The ‘neurological we,’ when those we love are gone

By Margery Irvine

Margery Irvine.

We are now eight squares on a laptop screen. Not so long ago we were 10. And before that, 10 eighteen-year-olds, all dressed up to be dropped off at our freshman dorm in September, 1960.

For a while, we met periodically in New England cities and towns for dinner and overnights. But as driving became more of a chore, and impossible for some of us, we have resorted to Zoom. Although the actual reunions have stopped, the virtual ones have become more frequent, because we realize that the years ahead will be increasingly difficult.

Two of our number have died; three are living alone, their husbands having died. 

We’ve weathered divorce, illness, surgery; one of us is caring for a grandchild. What we can offer now is pretty much what we offered 65 years ago: being present for each other, if only in cyberspace rather than in Lewiston, Maine.

All of us, at a certain age, begin to practice what Elizabeth Bishop called “The Art of Losing.” Is it lucky to outlive spouses and friends? Beats me. But whether or not it’s lucky, at a certain point, it’s inevitable. 

So I’ve been thinking about loss lately, and the older I get, and the more I lose, the less I know what that means. Well, corporeal presence, sure, but I can’t help thinking about how, in every way except the physical, the missing from life are still around us.

Take my father (but not in the Henny Youngman sense). Not only do I see his hands when I look at the ends of my arms and his hair when I look in the mirror, but I hear his voice and his laugh as often I did when he was alive.

Dad was a great one for telling stories, but he was always forgetting the exactly right story for the occasion. So he kept a list of punchlines he called his “cheat sheet” in his breast pocket.

Ever since he died, some 15 years ago, we’ve taken the cheat sheet (saved by one of my sons and digitized for the rest of us) and attempted to recreate what came before the punch line. You can imagine the laughte–and also imagine his presence among us, a very happy ghost.

Because of Dad’s stories, we have a family shorthand and regularly say, “It’s only a hobby” or “You people all are alike” or “It couldn’t hurt,” silently filling in the story that came before. We never ever say, though, “So far, so good,” because that’s what the man who had jumped out of the 40th-story window said as he passed the 10th floor.

So if the dead are in our genes and in our stories, woven into the fabric of our everyday lives, is there any other way in which they manifest? 

Well, yes, science tells us, there is. It’s called “the neurological we,” and it’s a bond created, in part, by the neurotransmitters oxytocin and dopamine, the former creating trust and attachment and the latter the reward system.

If, then, our brains are hard-wired to form bonds, why would we think that wiring would simply dissolve when someone’s body dissolves? My memories of my dad convince me that, although changed, that bond remains.

The part of me that flunked calculus, that can’t tell a neuron from an amoeba, tells me the bond is in my heart. AI tells me it’s in my hypothalamus, Ventral Tegmental Area, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex. 

Well, you may say, cold comfort that. But memories keep us warm.

For the present, we go on in our Hollywood Squares. When I was in my twenties, the very thought of my “square” someday being empty made me hyperventilate. Now? I have faith that I’ll hang around in the neurological we for a while, and in stories, and in laughs. And as Andrea Gibson writes, in her poem “Love Letter from the Afterlife,” “Dying is the opposite of leaving.”

—Irvine lives in Brooklin.