Dying of a broken heart

How grieving can lead to manic behavior

I recently read in Grief is Love about the residual effects of grief, especially in immediate cases, when the death of a loved one happened very recently. Marisa Renee Lee noted that mourning the loss of a loved one could also lead to major depressive episodes (obviously), but also anxiety and even manic and psychotic episodes.

I am sitting with that, and reflecting on my brother’s behavior after my mother died. And after he was served divorce papers soon thereafter.

There were isolated moments, and in reflection with my closest friends and some family members, I realize that he acted manic, what we used to call manic depressive, which I now understand to be a form of bipolar disorder. Communications with him and interactions with him were characterized by extreme highs and extreme lows.

On many encounters he could be laughing in an intense loudness. He reminded me of my father after drinking—obnoxious and almost farcically over the top. Then, during immediate points, thereafter, he would be sobbing, over my mother, or over his marital relationship or how his marriage was ending. I witnessed many of these extreme highs and lows in only the few days before my mother’s funeral.

A little over a month later he was dead.

I am fairly certainly some of it was also unprocessed grief and trauma from my father’s suicide and the example/model he set in how to deal with this pain and to exit it.

Without judgment, I get it the repression part. I was in the middle of a doctoral program that took priority and tending to my mother’s PTSD and emotional, mental and physical decline, whereas Jeremie was completing higher education and also had a new baby a year later. I don’t think either one of us processed or grieved, had the appropriate healing and therapy that we needed after my father’s completion of suicide.

But the point is—that quote made me realize just how powerful our emotions of grief and the great sadness from bereavement. I grow more and more convinced that our emotions are so much more powerful than western mindsets/medicine would like us to believe in terms of their effects on how overall health.

As I dig deeper into learning about biofield tuning, the more I realize the power and potential of emotions and their impact on our health, our relationships, how we take up space and exist in the world, how we vibrate with frequency from them…And how if we stuff them down, repressing them, they harm our health, since our bodies and minds cannot separate emotional pain from physical pain, our brains react similarly. Other fields note this as well.

But now, after my own healing and self reflection, I am sitting with how my brother, bereaved and heartbroken, was certainly manic. I wonder if it is a symptom of untreated mental illness, or pain, or—probably most realistically—the fluid barriers and interconnectedness of the two.

The decision of my brother to complete suicide was certainly not the result of one thing, much like I learned in the metaphor of those who complete suicide that their cup runs over. To claim it to be the cause of just one thing or the last thing is to dishonor his pain and experiences and to think I could possibly know what he endured. It is to short-change his complex and intricate story.

But, in making the decision to end his life, I can’t help but sit with how important it is for people to pain and the emotional grief that is heartbreak, that is deep and life-changing loss, like of your parents and marriages ending.

I dwell with this in order to learn from his experiences, to talk about them, to consider them, not to get caught in the hamster wheel, loop of guilt and despair. But, it also could definitely play a part in considering why someone makes the decision to end their life, and this may be small but important parts of the puzzle of how to prevent similar tragedies from happening in the future.