Dying of a Broken Heart

“He died of a broken heart.” That’s the way my dad’s family always referred to my grandfather’s death. My dad was only 5 years old at the time, so he had little memory of that year when his dad died in the fall following his mother’s death the previous spring.

It happens, long-term partners dying within a few months of one another, though more often they are much older than my grandparents, who died in their 40s with young children still in their farmhouse home. The second death is often the person who was the caregiver, who loses not only their partner but the caregiving activities that had structured their life and given it meaning, sometimes for years.

I found a recent study motivated by the idea of “dying of a broken heart,” led by Mary-Frances O’Connor at the University of Arizona and published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine.¹ The increased risk of mortality after the death of a loved one has been documented in epidemiological studies, but what might be a possible contributing factor? Blood pressure as a potential culprit was looked at in the Arizona study of 59 participants that had lost a loved one in the previous year.

The study used a process they called “grief recall,” which became a kind of emotional stress test when they asked each participant to take themselves back to moments when they felt most alone after their loved one’s death. In a 10-minute conversation about that experience, the participants’ systolic blood pressure increased from their baseline. Those people with the highest level of grief symptoms experienced the greatest increase in their blood pressure. This suggests that an emotional response to loss can affect the heart and could become heart disease and a challenge to the person’s longevity.

A second study at the University of Georgia, led by professor emeritus Toni Miles and published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health,² looked at what people do to cope with loss—examining the association between bereavement and binge drinking. According to Miles, 8.1 million people in Georgia reported a loss of a partner between 2017 and 2018. Of the roughly 1.7 million people who reported drinking, 600,000 would fall into the binge drinker category. “That’s one way people can die of a broken heart,” Miles said.

What do these study results suggest for the therapists, health care providers, and friends and family members who are companioning a surviving loved one during their early bereavement?

1. The potential physical impact of a loss on a grieving person’s health needs to be given more attention. Reminders and assistance may be necessary to ensure that healthcare check-up appointments are scheduled and kept and that nutritional needs are being met.

2. As demonstrated in the Arizona study, the time of grief recall and discussion can be especially stressful and vulnerable. Its impact on the person’s health may be mitigated by support and loving companionship from friends and family.

3. Support for bereaved loved ones needs to not encourage a person’s “drowning their sorrows” but rather to experience their grief. Offers of walks or strolls through a garden are better choices.

After my father’s death at age 87 in 1999, I found in his desk a newspaper article from 1917 from his hometown paper that reported at the time of my grandfather’s death that he had died from typhoid fever. Looking up the disease, I learned typhoid fever is a bacterial infection spread through contaminated food or water. This fact concurs with the meta-analysis of 40+ years of research on the relationship between grief and its depressive effect on the immune system done by Lindsey Knowles and Mary Frances O’Connor in 2019.³ My grandfather likely died not from a broken heart but from a broken immune system.