Arthur Brooks

They accept that somebody has died.

They accept that they're going to die.

And that acceptance is a period of tremendous generativity typically.

Now I want to talk about that later because I want to talk about how you can prepare yourself for acceptance in a way that you grow as a person and that in point of fact can enhance the joy of life for whatever time that you've got left.

When medical providers in the literature

And this comes from a pretty interesting article from 2017.

As always, I'll put it in the notes.

They see a pretty common symptoms of grief, which is a separation response.

One is yearning for that with which you've been separated.

One is longing.

And yearning and longing are sort of different, aren't they?

There's sadness, of course.

And then here's the interesting part.

There's hallucinations.

This is typically the case that there's disorientation.

When you lose something that you consider to be part of your life, it's like losing a bit of your cognitive ability.

That's what we often see, which is why when one of your aging parents dies, the other one might talk about the person like they're still alive.

That's a benign hallucination.

Very, very common.

um you'll be alarmed if that happens to one of your aging parents but it shouldn't alarm you because it's extremely normal that that would actually happen acute grief really acute grief in its early stages can actually resemble mild dementia in this way it's not dementia don't worry there's not a