Sleuth Hounds, we have an important announcement, breaking news. Make sure if you attended our

live show last month at the Hall, Coffee, and Social Club that you stay tuned for the love

notes at the end of the episode where we will draw for a prize. And even if you weren't at our live show for one reason or another, you also

should stay tuned until the very end of this episode because we will tell all of our listeners

how you could also win a prize. Grief is a strange thing. Losing someone you love is never easy. We grieve all that they

were and all that they could have been. We grieve for all the love we have left to give and no one here

to give it to. Holidays are never quite the same. There's an empty seat at the table, a stalking hanging

with nothing inside, a birthday

passes with no one to sing to. We go on because we have to, and with time, things get easier

as our body learns to deal with a new hole that's left in our heart. But the simplest things

can trigger your grief again, a smell, dropping past a particular place, a song playing on the radio,

and suddenly it's like the first day and you're gasping for breath as that familiar sense of loss rushes over you again.

Mary Frances O'Connor, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Arizona,

studies what happens in our brains when we experience grief.

According to NPR, she says grieving is a form of learning,

one that teaches us how to be in a world without someone we love in it. Quote, the background is running

all the time for people who are grieving, thinking about new habits and how to interact now, end quote.

We find ways to go on through the grief for our job, for our family, for our kids, but that

doesn't make the grief any less hard to deal with. In that same article, it said, quote,

we have that experience of being in a relationship. The sense of who we are is bound up with that

other person. The word sibling, the word spouse, implies two people. And so when the other person

has gone, we suddenly have to learn a totally new set of rules to operate in the world. The we is as

...