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

by Megan Devine

There is nothing wrong with grief. It’s a natural extension of love. It’s a healthy and sane response to loss. That grief feels bad doesn’t make it bad; that you feel crazy doesn’t mean you are crazy. Grief is part of love. Love for life, love for self, love for others. What you are living, painful as it is, is love. And love is really hard. Excruciating at times.

There are losses that rearrange the world. Deaths that change the way you see everything, grief that tears everything down. Pain that transports you to an entirely different universe, even while everyone else thinks nothing has really changed.

There is not a reason for everything. Not every loss can be transformed into something useful. Things happen that do not have a silver lining.

This book is about how you live inside your loss. How you carry what cannot be fixed. How you survive.

In order to survive, to find that life that feels authentic and true to you, we have to start with telling the truth. This really is as bad as you think. Everything really is as wrong, and as bizarre, as you know it to be. When we start there, we can begin to talk about living with grief, living inside the love that remains.

Grief is visceral, not reasonable: the howling at the center of grief is raw and real. It is love in its most wild form.

Saying something like “He wouldn’t want you to be sad” or “At least you had her for as long as you did” might seem like a comfort. The problem is, there’s an implied second half of the sentence in all those familiar lines. That second half of the sentence unintentionally dismisses or diminishes your pain; it erases what is true now in favor of some alternate experience. That ghost-sentence tells you it’s not OK to feel how you feel.

To feel truly comforted by someone, you need to feel heard in your pain. You need the reality of your loss reflected back to you—not diminished, not diluted. It seems counterintuitive, but true comfort in grief is in acknowledging the pain, not in trying to make it go away.

If it were true that intense loss is the only way to make a person more compassionate, only self-absorbed, disconnected, shallow people would experience grief. That would make logical sense. That it doesn’t? Well, it proves my point. You didn’t need this experience in order to grow. You didn’t need the lessons that supposedly only grief can teach. You already were a good and decent human, making your way in the world.

Grief is not an enlightenment program for a select few. No one needs intense, life-changing loss to become who they are “meant” to be. The universe is not causal in that way: you need to become something, so life gives you this horrible experience in order to make it happen. On the contrary: life is call-and-response. Things happen, and we absorb and adapt. We respond to what we experience, and that is neither good nor bad. It simply is. The path forward is integration, not betterment.

When you choose to find meaning or growth inside your loss, that’s an act of personal sovereignty and self-knowledge. When someone else ascribes growth or meaning to your loss, it diminishes your power, gives subtle shaming or judgment to who you were before, and tells you that you needed this somehow. No wonder it feels so bad. Words of comfort that imply you needed this, that you needed whatever has happened to rip open your world, can never be of comfort. They’re lies. And lies never feel good.

Grief is not a problem to be solved; it’s an experience to be carried.

Grief is as individual as love: every life, every path, is unique. There is no pattern, and no linear progression. Despite what many “experts” believe, there are no stages of grief. Despite what the wider population believes, there are no stages of grief.

Grieving people are met with impatience precisely because they are failing the cultural storyline of overcoming adversity. If you don’t “transform,” if you don’t find something beautiful inside this, you’ve failed. And if you don’t do it quickly, following that narrative arc from incident to transformation within our collective attention span, you’re not living the right story.

There’s a gag order on telling the truth, in real life and in our fictional accounts. As a culture, we don’t want to hear that there are things that can’t be fixed. As a culture, we don’t want to hear that there is some pain that never gets redeemed. Some things we learn to live with, and that’s not the same as everything working out in the end. No matter how many rainbows and butterflies you stick into the narrative, some stories just don’t work out.

Being brave—being a hero—is not about overcoming what hurts or turning it into a gift. Being brave is about waking to face each day when you would rather just stop waking up. Being brave is staying present to your own heart when that heart is shattered into a million different pieces and can never be made right. Being brave is standing at the edge of the abyss that just opened in someone’s life and not turning away from it, not covering your discomfort with a pithy “think positive” emoticon. Being brave is letting pain unfurl and take up all the space it needs. Being brave is telling that story. It’s terrifying. And it’s beautiful. Those are the stories we need.

Seeing someone in pain touches off a reaction in us, and that reaction makes us very uncomfortable. Faced with this visceral knowledge that we, too, could be in a similar situation, we shut down our empathy centers. We deny our connection. We shift into judgment and blame. It’s an emotionally protective instinct.

Hidden inside this seemingly encouraging advice to take charge of your emotions, and therefore your life, is that same culture of blame. It’s the avoidance of pain clothed in positive, pseudo-spiritual speak. It’s the presumption that happiness and contentment are the only true measures of health.

“Over three years now since you left and I am still tired of having people ask, “How are you?” Do they really think I will tell the truth? I am tired of hearing how it was all planned before you were born and how you and I agreed to your death for my soul’s learning and for yours. No one here wants to acknowledge that there might just be chaos and that some things happen because they can, like cars running people over, like bullets ripping through a skull or tearing open a heart, like blood clots filling lungs so you can’t get air, or cancer consuming what is left of the body. A pre-mapped-out lifetime doesn’t make the death of someone you actually love any less devastating. 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. DRU WEST, Writing Your Grief student, on the death of her daughter, Julia

As a way of deflecting responsibility away from the actual corporations that created the collapse, enforced positivity was a brilliant strategy: “What could be a better way of quelling dissent than to tell people who are suffering that it’s all their attitude,” writes Ehrenreich.

Somehow, we are meant to both accept suffering as a gift that we needed in order to become better people and refuse to let loss shove us out of our normal, happy, rosy, optimistic demeanor. Painful emotional states aren’t meant to last—they’re short-term pit stops on the way to a brighter and better (or at least more “normal”) you. Suffering makes you grow. It’s all part of that cultural storyline that glorifies transformation, while staunchly avoiding the reality of pain in the world.

Spiritual practices in any tradition, including mindfulness in its many forms, are meant to help you live what is yours to live, not make you rise above it. These tools are meant to help you feel companioned inside your grief. They’re meant to give you a tiny bit of breathing room inside what is wholly unbearable. That’s not at all the same thing as making your pain go away. Rather than help us rise above being human, teachings in any true tradition help us become more human: more connected, not less attached.

The way to get through the pain of being human is not to deny it, but to experience it. To let it exist. To let it be, without stopping it up or holding it back, or in our newer, more modern forms of resistance, by claiming it isn’t “evolved” to be in pain. That’s garbage. It’s elitist. By the same token, you don’t “allow” pain so that you can go back to a normative baseline of happiness.

On a personal level, repressing pain and hardship creates an internally unsustainable condition, wherein we must medicate and manage our true sadness and grief in order to maintain an outer semblance of “happiness.” We don’t lie to ourselves well. 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. Unheard pain helps perpetuate cycles of abuse by trapping victims in a pattern of living out or displacing their trauma onto others.

That you see your own potential for grief and loss in someone else’s grief? That’s beautiful. Poignancy is kinship.

The real cutting edge of growth and development is in hurting with each other. It’s in companionship, not correction. Acknowledgment—being seen and heard and witnessed inside the truth about one’s own life—is the only real medicine of grief.

Grief is not a sign that you’re unwell or unevolved. It’s a sign that love has been part of your life, and that you want love to continue, even here.

“You would say—why do people need to keep ashes? Can’t they just let go? Yes. Yes, babe. Eventually, I will take those bones and those teeth and that body I love to the river and to the woods. I will release that vessel I’ve loved so much, in so many different ways. But right now, your remains remain—safely sealed in a plastic urn inside a plastic bag inside a cardboard box sealed with tape and a sticker bearing your name. To take them out is to see you, to see the body I have loved, reduced to a permanent state of ash. Right now, I can’t let go. I can’t let this in. I can’t accept this in any way. I cannot swallow this truth, that you are gone, that the life we planned is done. If I try to look directly at that fact (that I refuse to let be fact), I feel the explosion start inside of me, the world cracks and my lungs fill, and I cannot breathe. All I know is that I cannot do that. I cannot look directly at this. Everything inside me will explode, and I cannot bear the tearing. It’s too big. It’s too severe. I’m being beaten by all this—the packing and the moving, your truck in my driveway that will be sold in the next two days, the bed in pieces in my room, waiting to be rebuilt, your photos, your ashes, the people clamoring for pieces of you, all of our things piled in various rooms. You are gone, and I can’t know that now. That you were here, that moment, just a regular moment, and then you were gone. From my early journals

Accurate description of the feeling on how those ashes used to be a living being that meant so much to you and the difficulty of just letting them or the persons possessions go.

Going to the movies can be an especially cruel experience: you go for a non-sad movie, only to find the main character is widowed, or you realize, halfway through, that you can never crack jokes with your sister about this movie, or that your child will never see it.

Wanting to ask my grandma if they got the time period right after watching Oppenheimer. Clothes, events, etc.

Innocuous, everyday things become loaded: The first time you have to fill out a form and choose “widowed,” or you’re asked how many children you have. When you get to the “emergency contact” part of a form, and realize you can no longer put down the name of the person who has held that spot for years. Dragging yourself to a party, thinking you need to get out more, only to have every single small-talk question point to only one answer: death.

When someone you love dies, you don’t just lose them in the present or in the past. You lose the future you should have had, and might have had, with them. They are missing from all the life that was to be. Seeing other people get married, have kids, travel—all the things you expected out of life with your person—gone. Seeing other children go to kindergarten, or graduate, or get married—all those things your child should have done, had they lived. Your kids never get to know their brilliant uncle; your friend never gets to read your finished book.

Many people write to me wondering when is the “right time” to remove their wedding rings, or convert their child’s bedroom into a guest room, or stop referring to their brother in the present tense. The answer is simple: there is no right time. You can’t wait for the time to feel right, because it likely never will. None of this is something you would ever choose. When you’re trying to make a decision, you can’t wait until it feels good.

I like the vomit metric for making decisions: If taking off your wedding rings makes you feel sick, it’s not the right time to take them off. If you start to panic at the thought of moving anything in your child’s room, then don’t move anything. If someone has told you it’s time to donate your sister’s clothes and you break out in hives, immortalize her closet.

When you make larger life decisions—like when (or whether) to date, sell your house, or change careers—is entirely up to you. No time is the right time. Nothing is too early or too late.

You will do what you need to do when you need to do it. Not a moment before. It will never feel good. But if it makes you feel sick, now is not the time. Use the vomit metric for any decisions you have to make and for the ones you feel like you’re supposed to make.

Death throws a monkey wrench into family dynamics. Strained relationships that had found a relatively happy level of mutual tolerance flare into knockdown fights. Opinions and needs all jockey for space; everyone needs to be seen and be heard. Old conflicts get brought up. Relatives who were distant in life come out of the woodwork; people you think have your back disappear into their own wounded silence. Death shakes everyone up.

You said it.

If you’ve found yourself arguing over what goes where and how, please be gentle with each other’s hearts—including your own. There’s really no winner in these situations. No matter who wins the battle over memorials or possessions, the person you love is still dead.

Maintain boundaries over the distribution of material possessions.

The reality of anger never gets any positive airtime in our culture. You’re not supposed to be angry. No matter what’s happened, showing anger is . . . unseemly. Much like grief, anger is met with deep discomfort: it’s fine in short doses, but it needs to be moved through quickly, without much noise. This boycott on anger is ridiculous.

Contrary to pop-psychology and the medical model, anger is healthy, normal, and necessary. As with most things, if it isn’t given recognition and support, it gets turned inward, where it can become poisonous. What we don’t listen to (or refuse to listen to) doesn’t go away—it just finds other ways to speak. Shushed anger joins a backlog of disallowed emotion, popping up in health issues, interpersonal challenges, and mental torment. Those negative images we have of rage actually come from anger that isn’t allowed to exist: repression creates pressure, which creates toxic behaviors set atop what used to be a healthy response to injustice.

Repressed anger will come back to cause problems for your health, relationships, and grief process.

Anger, allowed expression, is simply energy. It’s a response. Allowed expression, it becomes a fierce protective love—for yourself, for the one you’ve lost, and in some cases, gives you the energy to face what is yours to face. Shown respect and given room, anger tells a story of love and connection and longing for what is lost. There is nothing wrong with that.

Platitudes, “self-help,” well-meaning advice, and suggestions—they’re all about getting you out of pain. Whenever we talk about how much we hurt, someone is right there to help make that pain go away. In this model, pain is a bad thing, and it must be removed. But your pain is valid. It won’t just go away.

Rather than erase pain, we might tend to it as though it were healthy and normal, in need of our kind, compassionate, simple honesty and care. We might, instead, companion ourselves inside pain. Only in tending to it can we bear what is unbearable.

Ignoring or erasing the pain doesn't make it bearable.

When we say that the Buddha taught, “All life is suffering, and the way to escape suffering is to embrace impermanence,” he wasn’t saying, “Please pretend you see no suffering; please pretend you aren’t in pain.” He wasn’t saying, “If you’d just let go of your attachments, nothing would hurt.” He saw suffering. He saw pain. He wanted to find a way to stay present and respond. To respond without flinching. Without turning away from the abyss of pain present in the world.

The Buddha saw pain. He asked: “What can I do to not lose my mind and my heart, here? How can I keep both eyes and heart open without being consumed by this? How can I keep my gaze steady on that which cannot be fixed?” His response—in my mind anyway—was love. Love with open hands, with an open heart, knowing that what is given to you will die. It will change. Love anyway. You will witness incredible pain in this life. Love anyway. Find a way to live here, beside that knowledge. Include that knowledge. Love through that. Be willing to not turn away from the pain of this world—pain in yourself or in others.

Similar to stoicism, Buddhism teaches us not to ignore pain but how to live with it.

They’re meant to reduce suffering in the face of pain, not remove pain itself.

As we’ve said, pain is a healthy, normal response when someone you love is torn from your life. It hurts, but that doesn’t make pain wrong. Suffering comes when we feel dismissed or unsupported in our pain, and when we thrash around inside our pain, questioning our choices, our “normalcy,” our actions and reactions. Suffering comes with being told to not feel what you feel. Suffering comes with being told there is something wrong with what you feel. Suffering comes with all the crap that gets loaded on us by friends and colleagues and random strangers who, with the best of intentions, correct, judge, or give advice on how we need to grieve better. Suffering also comes when we don’t eat, don’t get enough sleep, spend too much time with toxic people, or pretend we’re not in as much pain as we’re in. 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. Suffering brings with it anxiety, and fear, and isolation.

Pain\=Suffering

pain gets supported; suffering gets adjusted.

One of the first things you can do inside your grief is to start paying attention to subtle shifts in how you feel. There are times that tears leak out at inopportune moments, times when the screaming inside you can’t be held in, situations where holding yourself together is an entirely impossible task and rabid mind-loops keep replaying the events of your loss.

Check in with yourself; note how you feel at different times of day, under what circumstances. Map your social interactions, how much sleep you’ve had, what you’re eating (or not eating), and how you spend your time. You don’t have to be obsessive about this; broad sweeps can be as useful as minute detail.

If you find anything that feels less bad (in early grief) or, eventually, even a little bit good (whenever that happens), pay attention to that.

Small comforts add up.