Nicole Evans
20/11/25
Love, biologically and emotionally, is our deepest human need. Love is our biological glue, built into our brains and bodies through oxytocin (my favourite neurotransmitter), dopamine, and attachment systems that shape our sense of safety and identity.
So when we lose them, we don’t just miss them. We feel like we are missing a part of ourselves.
This is why grief feels so destabilizing. As Neuroscientist Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor explains in her brilliant TEDx talk and her book The Grieving Brain, our brain’s prediction systems still expect our loved one to walk through the door, to wag their tail (losing a pet hurts so much) or to laugh at our bad jokes. Grief is our brain’s process of re-learning the world without them. And it hurts. Really hurts. But grief is love with nowhere to go.
Grief is not linear. It’s not a checklist or a task to be completed. It’s messy, cyclical, and deeply human. Sometimes it is gentle, other times it crashes. Like waves. But always, it is a measure of how deeply we have loved.
In our ConnectedLE workshops, we often remind teams: control what you can. But heartbreak? Loss? Those are the things we cannot control.
However, we can learn to navigate them with grace. Grace is choosing to keep going when everything hurts. It’s allowing yourself to cry. I always tell my medical students that is okay to cry, if they are moved by what is happening, they just need to get their emotions under control and not make grief their own. They are human and humans feel for others.
Tears are a release. To remember. To laugh, and not feel guilty. It’s learning to carry love forward, even when the person is gone.
Let me offer you this:
Take a quiet moment.
Place a hand on your heart and one on your belly.
Breathe in for 2 counts. Breathe out for 4. Through your nose.
Now, bring to mind someone you’ve lost – a person, a pet, even a relationship that ended.
Visualise them. Hear their voice. Feel their presence.
Notice what arises – warmth, ache, tears.
This is love. Still here. Still yours.
And it is okay to feel this way.
1. To love is to risk.
2. To grieve is to honour that risk.
3. Healing is not forgetting – it’s remembering with gentleness
And in time, that grief becomes something softer. It becomes your strength, your empathy, your compassion. It teaches you how to love more
fiercely, more presently, more bravely.
This week has reminded me: we grieve deeply because we have loved deeply.
And that, in the end, is something beautiful.