Heal with Marj

10/30/2026

10/28/2026

Put down the bag of worries that you are carrying forward with you into this new day.
And set down the sack of regrets that you’ve been dragging along behind you for as long as you can remember.

It is all so heavy.
And carrying it so far for so long is crushing you.

The worries are a future that may not happen and the regrets are a past that is gone.
And you are not there.
You are here, in the present.
Don’t be pulled so far backwards or forwards that you forget to live here.

Don’t be kept so paralysed by fear of the future and pieces of the past that you avoid the now.

So even if it’s only for a short while,
even if it’s only for a moment.
Put it down.

Put it all down.

*****

Becky Hemsley 2024
Amazing artwork by Caitlin Connolly

This is a poem from my collection, Words to Remember: https://amzlink.to/az0n9rRJWldGj
(affiliate link)

10/10/2026

🚨 According to Research about our Brain :

This is for the person who is still waiting for a goodbye that is not coming.

Who did not get the conversation. Who did not get the acknowledgment of what was real. Who did not get the specific and human recognition from the person who mattered most that what they shared existed and mattered and deserved more than the silence or the disappearance or the inadequate and insufficient ending that it received.

Who is still, in some part of the interior that the functional daily life does not always reach, waiting. Not for the person to return necessarily. For the recognition. For the acknowledgment. For the goodbye that would have allowed the story to have an ending rather than simply a stopping.

Who has found that the waiting for the acknowledgment from the other person has been one of the most persistent features of the aftermath. More persistent sometimes than the grief for the person themselves. The specific and particular longing not for the relationship but for the recognition that it was real and that its ending deserved more than what it got.

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio at the University of Southern California, whose research on how the brain processes incomplete significant experiences found that unresolved significant relationship endings maintain an active processing status in the emotional and narrative memory systems, found the grounding for the persistence of the waiting.

The brain, Damasio found, requires some form of genuine conclusion to complete the filing of significant emotional experience. The conclusion does not have to come from the original person. It does not have to be the specific acknowledgment that the experience deserved. But it has to be genuine and it has to come from somewhere.

Researcher Robert Neimeyer at the University of Memphis, whose work on grief and meaning-making found that the most effective closures following relationship losses that did not receive adequate endings were self-generated rather than externally provided, found the specific and available path forward.

The closure you have been waiting for cannot arrive from the person who withheld it. Not because they are necessarily cruel. Because the closure was never located in them. It was always located in you. In your own capacity to construct the ending that the situation did not provide.

To write the letter that will not be sent. To say the goodbye out loud to no one but the air. To construct from everything you know the most honest available account of what was real and what it meant and what it deserved and to give that account the specific and deliberate ending that the relationship itself did not receive.

That ending is yours to build. It is genuinely available. And the building of it does not require their participation.
It only requires yours.

06/19/2026

🚨 According to Research about our Brain :

This is for the person who lost someone and felt like the world expected them to recover on a timeline that made no sense for what they were actually experiencing inside.

Who went back to work too soon because life does not pause. Who smiled when they needed to because other people were uncomfortable with the depth of what they were carrying.

Who felt moments of forgetting followed immediately by the weight of remembering and felt guilty for both.

Who wondered if what they were feeling was normal because nothing about it felt survivable and yet somehow they were still surviving it.

What you went through was not just emotional.

It was one of the most profound neurological events the human brain can experience.

And the science behind it deserves to be treated with the same seriousness as the loss itself.

Neuroscientist Mary-Frances O’Connor at the University of Arizona has dedicated her career to studying what happens inside the brain during grief and her research, captured in her landmark work The Grieving Brain, revealed something that changes everything about how we should understand and treat people who are mourning the loss of someone they loved.

When someone we love dies the brain does not simply register an emotional loss. It experiences something closer to a fundamental disruption of its operating system. O’Connor found that the brain of a grieving person shows significant changes in the prefrontal cortex, the reward system, and critically the regions responsible for what neuroscientists call the internal model of the world.

Throughout a close relationship the brain builds a detailed predictive model of the other person their presence, their patterns, their role in the architecture of daily life. This model becomes deeply embedded in the brain’s moment to moment functioning. It anticipates them. It expects them. It has organized thousands of automatic predictions around their continued existence in your world.

When that person dies the model does not update immediately. The brain continues generating predictions of their presence expecting to hear their voice, expecting to see them in familiar places, expecting the thousand small confirmations of their existence that the relationship had always provided.

And then reality delivers the absence instead. Over and over. In a process O’Connor describes as the brain slowly and painfully learning a new reality that every part of it was built around contradicting.

This is why grief comes in waves rather than a straight line. Why you can feel almost normal one moment and completely devastated the next.

Why certain places, songs, smells, or times of day hit differently than others because those were the coordinates where the brain’s model of that person was most active, most expected, most embedded.

The wave is not a setback. It is the brain encountering another moment where its old model expected someone who is no longer there.

Research by neuroscientist George Bonanno at Columbia University tracked thousands of bereaved people across years and found that grief does not follow the stages most people have been taught. It is non-linear, deeply individual, and significantly shaped by the nature of the relationship, the circumstances of the loss, and the social support available in the aftermath.

There is no correct way to grieve and no correct timeline. The brain is doing something enormously complex rebuilding an entire model of reality from the inside and that process cannot be rushed by will or expectation.

What O’Connor’s research ultimately found was both sobering and deeply hopeful. The brain is capable of integrating loss without erasing it. Grief does not end with forgetting the person or diminishing how much they mattered. It ends or rather transforms when the brain successfully builds a new model of the world that holds the reality of the loss and the continued meaning of the person within it simultaneously. When the absence becomes part of the architecture rather than a disruption of it.

They do not disappear from your brain. They are reorganized within it. And that reorganization, as painful as it is, is the brain’s most profound act of love for someone it was built around.

You are not supposed to be over it.

You are supposed to be changed by it.

And you are. In ways that will take time to fully understand and that carry the shape of everything that person meant to you.