It's OK That You're Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn't Understand

by Megan Devine

If we commit to loving, we will inevitably know loss and grief. If we try to avoid loss and grief, we will never truly love.

The terrain is forever different and there is no normal to return to.

helpful. Like many grieving people, we stopped talking

We assume that if something is uncomfortable, it means something is wrong.

Grief gets a narrow window to be expressed. After that, you are expected to return to normal, carrying with you the gifts you’ve learned from the experience.

most people simply stop saying how misunderstood they feel in their grief because it seems no one wants to hear it. We stop saying “this hurts” because no one listens.

People look for the flaws in what someone did to get to this place: She didn’t exercise enough. Didn’t take enough vitamins. Took too many.

I have a theory (as yet scientifically unproven) that the more random or out-of-order the loss, the more judgment and correction the grieving person hears. It’s like we just can’t reconcile the fact that someone could be alive and well at breakfast and dead by lunch.

This idea that some overarching force of the universe decides who lives and who dies creates, as Cheryl Strayed writes, “a false hierarchy of the blessed and the damned.”2

I am tired of hearing there is a reason for your death, for my heartbreak, and that when we get to the other side it will all make sense. It will never make sense, even when my heart stops hurting so much. I miss you. I wish you had never died.

Unaddressed and unacknowledged pain doesn’t go away. It attempts to be heard in any way it can, often manifesting in substance addiction, anxiety and depression, and social isolation.

What I’m proposing is a third path. A middle way. Not on, not off. A way to tend to pain and grief by bearing witness. By neither turning away, nor by rushing redemption, but by standing there, right there, inside the obliterated universe. By somehow making a home there. By showing that you can make a life of your own choosing, without having to pick one thing over another: leave your love behind but be “OK,” or retain your connections and be “stuck.”

But when your life has newly exploded? That is not the time for books on how to build a great and glorious future.

For some people, taking care of these details is the last tangible, intimate act of love they can do for the person who’s died. There’s no one right answer. Delegate what feels overwhelming, and wherever possible, don’t let anyone take over acts of intimacy that feel important to you.

Many people choose to shrink their world down considerably, refusing invitations to anything and everything.

The people I love, the ones I will go to again and again, are the ones who do not in any way try to “solve” this for me, or fix it, or fix me.

At that initial time of impact, few things bring comfort. Things that brought comfort in the past become flimsy under the weight of this kind of grief. Words of intended comfort just grate. Encouragement is not helpful. Platitudes never help.

The way to survive grief is by allowing pain to exist, not in trying to cover it up or rush through it.

Suffering comes when we rehash the events that led up to this death or this loss, punishing ourselves for not preventing it, not knowing more, not doing more.

There is no one correct way to live this. Others have come before you, and others will come after, but no one carries grief—or love—in the same way you do. Grief is as individual as love.