Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.

O’Rourke frames grief not as a passive feeling but as active cognitive labor. Bonds with others structure daily routines, expectations, and self-conception; when a close relationship ends through death, the bereaved must revise an internal “map” of reality—who they are, what the future looks like, and how the world is organized. The quote also highlights why some losses feel destabilizing beyond sadness: if one’s identity was intertwined with the deceased (as partner, child, caregiver, or confidant), the death removes a key reference point for the self. Grief, then, becomes a process of rebuilding meaning and identity, not merely “getting over” emotion.