A couple days ago, I watched a video with Deb Roy, a scientist and MIT Professor, share a project that mapped the early language development of his son. The goal was to closely observe and model the language acquisition of his son over the first few years of his life. Roy and his team at MIT built a series of models which visually mapped out 90,000 hours of data, creating a landscape that they call “wordscapes”.
Part of the presented visualization was a line attached to each primary individual as they moved about their home, thousands, millions of threads weaving about, years of life summarized in what might feel like millions of inconsequential moments. Yet, those moments all make up a life, the precious, beautiful, irreplaceable moments we forget about.
Combine this model with what I’m learning about neural mapping, specifically how it relates to loss, and some things start to click into place.
Our brain does an incredible thing when it maps out our unique, individual world. The space inside our home is mapped out perfectly in our brain, if we came home and someone had moved the couch to the opposite side of the room, our brain would catch on this. It feels weird there, no I guess it looks ok, why did you move it?
If we apply this idea to loss, some things make a little more sense to me. The places in our lives that someone has inhabited, they’ve intricately woven themselves through our neural map. They are entwined through memory, stories, jokes, music, the small thing that pings a memory, then follows the thread back to the repeated, slamming realization of…they’re gone. Our minds have to remap our reality that this particular thread, is finished. It will never get longer, there will never be more.
When you lose someone you spend every day with, the neural mapping is incessant, constant, it’s completely overwhelming. Especially when loss comes suddenly, there is a period of shock where the mind follows string after string after string, all leading to the same location, its end. Yet, the mind slowly re-crafts our neural map to accommodate these changes, but it takes months, years. Everytime you hear a song, for the rest of your life, you may follow that thread to that memory. Certain scents, places, sounds, they’ll strum on the threads that are woven through you, and the vibrations of it will occasionally take your breath away.
I’m grateful for those that have woven themselves through the halls of my heart, some stands I wish I had more of, and some I wish I could rip out all together. Yet we are the sum of our parts, the cultivation of our experience, to love is to lose, that’s a guarantee. But is it worth it? To stand on the other side of loving someone, millions of strands abruptly tied off…
A long time ago I watched an elderly woman weaving a tapestry, her knobby, nimble fingers weaving strands upon strands together, creating something beautiful out of all these individual, multi-colored threads. Maybe that’s the point. In life, we have the opportunity to weave our lives together with others. Some sections of our tapestries will have a lot of one thread, until it runs out. We can always go back to it, run our hands lovingly against its slight imperfections, memorizing its texture, replaying the millions of moments that are represented there.
Grief is not linear. It does not occur in stages, it’s everything, everywhere, all at once. I wondered at first, if I would love someone again, if I could, if I wanted to. Yet what I realized is this, our lives, the breath in our lungs, it’s hope. It doesn’t matter if you’re facing a diagnosis, the death of someone you love(this 200% includes beloved animals), a divorce, or just a shit day at work.
The breath in your body IS your thread.
The breath in your body IS the continuation of your tapestry. You can’t rip out the parts that hurt or feel ugly, they are part of who you are. You can love the sections which you can’t get more of, because they’re concluded, precious and dearly valued. To love someone, for any length, is the greatest opportunity of a lifetime.
My opinion? Weave your tapestry and don’t be a chickenshit about it. Be brave, be bold, live honestly, live true. Surround yourself with the people you want woven through your life, because they will, and there’s a good chance some of it will hurt like hell.
You are worth every single beautiful, painful, wonderful, excruciating, blissful, wild, entangled moment.
Much love.
🤍KB
Video of Deb Roy, The Birth of a Word at TedTalk Conferences.
What you shared here in your painting-of-words helped give a visualization to the experience of losses of all kinds, to better understand them as grief, and why that grief ambushes suddenly, repeatedly, with (in the moment) no predictable pattern. It is that returning to the end of the thread, finding there is no more length, or that the thread has spliced at its end, and one portion is slowly interweaving with another tread, shaping itself into a new pattern within the tapestry that is each of our lives. What a gift it is to have you as a key, enduring thread in my tapestry.