The Scientist Behind Grief
- Naz Hernandez
- 5 days ago
- 10 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Trigger warning - Child/Infant Loss, Personal Account of Therapy
Did you know I was a doctor working in palliative care and old age medicine before I became me?- todays me I mean.
Yes, I was a wonderful doctor (I think…), I prepared countless people for the death of a loved one, taking time to explain, holding space for tears, and understanding the pain from the outside. I often shed my own tears for the losses that I empathised with and carried home — and the audacity to be grateful for my own peace and health.
In all of that, I was a scientist. I made sense of the individuals’ deaths through understanding why they were dying, that it could not be reversed. It gave me professional comfort to know I had done all that I could do to intervene, and the rest was out of my hands.
That is, until my own child died — Then something extraordinary happened. All the past pains I had seen suddenly flew into full HD colour, my body exploding with emotions I had never experienced before. I was quite literally paralysed with pain. If I stopped to think about the loss of my son, I could feel the contours of my heart cracking and tearing. I have never been so aware of my own anatomy. My breath would stop and I would shut down. Sat in front of the silent TV wishing for the moments to end.
It has taken me the best part of four years to understand what happened to me and why. Four years (going on almost five) for the scientist in my brain to explain to me that there was nothing more we could do — yet there will always be a quiet ROAR of anger that mutely shouts ‘but what if we had waited? ‘. The context for this being my son died of post-operative complications after a high-risk surgery — the science tells me that the doctors prepared me that he might die — I heard only that he might live. I wonder what would have happened if we had just waited, just one more day, before that surgery — would the outcome have been different?
When you first start counselling or therapy for grief they will tell you to stop wondering about the ‘what ifs’. It’s true they can drive you mad but personally I feel that the ‘what ifs’ give you a perverse hope to keep going with your grief and process what has happened. I also hated counselling because either the person was very fixated on their own experience of grief or they had never really been through it, and seemed too happy a person.
How are you meant to you explain sadness to someone who has never truly experienced sadness before? You can’t bring them into your sadness because that would be cruel yet, there you are alone in something greater than the word sadness could ever encompass.
Well despite all of that depressing introduction, my truth is it did get easier to hold the grief. It’s not because it went away, but a combination of becoming a different version of yourself that is built on top of your loss and how you make sense of what you experienced. Who that person will become is an enigma and a highly personal story to tell.
I want to share with you the core things that helped me understand myself — stop blaming myself and truly be kind to myself — and I don’t mean stuffing my face with cakes as being a kindness; but eating a piece of cake and enjoying the sensation is the kindness, or not chastising yourself for being rude to someone who inadvertently triggered you; giving yourself a real celebratory ‘high five’ when you got out of bed, when all you wanted to do was shut the world out. I didn’t always receive the same kindness from others because no-one in the outside world will even notice these things and their pride can be hurt by your pain. The least we can do is give this kindness to ourselves. Let go of your human mistakes.
Now, I still have a way to go in understanding grief and I know I am but one person’s perspective — I have a husband who went through identical experiences to me and from where I stand very little has changed in his daily routines — he carries few words for how it affected him but I see him feel it deeply. Against what felt natural, I have only recently given up ownership of his grief, for it is not mine and he doesn’t owe me a justification for how it sits.
As a couple, that has been a hard pill to swallow.
Full Cup or Half Cup?
The first thing I found nuance in, is the phrase ‘my cup is overflowing’. For the average Joe this equates to the overwhelm of holding it all together. When the cup overflows it is often a result of overwork, discrete complications added into our personal lives (sickness or house renovations), and emotional burdens. Together they cause us to burn out. Looking back on my career as a doctor I was consecutively burnt out and never truly had rest before going back to work. I remember the sensation that I had to keep moving to keep all the balls in the air and I was proud to do so. What then completely flummoxed me in grief was being sat on the sofa with nothing more than a new-born sleeping soundly on my lap and my cup was overflowing continuously. My counsellor described it as being a volcano with the magma bubbling under the surface, but the concept is the same. The idea that your grief fills the cup so that you can’t hold any more. You then have to remove as much as is feasible to stop this volcano from boiling over.
I found this helpful to visualise why I couldn’t cope with the smallest of tasks and the sensation of being on fire all over.
Recognise Trauma when you have it
Perhaps when we become first-time parents we all experience a similar loss of identity. We grieve our previous self. Of course, I’m only able to speak from this mother’s perspective, but we change — our bodies, our hormones, the sleep deprivation, being off work and so forth. We all find ways to claw back our former self and the Millennials I know prioritise balance so they can keep space to be themselves, despite the odds stack against them with modern day parenting. This is the parent I was and I thrived with my first daughter doing it all — not perfectly — but giving it a good go.
When my son died, something else entirely happened. I could not understand who I had become. I was so afraid in the first weeks after his death that I would call my best friend and ask her to stay with me as I walked up the stairs to bed. I made my husband get up in the middle of the night to check all the doors and windows, sometimes twice. I was so afraid to get out of bed that I had flashbacks to childhood hiding under my sheets praying that ghosts were not real.
My heart rate would jump to 130 bpm if I got in a car — I got a speeding ticket — I could not bear to talk to strangers and leaving the house became a real ‘event’. I once was on the phone to a psychologist for an assessment and I spoke about what happened. I thought I was on that call for 20 minutes — it turned out to be 2 hours and I was incredibly disorientated by this. I could not understand how that could be possible. I ruminated over the fact I had blacked out for awhole day and night, until I googled the only thing I realised it could be…
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
I lost my sense of self because I was no longer myself. I was afraid of my own shadow and I didn’t know whether it would ever get better. Happiness seemed something that I would never be able to feel again in the purity that I knew it before. It is still true that every happy moment holds hands with sadness.
I learnt that typical trauma takes 6–8 weeks to resolve on its own but that if symptoms persist after that you should seek psychological help. I eventually self-referred and underwent Eye-Movement Desensitisation Therapy (EMDR) or as I like to call it: Voodoo Therapy. I can write more about this at a later date as it deserves its own chapter.
EMDR helped me get back in control of my symptoms but caveat it with the fact that even magic takes time. It took a couple of years to go through the process [recognise it was needed, get referred, get a therapist, then 12 weeks of sessions etc. etc.]
Typical Grief
Intermingled with the trauma symptoms I was also grieving typically — the swings of loss that hit you out of nowhere, bargaining, questioning life. I landed in an existential crisis, which I have not gotten over [I can be quite nihilistic these days although gain comfort that my children are blissfully ignorant and I can be part of creating ‘The Matrix’ for their lives]
I learnt that Grief is not linear — best described by the stone in your shoe — it is ever present but sometimes moves into a position that makes it possible to walk normally, then an unexpected step drives it sharply into your foot and the pain floors you. Else, the hole that is in the fabric of your life and the hole does not get smaller but as time passes you create memories that weave around it, until one day your life is bigger than the hole.
Child/Infant loss in particular, has its own twisted extra kick in proverbial sense of self, whereby as a mother you have been attached to said individual for 9 months and blessed with a discrete amount of time afterwards. Our job is to grow this child into an independent being, which in typical parenthood starts with every separation milestone. It hurts us to do so but we do them with a quiet sense of pride. The first day at nursery, the first night out without them, school, university etc. etc. We continue these milestones until they fly the nest, having separated our ‘selves’ to an adequate degree from the child by 18 years. However in infancy, the child is as close to being you as it is possible for another human to be. So when they die, you feel it as if it was you. They cry and you cry, they get cut by the surgeon, you get cut by the surgeon. So, when my son died I quite literally felt dead — and could not understand how I was meant to carry on living.
Added to this was the fact that I was a doctor and at no point did I truly believe he was actually going to die. I was wrong. So now, who was I as a doctor? I was used to predicting outcomes for patients and I could not even do that right for my own son. What a fake.
Well this is the narrative of a brain wracked by grief. Who could I unburden to but a series of therapists who could never out-manoeuvre my logic. The truth is we have to understand and rationalise these things for ourselves. Find comfort and be kind to ourselves to find peace. By find peace, I mean accepting that you are now living without a child who you thought would grow old.
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
Have a look at the diagram - I won't describe it in full but it essentially shows how our sense of self builds upon our basic human needs first.
It seems obvious once on paper, but when you’re in the thick of adulthood, its useful to be reminded that you are indeed just human. As time has gone on I have more kindness for myself. I realise that shortly after birthing the twins my physiological needs were compromised due to being post-natal and having a C-Section, my safety needs were compromised by a traumatic and sudden loss of a child (I have failed to mention that the son I lost was an identical twin and that his surviving brother then went on to have the same heart surgery at the age of 3 — SPOILER he survived! A story for another day). Although I had love and belonging my self-esteem as a doctor was shot to bits and as a mother it was precarious.
Needless to say sitting on the sofa and staring at the wall for the best part of a year was the correct response. It recalibrated my nervous system and allow my body to heal. Understanding this removed one big part contributing to my overflowing cup — the guilt and self-blame.
Japanese philosophies
In response to my aforementioned existential crisis, I discovered the concepts of Ikigai (your reason for being) , Kintsugi (art of repairing broken things with gold) , Kaizen (incremental improvement), Wabi-Sabi (beauty in imperfection) and Gaman (enduring hardship). The latter helped met to understand that there is a romanticised approach to grief that benefits society rather than the individual. We have to challenge our own inner stoic at times.
Essentially, what I love about Japanese philosophy is that outcomes are not as important as getting there in the ‘right’ way. Live the process, be present in the moment. To be honest it was easier for me to manifest than I imagine it is for many people holding it all together, because I had already fallen apart. The only way forward for me was to live in the present, one foot in front of the other. There is a lack of answers for what lies ahead for me and my family, but all I know is that right now I want to write. So here I am living the philosophy that brought me thus far . Do what is needed and nothing else.
About Naz
I’m a former doctor with a background in palliative care, geriatrics and general medicine. I am now exploring life through writing and reflection. I write about grief, loss, healing, and living life with two children and a husband. I share my personal journey in the hope it helps others feel seen, understood, and a little less alone.
We started our not-for-profit, Cafelias, in memory of Elias, our son. Our aim is to help reduce the isolation of being a special needs parent, childloss and being a disability family. Did you know we also weekly run groups for SEND children in partnership with OXFSN? click the link find out more.
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