Continued Bonds and Death Differentiations in Hong Kong, P. R., China vs NYC
In one of my most treasured Pedro Almodóvar films, a Spanish cinematic tale, “Talk to Her,” the multiple-award-winning film from 2002, the titular scene portrays the nurse, Benigno, caretaking for his beloved, a ballerina named Alicia, who is deeply unconscious and in a prolonged coma. Meanwhile, his fellow visitor at the hospital, Marco, a journalist, examines his own grief for his girlfriend, Lydia, a famous bullfighter, also in a protracted slumber- like coma; he truthfully acknowledges to the nurse that he has no idea how to care for her limp body, neither emotionally nor spiritually. Over which Benigno advises him, utterly animated: “Talk to her! Tell her that…” He advocates impassionately that: “Women…must be remembered… because they matter.” Indeed, it is an Almodóvar film, and therefore darkness and irony linger a millisecond below the jagged surface.
The advice to “Talk To Her” is, indeed, a manifestation of “Continuing Bonds” for the talker, the person who speaks in this case, albeit to their girlfriends in comas, and the same could be elicited by communicating with a beloved dead one in our lives. While sustaining “Continuing Bonds”, psychology’s term for staying affectively interconnected to a deceased loved one, if you were to look at an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scan of these two caregivers’ brains, like the researcher Mary O’Connor would almost three years shy of two decades later, you would likely find the nucleus acumbuns glimmering like shooting stars. This brain center’s nucleus is predominantly involved in reward, motivation, and attachment circuitry; that is, clarified or simplified: love bonds.
Our unconscious brains permanently encode our beloved as a source of survival and physical safety, treating the dead in our memories as if they were living, while witnessing photos or recalling comforting memories of the deceased. Striking investigations highlight that this region processes the craving, yearning, and dopamine-driven pleasure or motivation felt when looking at photographs or recalling affectionate memories of the deceased. This is beyond powerful. Our attachments never die psychologically, regardless of our spiritual beliefs about what happens to our souls! This is the function of how, two decades later, as both an AEDP and chronic grief therapist, I never mandate séance salts to have someone bring back their beloved; you can do it with a trained therapist. You can even do it from the comfort of your home.
As a proud member of world -renowned investigator George Bonanno’s (my graduate school research advisor) prolific laboratory, we discovered so many constructs as a group of humans working together stunningly, all vibrating amidst one another in collective effervescence à la Émile Durkheim, related to loss and trauma, and most astoundingly, resilience always as a majority trajectory. Do you know what ”Continued Bonds” signifies? Most of us experience a loss or potential trauma in our lives. “Continued Bonds” is a psychological theory that ongoing connection with the deceased may be healing and normative, in contrast to popular bereavement ideals that the goal of grief work is “letting go or “closure.”
The comforting aspect for grievers is that no one even has to die, that is, in our minds or hearts! When our beloveds do indeed cease to breathe and ebblingly disintegrate into stardust, our relationships simply transform into internal, affectively imbued attachments. In addition to “Talking to Her,” as the prescient Benigno advocated, albeit by nefarious means, pleading for guidance from your beloved, either inaudibly or majestically verbalized, and sharing quotidian information are further strategies of “Continued Bonds.“ Further manifestations of “Continued Bonds” include sustaining rituals and traditions your loved one cherished, such as holidays and visiting places in which they delighted. We sense their presence directly, through day/dreaming or other extracurricular, comforting symbolic omens. Other tools include preserving meaningful objects like garments, photographs, or stark artifacts, like a dear old friend did to commemorate his brother, 20 years after the anniversary of his death, far too young, by cancer. He enlisted his friends via social media to contribute to a website memorializing his stunningly well-documented brother, complete with video, scraps of writing to him, and audio files. My friend’s statement that “he felt way closer to him” by collecting this website of novel representations suggests that his nucleus accumbens is likely sparkling like constellations, too.
Loss is not only a research passion of mine, but it is also one of my utmost clinical specialties. I love how chronic grief impacts our attachment systems, and healing from the get-go is even more accelerated and visceral with loss with AEDP, where we can speak directly to our beloved. I was privileged to witness mind-blowing investigations that demonstrate that “Continued Bonds” heals (cross-cultural comparison studies show distinct outcomes for NYC representative samples versus Chinese populations, with inverse outcomes). For our NYC longitudinal data, across several points in time, our mental health declines, while in the Chinese studies in Hong Kong it improves, which is mind-blowing. Why is the same construct presenting polar dialectics? To this day, this one gives me goosebumps of wonder.
Why does the same factor have strikingly distinct impacts across cultures? First, let us define the term “culture.” According to Merriam-Webster (Dictionary, 2026), culture is defined as the “beliefs, customs, arts, and social group, place, or time.” In consonance with sociologists, universal components allow societies to function, communicate, and pass traditions down to novel generations. A system of shared language, which connotes rules about collective ideas, exists. Across cultures and indeed civilizations, we share symbols and dialects, which are explicated here as “a system of words and rules used to communicate beliefs.” We also share values in each culture about what is deemed “morality,” and beliefs and norms, which are rules for how humanity might behave in quotidian life. We collectively share cohesion: it is dynamic, symbolic, and relies on language. Moreover, a fundamental truth of cultures is that they are shared, meaning they belong to a group rather than an individual, creating cohesion and an identity among members. Most strikingly, culture must be dynamic: it constantly evolves as people interact, adapt to new environments, and experience outside influences.
The same mechanism, in this case, “Continued Bonds” across two vastly distinct cultures showing polar opposites, reflects something fundamental about how we grieve distinctly across civilizations. It reminded me of my poetically vital experience, as a 20-something, white, Jewish -raised, agnostic female Westerner living abroad in Chile for three years in the early 2000s, exhibited for me an almost antithetical belief in certain constructs of death compared with what I was familiar with where I grew up in a Boston suburb of the United States, where affective expression about death was fundamentally discouraged. In Chile, I would ask my host aunt, Anita, “Where did you go today?” She would answer almost whimsically about how “I spent the day with my father,” even though I knew in my heart of hearts that her father was many years dead. From context, I gathered that she would do something that roughly translates to “spending time” with him at the cemetery, more frequently around the ceremonial holidays.
I passionately accompanied my host-sister to the cemetery during “All Saints Week” in 1999. From an anthropological perspective, I was moved by this notion, which felt much more disheartened and closed off in the States, compared with the open-heartedness of Chilean grieving. Everything in the cemeteries that I knew as a kid was seemingly, at my uncle’s funeral, repressed and underground, albeit the Jewish tradition of building unremarkable gravestones underground. Chilean burial grounds, in contrast, and probably connected ot Catholcisim, were all above ground, even the burial plots. I went during “All Saints’ Week,” which falls during “El Día de los Muertos” (Mexican festivity known as “Day of the Dead”), and was in a state of wonder as I uttered to myself that the day was vibrant, full of hues of color, and festival-like in its intricacy of flowers; nearly every single grave was draped and adorned wth old family souvenirs, like photographs and freshly cut flowers. Indeed, it felt carnival-like, with outside booths packed with “churros” and flower vendors. How alive the “Day of the Dead” felt to me in its vibrancy, an epic cultural divergence in loss between two distinct Western societies. I suspect that so many of the graves being wildly garnished was a further delineation of this gorgeous construct that at last to be labeled “Continued Bonds.”
Nevertheless, radically Bonanno’s prolific investigations of China show extraordinarily elaborate death ceremonies in which the residents of Hong Kong engage. There exists a plethora of traditions that lend a dramatic stage to Hong Kong’s funerals, including but not limited to these stunning joss papier-mâché offerings as artworks. In Hong Kong, which is part of the People’s Republic of China, traditional papier-mâché offerings emerged in the 1940s to commemorate the Dead. We are considering what makes Eastern and Western cultures different from one another and how they distinguish from one another. Eastern traditions tend to engage a more collectivistic view of Death than New York, United States, which is fundamentally individualistic and where bereavement tends to be more hidden. Following papier-mâché offering shops started opening in the 1940s, when this gorgeous industry literally blossomed.
Taoist and Chinese culture denote many superstitions. The primary function of specified offerings is, according to Erica Na, 8/28/2024, who writes in the South China Morning Post, ‘Chinese funeral customs to pay respects to the dead, from what to wear to why age is key.’ “Souls are believed to go through a final judgment upon the death of the body. If a person has been bad in their lifetime, their soul may be tortured until they are absolved of their sins. Only then can they be reincarnated.” Various rituals have been developed in different parts of China to expedite the release of a deceased person’s soul from purgatory. The dramatic funeral offerings depict humans as they were alive; this is a form of “Continued Bonds,” including elaborate joss paper offerings. At Taoist funerals, “ghost money” excavated from joss paper is also dramatically burned to assist the deceased in their travels in the afterlife.
Why, then, do “Continued Bonds” produce inverse outcomes in the United States, New York longitudinal sample, instead of the beloved and prolonged Chinese traditions? In Hong Kong, China, whether following Benigno’s emphatic advice to “Talk to Her!” Or engaging in feeling their presence is literally part of the funeral and never discouraged by your village of elders. I suspect that if you were to mention to a friend in New York, United States, that you were trying to “Talk to Her,” they would likely look at you like you are a minotaur. In contrast, in Hong Kong, “Talk(ing) to Her,” where talking and representing your beloved’s soul is your sole job. In the aftermath of death ceremonies, religious rituals maintain “Continued Bonds, “ as does mourning, by integrating their spirits and conversations with them into your quotidian life.
In New York, people tend to be more atheistic and agnostic, like me, and therefore the judgment of talking to a beloved effectively attunes you to less reverence for their bodies and spirits. My mother in Boston, who believes in an afterlife where she will reunite with everyone she loves, visits my father in the cemetery weekly, where she brings him flowers and “Talks to Him,” sharing whatever the quotidian news of the week is. She and my friend share less judgment about creating memorials to their beloveds. The key is being courageously confident, like my mother, and not caring what friends or loved ones think. The most hauntingly crucial part, then, is being confident enough that you may still derive the comfort of “Continued Bonds.”
Here’s to more Talk-ing to Her or Him or Them without self or other judgment. May it be full of vibrations, like a Chilean cemetery during Day of the Saints. May it be joss paper identified, with as many living, breathing iterations of others as possible. Here is to the recognition that death never ends our attachments, if we could only access them quietly or aloud.