihub
Their work demonstrates Grief can permanently alter different regions of the brain
My brother passed away in 2021. He was a light - not easy, but then, I don't know any star to be easy.
Even now I want to eulogize him, but this is for me...
Grief is for the living, after all.
I have mourned my inability to explore my grief more visibly. I have not set up a 5K or an event. I have not stayed (consistently) in touch with those that love him. I haven't even really found ways to discuss him casually - it's either a crash into someone's orbit, or carefully omitted anti-gravity
I once saw an interview, NPR with Jack Antonoff, where he speaks to grief teaching him the importance of his decisions, of each moment being precious. He's also spoken elsewhere that grief is an acute lie-detector: when we are grieving, our decisions about WHAT REALLY MATTERS will never be so clear again.
His comments are elegant, well thought out. He's also 15-ish years deeper into the loss of a sibling than I am.
My experience remains much more.... feral.
I have no patience. I have no patience for people that appear unwilling to make changes for themselves that will make their lives better. I have no patience for social nonsense. I have no patience for the idea that there is TIME to do all of the things we want to do. And yet, I am ever patient.
I have no tolerance. I have no tolerance for those that cannot find compassion. I have no tolerance for the idea that we cannot give to each other what we so desperately need for ourselves. I have no tolerance for the aggressive, mind numbing, devastating cruelty may are capable of. And yet, I am ever tolerant.
I have longing. Craving. Desire. To be understood. To be seen, fully, in my humanity. To be tended, held, nurtured. And yet, I shy away.
I need immense amounts of time alone. Sinking into the depths of self, trenches of ocean that soothe even as they toss me. I am content inside my own waves, it is the waves of others that confuse me immeasurably.
I am temporal, and mutable, and slippery. I am extremes. I'm muted, loud, passive, violent all at once.
When I feel I have a handle on her, she slips away again, as to illustrate that these pieces of what it means TO BE are not yet mine to hold.
This is likely why I don't have a memorial foundation: I'd be better suited to a cave.
And here in, for this ramble, lies my angst: MY ice cream cone.
Nothing about my grief feels WRONG. In fact, it feels utterly, completely, RIGHT.
To feel less would be inhumane. To turn the dial up or down, would strangle. And yet.. and yet...
Where do we talk about this? Where do we talk about the range, the variety, the sheer audacity of grief in its ability to strip us down to the animals we are at our core?
I am temporal, and mutable, and slippery. I am extremes. I'm muted, loud, passive, violent.
And doesn't it, wildly and inconceivably, sound like the first moments of love?
What's fun here, for the sake of science: Love also modifies the regions of the brain associated with reward, motivation, and emotion regulation brain network (Song H, Zou Z, Kou J, Liu Y, Yang L, Zilverstand A, d'Oleire Uquillas F, Zhang X., 2015). So that's right, folks, they're not that far away from one another as the crow flies.
And yet, we place expectations upon it.
Some of these are simple, in their turn. The idea that romantic love, even the most soul-mate level, is destined to become marriage. Or that love inside of friendship lasts lifetimes. That parents will automatically love their child, and children in turn their parent.
We make the 'I love you' a statement of contract - once offered, to be returned. One defined, to last indefinitely, independent from the very changes that make us human.
Love as negotiation. Love as contract. Love as behavior modification. Love as a resource. Love as conditional.
Yet, we want love to exist in a bubble, away from the restrictions life places on us. And yet, we grieve these restrictions, day in and out.
The commodification of what it means to love has distorted us to what it means to actually feel love. To experience, give, grow, share, lose, mourn love. Rather, we have lumped love in with the very same feelings we avoid. And so, because being human is often very hard, we wrap it up in a cage. There, isn't this love safe, now?
But that wildness, oh that wildness, that's the heart of it all.
The beat that makes us seek out love, again and again, despite its promise that WE WILL MOURN THIS.
As we love, we will grieve. But, as *science (truly my brother would just appreciate that point) is able to show us.. the brain is insulated from grief by nothing other than LOVE. Love tends those areas, changes their function, insulates.
With that insulation, we can survive the loss of that love....
Should we remember that love is not ours to control, nor is grief. They're for us to hold, ever briefly.
And maybe, just maybe, to enjoy the sweetness like we would an ice cream cone.
Ya'll this is an imperfect literature review. I did my best here, in an article where I'm really just trying to wrap my head around why love and grief feel.. the same.
Cited works :
Martin, Rachel. (2024) How grief taught award-winning producer Jack Antonoff to be less cynical. NPR: retrieved
21/7/2026 from https://www.npr.org/2024/06/02/nx-s1-4987279/jack-antonoff-taylor-swift-wild-card-grief-music-producing
Song H, Zou Z, Kou J, Liu Y, Yang L, Zilverstand A, d'Oleire Uquillas F, Zhang X. Love-related changes in the
brain: a resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Front Hum Neurosci. 2015 Feb 13;9:71. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2015.00071. PMID: 25762915; PMCID: PMC4327739.
Sophia R. Evstigneev, Mary-Frances O’Connor, Frank H. Wilhelm, David Blum, George M. Slavich, Annina
Seiler,Grief and bereavement: A pre-registered systematic review of neuroimaging studies,Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, Volume 182, 2026, 106535, ISSN 0149-7634, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2025.106535.
