What does it mean to "move on?"

A young widower is trying to rehome his late wife’s cat. The problem is, every time the cat walks in the room, he expects his late wife to follow. He needs to move on, he says. Therefore, the cat must go.

His prospective adopter likes the cat, but under these circumstances, she will not be taking Billie with her. Instead she tells him,

Moving on is something that happens to you, not something you do. That’s what people don’t realize. Moving on is not proactive. It’s organic. Be kind to yourself.

The immediate concern of Lisa Jewell’s widower in her novel, The Third Wife,¹ is one of rewiring the brain. When we develop a relationship with someone, neural pathways form in our brain made up of object cells that are a physical representation of that person.

The widower has object cells representing his wife, and his wife’s cat.

Place cells tell us where that person is physically located, and along with object cells, give us a mental map of where that person exists in our physical environment.

The cat is in the widower’s house, his late wife is nearby the cat when home.

When someone dies, the object cells formed by our relationship with that person stop firing, but the person continues to exist for some time in our brain matter through object trace cells. These cells fire when we expect to see the person who has died.

This is why though the widower knew his wife was not going to walk into the room after her cat, he still expected her entry. The cat’s presence triggered the neural pathways representing his wife to fire, making him feel as though she were still alive.

As time goes on and the cat walks into the room a hundred times without his wife trailing behind, the neural pathways in his brain will organically start to fade along with the expectation.² The map in his brain will be a different map, one that keeps the old objects and places them in a new physical reality.

But this man wants to move on now, and thinks removing the cat, aka the expectation trigger, will proactively quiet those neural pathways. And quell the consequent crash of pain as he realizes he’s not going to see her walk into the room.

When we say we need to move on, are we really saying we don’t want to feel this way anymore?

While there are certainly healthy ways to be proactive about grieving, grieving does not equate moving on, and moving on does not mean you’re no longer grieving, nor does it mean you’re leaving that person behind. Such are the nuances of grief. If you have a strong desire to move on, or are beating yourself about needing to, “move on already!” ask yourself some “whys?”

Are you keeping your loved one’s belongings exactly as they were the day they died to preserve a sense that they never left, or because you need to ask a friend to help you with the task of going through their things and reallocating them?

Are you leaving that sticky note up on the fridge because you’re tortured by the thought that they will never leave you another, or because seeing their handwriting and care brings you a sense of warmth and comfort?

Are you continuing to pay their subscription to BritBox because you love “Downton Abbey,” or because you’re afraid of a losing that point of connection when you turn on the TV?

Examining why we’re trying to move on, or not, provides information on where we are in our grief. It does not assign a grade to our grieving.

An aside: Sometimes people do become stuck in their grief; losing a sense of self, completely absorbed by their loss, and unable to reengage in life long after their loved one has died. This is known as complicated grief, uncommon, but notable. If our widower suffered from complicated grief, he may rehome the cat in order to avoid reminders of his wife, but not as a means to move on.

At the end of Jewell’s vignette, the widower decides to keep the cat, recognizing they need each other. His perception of the cat evolves from a source of pain to a source of comfort, seeing that they both lost the same person whom they loved. His form of organically moving on involved developing a new relationship, and in this moving on, he’s bringing a part of his wife with him. Her cat is now his cat.

He took his prospective adopter’s advice, and was kind to himself.

1. Jewell, Lisa. The Third Wife. Atria Books, 2015.

2. You can read the original publishing of my breakdown of the neuroanatomy of grief here.