Schrödinger’s Grief: How Physics Helped Me Understand Loss
Artist: SMH
Published: February 28, 2025
Estimated Read Time: 8 minutes
What is Grief?
Grief is the feeling of losing something that can never be replaced. It’s heavy, confusing, and doesn’t follow a straight path. Some days, it feels like it’s fading. Other days, it crashes over you like a wave.
When we lose someone, we love, time stops making sense. We’re living in the same world, but it feels like something fundamental has shifted—like gravity has changed, or we’re breathing a different kind of air.
Grief isn’t just an emotion—it’s an altered state of existence. It changes how we experience time, how we relate to others, how we move through the world.
And yet, despite its power, grief often goes unspoken. Some people don’t know how to acknowledge it. Others pretend it isn’t there. Society tells us to "move on" before we even understand what’s happening inside us.
But what happens when grief is ignored?
What happens when a person’s pain is unseen, unacknowledged, or dismissed?
Does grief still exist if no one is willing to observe it?
Schrödinger’s Cat: A Thought Experiment in Uncertainty
In 1935, a physicist named Erwin Schrödinger created a famous thought experiment about quantum uncertainty. He imagined this scenario:
A cat is placed inside a box with a device that may or may not release poison.
Until someone opens the box to check, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time—it exists in two states at once.
Only when an observer looks inside the box does the cat’s reality "collapse" into one outcome—either alive or dead.
This is called superposition—when something exists in multiple states until an observation forces it to become one reality.
Schrödinger’s Cat was meant to show how the act of observing something changes its reality. It’s weird, paradoxical, and deeply unsettling.
And grief feels exactly like this.
Grief as a Schrödinger State
When my father died, I found myself in two realities at once.
In one, I was moving through life as if things were normal—answering emails, doing laundry, talking to people who expected me to function.
In the other, I was completely undone, shattered by loss, unable to comprehend a world where he no longer existed.
I wasn’t fully in either state. I was both at the same time.
No book, no psychology framework, no grief model captured what I was feeling—except physics.
Schrödinger’s Cat gave me language for what I was experiencing.
My father was both here and not here.
The grief was both real and unreal, depending on whether people around me acknowledged it.
I was both the same person and forever changed.
Grief, like the cat in the box, doesn’t fully collapse into reality until it is observed.
The Observer Effect: How Denial Traps Us in Superposition
Quantum physics teaches us something else: observation changes reality.
If no one looks at an electron, it behaves like a wave—undefined, spread out, uncertain.
But the moment it is measured, it takes a definite position.
This is called the observer effect—and it happens in grief, too.
Some people refuse to observe grief.
A partner who changes the subject.
A friend who says, "You just have to stay positive."
A world that tells you to "be strong", meaning "Don’t make us uncomfortable with your pain."
When grief is ignored, it doesn’t disappear—it just stays in superposition. The mourner is left trapped between worlds, unable to fully grieve, unable to fully exist.
💡 If no one observes your pain, does it still count as real?
This is what I call Schrödinger’s Grief—when loss is both acknowledged and unacknowledged, both deeply present and completely invisible, because the people around you refuse to collapse it into reality.
Schrödinger’s Grief in Relationships: When One Partner Refuses to Collapse the Wavefunction
Grief is not just about the dead. It exists between the living.
When one person is grieving and their partner refuses to acknowledge it, the relationship itself enters a quantum state of uncertainty.
One person is mourning.
The other pretends nothing has changed.
The grief exists and doesn’t exist at the same time.
The one who is grieving remains stuck in superposition—both in the relationship and emotionally disconnected, both present and absent, both feeling and numbing at once.
💡 A grieving person needs observation. Not to be fixed. Not to be told what to do. Just to be seen.
Quantum Entanglement: Grief’s Invisible Connections
There is another law in physics that helped me understand loss: quantum entanglement.
When two particles become entangled, they remain connected no matter how far apart they are. If you change one, the other changes instantly—even across galaxies.
Grief is entanglement.
The dead are still connected to us.
Their absence shapes our reality.
The love we had with them doesn’t disappear—it just moves into a different form.
But entanglement isn’t just between the living and the dead. It exists between the grieving and the non-grieving.
One person is mourning; the other pretends not to see.
One person acknowledges loss; the other resists.
One person moves through time differently; the other expects them to return to normal.
💡 Unacknowledged grief distorts relationships. It creates a gap, a misalignment, an invisible but powerful force pulling people apart.
If the two do not collapse into the same reality—if the grief is not entangled in understanding—the relationship fractures.
Why This Matters
Grief is more than an emotion. It is a disruption in space-time, a shift in reality that needs acknowledgment.
► Ignoring grief keeps it in superposition—it does not resolve.
► Refusing to observe grief keeps the mourner from fully existing.
► Loss does not end connection—it entangles us, forever.
To grieve is to collapse the wavefunction.
To speak grief is to pull it from uncertainty into something real.
To love the grieving is to observe them—so they do not disappear.
This is Schrödinger’s Grief.
We exist in the in-between. But we do not have to stay there.
Final Thought
This is the framework I never found in grief literature. Psychology didn’t explain it. Trauma models didn’t satisfy it.
Physics did.
💡 What if grief is not just metaphorically quantum—but structurally quantum?
💡 What if loss, mourning, and relational grief are actually governed by these principles?
This is the conversation I want to start.
🚀 Let’s talk about it.