Losing a loved one: reconciling the shadow of rationality

Long before the modern, rational, materialist era, there was an age of reverence. It was a time when we honoured the feminine, the unseen dimensions of life, and our sacred connection to the earth. People lived in harmony with the shifting seasons, the cosmos, and the natural rhythms of birth, decay, and rebirth.

Anne Baring’s search for the roots of human suffering led her deep into the past, to a period around 4,000 years ago when, she argues, humanity underwent a profound shift—from what she calls the Great Mother to the Great Father. This new “solar age” was the era commonly associated with the rise of civilization. But at what cost? From this point onward, qualities and values associated with the Great Mother were increasingly diminished and devalued. This included death as a natural part of life.

The defining characteristics of Baring’s “solar age” find a parallel in Iain McGilchrist’s work on the historical imbalance between the brain’s two hemispheres. McGilchrist argues that Western culture has increasingly privileged the left hemisphere, with its narrow, focused perspective that seeks certainty through reason, rules, and analysis.

The lesser-used right hemisphere offers a more wholistic view. It is attuned to context, ambiguity, emotion, the unconscious and recognises death as part of the fabric of life. Death is the ultimate challenge to the left hemisphere’s need for control, and therefore it becomes taboo.

When I was 20, my boyfriend of six years was killed in a car accident. I found myself ill-equipped to navigate the grief and upheaval that followed. While my youth was certainly a factor, it did not fully explain why I felt so unprepared. During my MSc studies, I began to gain some insight into how the wider cultural environment may have contributed to the difficulty that I experienced.

This led me to undertake a research dissertation exploring attitudes toward death and dying, how we navigate Mystery and the dominance of rationality in Western Culture. My research question was: “How do attitudes toward Mystery and rationality influence the experience of losing a loved one?” The construct of Mystery in the study represented the unknown and denied, and rationality was intended to represent the dominant cultural narrative.

The study involved 104 participants, 11 of whom were interviewed. A mixed-methods approach combined the strengths of a larger sample size with the deeper exploration of participants’ lived experiences provided by the interviews.

All eligible participants had experienced the unexpected loss of a loved one. To meet ethical requirements, interview participants were additionally required to have experienced their loss more than two years earlier.

Quantitative measures assessed attitudes toward Mystery and rationality, and their relationship to attitudes toward death and dying. Semi-structured interviews elicited rich, detailed accounts of participants’ experiences of loss.

Data analysis from the quantitative, qualitative and the integration between them indicated the cultural absence of how to hold death in Western Culture. It also became clear that for individuals, loss of a loved one presented an opportunity to reconcile the shadow of our dominant cultural preference for the rational and material.

The hypothesis that embracing Mystery correlates with acceptance of death and is negatively correlated with the fear of death, was supported. Fear of death emerged as a fork in the road, leading either towards greater denial or towards engagement with the existential reality of our impermanence. Paradoxically, fear of death can function both as a catalyst for psychological defences and projections, as proposed by Ernest Becker, and as an existential opening that challenges the denial of our finitude as encouraged by Irving Yalom and other existential psychologists.

Rationality proved not to be the problem. Interviewees described rationality as an important resource for navigating their experiences. It became clear that rationality, as a construct for the study, wasn’t useful as individual psychometric measures reflected a valuable cognitive skill rather than cultural dominance. The issue lay instead in what culture failed to acknowledge, teach, or legitimise -the important dimensions of human finitude, leaving individuals to navigate it for themselves.

Western culture does not prepare people for death; instead, acceptance develops through life experience and exposure to loss. This reflected my own experience. Within a death-denying culture, loss can become an opportunity to reconcile with both mortality and the cultural shadow that resists it. Embracing Mystery is not only helpful in navigating loss but an implicit requirement of it.

For all interviewed participants, the experiences of loss created an opportunity to reconnect with the invisible dimensions of life—aspects of existence that dominant cultural narratives cast into the shadows. At one end of the spectrum, individuals maintained an ongoing personal relationship with the deceased; at the other, they found reconciliation through spirituality, interconnectedness, or the Divine – the transpersonal.

For all participants, loss was experienced as challenging, painful, and deeply sad. However, those who described a more transpersonal reconciliation with death also described a diminished sense of death as something bad, shameful, or hidden. Death remained a source of sadness, but it was no longer experienced as inherently wrong. Accompanying this shift was a reduced resistance to reality and a greater acceptance of what is. As Grace reflected, “I just, in a way feel at one with whatever is, while Aaron expressed, “I’m at peace whichever way it’s going to work out”.

The findings of this study provide encouragement to “do death well”. There are potential applications in educational and health settings to embrace death as a natural part of life rather than keeping it in the cultural shadow. For wholeness we need both rationality and Mystery.

A future direction arising from this study is to explore the relationship between left hemisphere dominance and trauma. To what extent might individual, collective, and ancestral trauma contribute to left hemisphere dominance? Viewing these patterns through a trauma-informed lens and as part of long evolutionary arc offers a more compassionate understanding of the individual and collective work that Thomas Hübl suggests we share “response-ability” for. A transpersonal perspective illuminates the way.