The Decline of Acute-Grief Pangs

Acute grief arrives in pangs whose intensity falls off geometrically rather than linearly — steeply at first, then a long tail. Adjust how quickly the reaction settles and watch the curve stretch or compress.

Weeks since lossPang intensity
With a 8-week half-life, pang intensity falls to 50% by week 8, to about 25% by week 16, and to 13% by week 24.
An illustrative exponential-decay model of pang intensity, I(w) = e−kw; representative, not measured. Real courses are noisier and punctuated by reminder-triggered spikes. Computed locally, not stored.

Oscillation in the Dual Process Model

Adaptive coping alternates between loss-oriented attention to the death and restoration-oriented attention to the demands of ongoing life. Set the balance, then step through the sequence to watch the mourner cycle between them.

Loss-orientedRestoration-oriented
Press Step forward to begin the oscillation.
An illustrative scheduler for the dual process model (Stroebe & Schut, 1999); the alternation is schematic, not a measured time-series. Computed locally, not stored.

Grief as Attachment Updating

Each reminder is a prediction error that revises the attachment system’s expectation that the deceased is present, E, toward the reality of absence by a learning rate α: En+1 = En(1 − α). A smaller α stretches integration over far more episodes.

Updating episodesExpectation E
After 0 episodes at α = 0.10, the expectation is 1.000. Reaching the halfway point (E = 0.50) takes about 6.6 episodes. Integration revises the prediction to near zero without erasing the value of the relationship.
An illustrative error-correcting learning rule after O’Connor (2019); the curve is a conceptual model, not measured neural data. Computed locally, not stored.