A Geography Of Loss
“…you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on…”
Aug 27, 2026
we’re never so close to the other realm as when a loved one crosses into it
I made a commitment to write at least every other Wednesday relative to Navigational Mind. I missed last week due to heartbreak. Maybe someday I’ll write in more detail about this person I love and his unexpected death, but tonight I wouldn’t get through it if I tried, so I’ll write this in a tone that will keep me from collapsing. To be honest though, it feels impossible to send any message here simply because I know he will not receive it. Maybe that’s one reason to write it; to break through that wall. He was one of my first subscribers after all, and the last time I saw him, he made a point of telling me that he reads every post. This is the first one he won’t get.
Coming to terms with his absence has not been possible. Will it ever be? Some say it gets easier. Some say it doesn’t. All I know is the kaleidoscope has turned. I’m in a different state of coherence than the last time I wrote. The cliches are true. I’m forever changed. Loss really is another geography. It has different textures, different colors, a different vibration. Even weirder, it’s also the same world as before. All this was always here but now another realm is unlocking. How many other such realms exist? What sorts of pain and beauty are people carrying that I haven’t had the capacity to handle yet? Memory and love are about mattering, but are such portals bearable when they shift?
“…you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on…”[1]
Our closeness was the kind of closeness you take for granted because it was always there. It never had to be earned. Even when mistakes were made it was never in question because it wasn’t questionable. Our norm was synchronicity. I’d think of him and pick up my phone to text him only to see that he had just texted me. The other side of this conversation has grown quiet, at least in the usual channels. If I were to write him, no one would text back. I can no longer call him, see him, hear his voice, sit beside him at the dinner table or on the couch. Have I lost what was special about our relationship? No. Still, I’ve lost something profound.
Whatever we were, whatever he was, has only become more potent since his death.
This is not something I could have expected, or something I can explain, but (having studied neuroscience) it does give me a new understanding of the explanatory power in thinking of the brain as a ‘predictive engine’; such theories have become intimate. A big part of me just keeps on going as if this hasn’t happened yet. I still pick up my phone to write to him. I still take pictures to share with him (or at least I think about taking them before catching myself). I still expect that he will be there if I call.
This is what Mary-Frances O’Connor (The Grieving Brain) writes about as the implicitly bone-deep model our bodies build of one another1, one that persists and feels reachable long after it makes sense, encoding us with what she calls the ‘here, now and close’. That’s why I still come into the room and expect to see him sitting there. Or why I still make plans with him in mind. Or why every time I remember he died, it shocks me.
Still, I don’t think ‘prediction’ is the right word for this (at least not at this somatic level). Rather, it is that we are aligned with all we encounter in ways that tend to keep to that inertia (and even to have to keep to it) for us to find our way. Changing these deep alignments is more potent than any psychedelic or hallucinogenic could be. But it’s harder because we are not tripping and so we have to continually realize our world really is no longer aligned as it once was. Grief cannot be explained by prediction error if you are experiencing it, but that term and its associated models help more than one might expect. Mostly because they show this is natural, that it’s a part of how your body copes—the world is simply stock full of strong priors when you are in a geography of loss. People who lose partners, for example, often report hearing voices of their loved ones or feeling the mattress shift or catching a whiff of their perfume in the hall.
A 1971 study by W.D. Rees found that this sort of thing happens to about half of all widows, but most people (at least back then) were afraid to admit it for fear people would think they were going mad. Or maybe for fear that they really were going mad, for in a geography of loss, madness can feel like it’s just an eyelash away. Considering all this via ‘prediction error’ helps to legitimize it and take that stigma away. If you can think of the body as a predictive machine, you better understand how those old scripts continue to play even after the scene has changed. Might it also explain those ‘sensed presences’ that solo sailors and mountaineers report under duress, or the ‘third man’ walking beside the exhausted hiker, or the fourth companion Shackleton’s party felt when crossing South Georgia?
Perhaps considering memory and its close link with imagination is a better way of understanding how a geography of loss is also one of finding new strength.
Another way of understanding the unusual physics of the geography of loss is to consider how much of our own self and experience we offload onto others or that others hold for us or that we hold for them, just by holding our form, just by mattering for them.
Daniel Wegner talks about this as ‘transactive memory’ whereby our relations, families and social groups become bodies that hold much of the memory and cues and overall associative scripts for one another so that when you are together you literally have more access to your own mind than you would when alone.
To push that further, as I do in my work, we could even think of intimate and long-lasting relationships as extended minds. Isn’t this also a bit of what memory is when it is passed down through generations?
Looking at the messages on my phone and seeing the message channel with his name on it, seeing his little photo (a deer and its fawn; a photo I took when we were together in a forest cabin and later sent to him), I feel all of the above.
In Book IV of the Confessions, Augustine writes about this sharp phenomenological grief in his mourning of a great friend of his youth. The places he had shared with his friend are a torment to him now because he keeps expecting to see that friend everywhere and yet every time must remember the loss and experience the shock of it again; factus eram ipse mihi magna quaestio.
A geography of loss is not a place you want to stay but it does draw you in. It does not deal in the same metrics or mediums as anything you’ve felt previously, or at least this is how it has been so far for me. A piece of the puzzle has moved, shifting all old alignments into strange vibrancies, threatening me with beauty that is not neat or symmetrical or practiced or purchasable and seems to exist eternally exactly because it can never be grasped.
Time and space in such landscapes cannot be described by an ordinary order. As the poet and philosopher Denise Riley expresses it in Time Lived, Without Its Flow, a book she wrote after her adult son unexpectedly and suddenly passed away, there is a moving but also arrested present and you are moving and arrested with it, standing outside the before-and-after world that all the others around you are still taking for granted. In such a geography, you have to realize that any talk of ‘before’ or ‘after’ has only ever been an attempt to make sense of a vastness that cannot be held between any binaries.
Eternity is also the fragility of the present, so you only know both at once. And being able to do this, or having to do this, as one must when in a geography of loss, is both crushing and empowering. As Riley writes. “You are cut down, and yet you burn with life.” This is the liminal and it is the threshold and the goal and the path all at once and beyond any one direction.
We crave this liminality and we can barely handle it. In fact, life itself might be all about helping one another better learn how to handle it, for if we can, we can cross many a new threshold. Whole other sorts of lives and communities and scared spaces are possible and we have hardly gotten a taste of what could be if we started to help one another with this. When you are in a geography of loss looking back at the earth from its moon, you know it is worth it. How can you continue to remember and imagine that way without having to endure such constant pain?
Grief defamiliarizes what it means to exist and I hope some part of this can be brought out into the other worlds of my life. Certainly it has already alerted me to a whole other community of people who have been here and who are much stronger than I’d ever noticed before joining them to explore this shared land.
Exploring a geography of loss is never voluntary and it is not something I would ever have willed and yet it is attractive at least in its confirmation of another realm. Lives and bodies are always numinous but most of us are not yet able to handle the power in that; loss forces us to handle it, at least for a bit, though perhaps some still cannot. I feel myself wanting to describe it as ‘the darkest brightest light’.
Being here has reminded me of how much others bear, and of how little I likely notice that they are enduring such hardship. Not because I don’t want to notice, but because it’s not something one can notice easily just by looking, at least not as time goes by. I doubt many who pass me on the street have any idea that I am in a whole other geography now.
We live in different chords and keys and when certain seed alignments shift, so too does the resonance of the entire composition.
“I just became a father last year,” someone said to me as means of condolence; it was his way of expressing how he too had felt another geography recently. The beginnings and the ends are always already there. Our songs are continuing even as they are just beginning and never coming to any end.
What part of these songs we hear depends on a million nuanced notes and shifts. Each beat of the day happening from all the many layers of voices and instruments on all sides and in all directions—all this becomes the music that is the geography. And each note is part of reams of possible scores, all of them playing, though not all of them part of the reading flow of the hour. We are ourselves pages of spectrums possible in every direction and this same world can be experienced in many different registers, experienced differently by each body and by the ways bodies in relation create new tones. The same note crosses many worlds and is part of many such songs simultaneously; it can be sad for one and ecstatic for another with each sounding.
What am I saying?
I am saying that grief is a mode of perception.
I am saying that grief is another way of moving and sensing with the world.
I am saying that loss widens the body as the ongoing portal it always is for a time, widens so wide we cannot ignore that it is a threshold, cannot doubt the symphonies exist. Closeness means never being able to fully mend the wound. Being wounded means always being the portal itself. Even if this is only one of many ongoing melodies; with grief, we have to tune in.
Even so, much of the day may be passed in other realms. This is how I can be shocked each time I remember that he is gone. I still know him, still know exactly who he is; I still sense exactly how his presence is unique from all others and how that cannot be put into words. In a very real way, he is still here as everywhere when I enter that geography. There is no representation—no image, no sentence or word or expression in any language—that could describe the feeling I have of him, nothing could capture it, and yet I imagine it will endure as long as I can. This is so curious. How we know what cannot be represented and what does not leave. Portals can be wounds, but they don’t always have to be.
It is the body that is the way and the truth and the life. Memory is the dynamic sediment of attention that we bestow on future imaginations. Sudden loss shifts the parameters of what is possible for memory and imagination at once.
What I did not expect was that it would expand that potential as much as it forced me to accept its severing. What I did not expect was that it would show me what it means to experience what had been binaries (memory/imagination, life/death) as a sphere of fractals unfolding into other spheres, themselves all mattering, becoming, care, themselves potential melodies and scores—an expression of the constellatory. Care is also a place.
What I did not understand before this, even though I’d likely said something similar, was how bodily everything that matters really is, and how the body does not stop or start any more than a song does—even when it’s not being played, it’s always there. It’s there so long as anyone anywhere can recall any part of it, or so long as any one of its notes is still part of any other song, and all songs are made of notes that transcend their own form.
In losing proximity to the body of someone, what do we lose? I have often discussed mind as ecological but I was missing something—it is body that is ecological; mind is nothing without body, and body is not the form but the mattering. To really understand that the body is ecological is to understand that its mattering is never contained in any one form. It’s in every note it has ever been.
The body is everywhere that presence matters. What is mourned becomes the land. That we put our dead into earth or spread their bodies into the water and earth and air seems quite profound right now. That every culture has taken this diffuse mystical opening and given it an address. That the dead go somewhere as land itself, to some other land.
Grief can be a landscape.
But it is also how relations go on mattering even when form doesn’t. Bodies are ecological in a very radical sense. They go beyond the form we name them with. Bodies are what matter in the sense of coming into being (as matter) and of what we care about and towards—and it this mattering that lasts and becomes part of other bodies, other songs, other scores, continuing the notes of what will only be songs so long as we walk them into paths again.
Mind is a body’s way of moving through landscapes, encounters, be those emotional or geographical or any other familiar set of regularities we lump together under recognizable representations so as to communicate. The representations never matter but we use them to communicate about what does matter and what matters beyond form and we create new matter through our communicative use of them.
Another way of probing this is to ask: Can I make land of this grief? Can I find the body (not the form) in the mattering all around me? Can I shape the love and thought I long to share but can no longer give directly as I once did into an ecology that is still connected to the ways he matters here? Is this some matter woven from the leaves, clouds and cold rivers we swim within?
Then the geography is also a way through loss without getting over it. Landscapes become natural givens that layer with memory, myth and imagination the more life matters to us. We cannot separate nature and love or nature and family or nature and relation to any life. Still, we do not create it; we layer with it the more we matter to one another while we are here.
Mattering is not what sediments into place, but what creates the tectonics and paints the colors of that unforgettable sunset. It is the work of the body that minds into mattering and becomes the place we long to visit and learn to better notice, and to care for; it’s where we become strong enough to handle our inner geography, and a portal into what we have not thought possible yet. The mountain, the river, the sacred grove—these are portals for remembering and imagining the potential in relation.
When writing of his wife’s death in A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis talked about her absence as the sky spread over everything. Taking the mattering of bodies as ecological gives that entire statement a different resonance.
When in Finland recently to speak at a workshop about mattering, I came upon the oral folk poetry of Karelia, the Kalevala. This poetry is deeply entangled with lakes and forests; encountering it felt like being given a map through this geography of loss.
There is the Aino story, for example, where the tears of the mother form the rivers and lakes, and the rivers and lakes are love mattering, a hydrology of grief. There is the beauty of the black swan. There is the death of Lemminkäinen, a child killed and torn asunder, thrown into the river of Tuonela (which I take to be death itself, or the underworld). His mother refuses this fate, however, and rakes that river till she has gathered all the pieces of her son. She is then able to reassemble them with the help of bees and honey. The body is the honey and the bees and the river become the glue of grief, the power of the mother and her wild care. You will also come to matter perhaps through the sap of trees and the zig zagging melodies of birds.
What is mourned is already the mattering. Making the poem or the post is what pulls us back from death. Grief is not resolved through consoling ourselves or others but through work of the memory which is work of the imagination as well. What might seem like indifferent nature is what comes, through love, to matter most in this world.2
All photos are snapshots I took of Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory (1995) which happened to be on my desk this week.
[1] The final sentence of Samuel Beckett’s 1953 novel The Unnamable. I’m pretty sure I saw Samuel Beckett on the bus uptown in NYC once, though of course it would have had to have been his ghost.
Listen to the audio at:
https://youtu.be/DiDCrfFe410?si=n5O25GGm2hCI-P1I
Footnotes
we don’t actually have models in our heads but rather we form aligned interactions that cue via automaticity
the Navigational Approach to Mind
May 17
Mind is the navigational action of the body; it is first and always bodily.
I heard a tawny owl in the forest just as I was first sending this out and I just want to put that into this somewhere so I remember it.
Discussion about this post
The Incarnate3dEdited
What an amazing exploration. I feel grateful for the love, complexity, and subtlety that you are bringing to bear in this expression. Thank you Andrea, and my deep condolences on the loss of your friend.
This is beautiful and seismic. I wish I’d heard these words in the early days of loss and grief so long ago (I might have been too young to fully grasp them, but maybe not). Anyway, your ideas still find me — bodily — all these decades later. Thank you for that, and I’m deeply sorry for your loss.
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