“Each that we lose takes part of us / a crescent still abides, / which like the moon, some turbid night, / is summoned by the tides,” Emily Dickinson wrote as she reckoned with loss after her mother’s death a century and a half before neuroscience illuminated that abiding crescent as a synaptic reality engrained in the brain’s model of the world.
As the poet Meghan O’Rourke wrote in her own stunning reckoning with loss in the epoch of neuroscience, “the people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.”… Lês fierder