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

by Megan Devine

Remember, suffering is arbitrary. Mapping those subtle distinctions of what helps and what doesn’t is mapping your own suffering: It lets you know what can be changed or avoided. It lets you know where you do have some control in your grief. Whenever possible, choosing to avoid those “things that don’t help” decreases your suffering, making you more available to tend to your own pain.

One of the biggest causes of suffering in grief is the self-harm we do to ourselves with our thoughts.

(Did you just say, “OMG, yes!”?)

Pretty much.

In times of stress, your mind can get really ravenous and start eating itself. I know mine does. Insightful, self-reflective people tend to be far harder on themselves than other folks. In this instance, a sharp mind is not necessarily your friend. Especially in out-of-order or unusual death (but in many other losses as well), we rehash the events, and our roles in them, over and over and over. We process everything: every nuance, every word, every choice. I wrestled not only with what happened that day at the river, but also with the intractable mind-loops I got into nearly every day around how well or not well I was doing, whether or not Matt would think I was doing this well or not, and how unfair it was that I felt I was being judged by his invisible ghost in my mind, given what I had just gone through.

Always thinking about what I should have done or said differently.

“Worseness” thoughts take your pain and grind more stress into it, increasing your suffering. You’re going to have your own particular way of mentally tormenting yourself, but it’s really just a manufactured anxiety about what might happen in the future or stressing about what happened in the past. What did I miss? Why didn’t I do something differently? How am I supposed to live with this now? Did I cause all this? Those are the kinds of thoughts that shut you down and shut you off. They’re not useful. They create suffering. They make things worse. “Wellness” thoughts have the opposite effect: your pain still exists, but your sense of calm or stillness is increased. Wellness thoughts are the stories, ideas, and inner images that bring you closer to yourself. They bring you just the tiniest sense of peace or rootedness, increasing your capacity to withstand the pain you’re in.

Differentiating pain from suffering helps you understand the connection between certain activities and their impact on your grief.

There are times you feel calmer and times you feel whipped around like a tetherball. One is not more right or more “emotionally evolved” than the other. One just feels better, and the other feels like crap. Sometimes you choose the crap because you don’t have it in you to care for yourself. Totally valid. Do what you can.

Survival in early grief is not about looking toward the future. It’s not about finding something that lights you up, or gives you a reason for living. It just doesn’t work like that.

My most intense moments of rather-be-dead feelings usually came while I was driving on the highway. What kept my hands on the wheel in those cannot-care-about-myself moments was knowing I did not want to create another me. I kept driving, or stopped driving, because I did not want to risk harming someone else. I would not chance creating another widow. I did not want to mess up someone else’s life, or cause anyone else any pain, by creating an accident scene they had to clean up. Not wanting to create more pain for someone else was a strong enough motivation to make safer choices.

Tempting feeling. I know.

There’s a range inside grief from simply not wanting to be here to being seriously tempted to stop being here.

For physical issues, we have an entire pharmacopoeia of pain medicine. For the actual pain of grief, we have . . . nothing. It’s always seemed so bizarre to me that we have an answer for almost every physical pain, but for this—some of the most intense pain we can experience—there is no medicine. You’re just supposed to feel it.

The answer to pain is simply to feel it.

Equanimity (upekkha) is said to be the hardest form of compassion to teach, and the hardest to practice. It’s not, as is commonly understood, equanimity in the way of being unaffected by what’s happened, but more a quality of clear, calm attention in the face of immoveable truth. When something cannot be changed, the “enlightened” response is to pay attention. To feel it. To turn toward it and say, “I see you.”

It’s important to find those places where your grief gets to be as bad as it is, where it gets to suck as much as it does. Let your pain stretch out. Take up all the space it needs. When so many others tell you that your grief has to be cleaned up or contained, hearing that there is enough room for your pain to spread out, to unfurl—it’s healing. It’s a relief. The more you open to your pain, the more you can just be with it, the more you can give yourself the tenderness and care you need to survive this. Your pain needs space. Room to unfold.

With enough room to breathe, to expand, to be itself, pain softens. No longer confined and cramped, it can stop thrashing at the bars of its cage, can stop defending itself against its right to exist.

There isn’t anything you need to do with your pain. Nothing you need to do about your pain. It simply is. Give it your attention, your care. Find ways to let it stretch out, let it exist. Tend to yourself inside it. That’s so different from trying to get yourself out of it.

Trust is really tricky when the universe has upended itself, so I’m not talking about trust that everything will work out, or trust that you’ll do everything right. Not at all. I’m talking more about trusting that you won’t abandon yourself in your pain.

Everywhere I turned, Matt was dead. Matt was dead. There are no more romantic dinners. There are no more mundane dinners. There is no more anything. And not only that, but each one of these loving partnerships will eventually end in death. The walls began to close in around me. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t hold back my tears.

Some teachings also suggest that you imagine yourself in your “happy place” when you’re overcome with emotion. In early grief, a “happy place” is pretty well impossible to find. There is no place your loss does not touch. There is nothing that is not tied back to it.

If we boiled down everything in this book about how to survive intense grief, it would come down to this: show yourself kindness.

Self-kindness is seriously difficult. We can talk all day about how other people deserve kindness, but when it comes to ourselves? Forget it. We know too much about our own short-comings, the ways we’ve messed things up, just how badly we’re doing everything. We treat ourselves far more harshly than we would ever allow anyone else to treat us. Everyone struggles with this; it’s not just you. For many people, being kind to others is far, far easier.

Empathy to yourself is as important as empathy to others.

Kindness-for-self might be allowing yourself to sleep as much as you need to, without yelling at yourself for it. It might be saying no to a social engagement. It might be turning the car around right after you’ve arrived in the parking lot, having decided that getting groceries is just too much for you to bear right now. It might mean cutting yourself some slack, backing off of the demands you place on yourself. It might mean pushing yourself sometimes, taking yourself out of the softer nest of distraction into the bigger landscape of pain.

In therapy, we often remind people of the airplane safety analogy: in times of trouble or danger, put your own oxygen mask on first before you try to help others. Inside your grief, you have to put yourself first. To survive, you have to become fierce about caring for yourself.

We often think of grief as primarily emotional, but grief is a full-body, full-mind experience. You’re not just missing the one you’ve lost; your entire physiological system is reacting, too. Studies in neurobiology show that losing someone close to us changes our biochemistry: there are actual physical reasons for your insomnia, your exhaustion, and your racing heart.1 Respiration, heart rate, and nervous system responses are all partially regulated by close contact with familiar people and animals; these brain functions are all deeply affected when you’ve lost someone close.

Grief affects appetite, digestion, blood pressure, heart rate, respiration, muscle fatigue, and sleep—basically everything. If it’s in the body, grief affects it. In addition to physical effects, cognitive changes, memory loss, confusion, and shortened attention spans are all common in early grief. Some effects even last for years—and that’s perfectly normal. It’s true on so many levels: losing someone changes you.

Sleep is a time of restoration for the body, and it’s always the first place to look for improvement or comfort when things are completely falling apart.

Recharge your battery.

Some people find that they wake up repeatedly at the time their loved one died. Others are woken up reaching into the empty space, jolted awake by finding it, indeed, empty. Many people have a hopeful, hazy moment on waking, thinking maybe this was all a dream, only to have reality crash in on them as their eyes fully open.

Waking up thinking grandma was in her room asleep.

They suck.

Tell me about it.

In the widowed world, we often use the term widowed brain (though it occurs in many different losses)—it’s a great term for the cumulative cognitive effects of grief. If grief has recently erupted in your life—and by recently, I mean anything from yesterday to a few years ago—you will most likely find that your brain just does not work. You may have been brilliant and organized before this loss, able to multitask, remember, execute. But grief changes all of that.

In the meantime, leaving yourself multiple reminders and notes is a good way to outsource your memory. Your need for multiple sticky notes, timers, and alarms is not a sign that you aren’t doing well. It’s proof that you’re doing whatever you can to support your mind and make things easier for yourself. Cover the entire house in reminders if that’s what you need to do. They won’t help you find your keys, but they might help you remember other things.

You might feel overwhelmed at the sheer number of details needing your attention. Many people feel they’ve lost their competence, their drive, and their former confidence.

Of course you’re exhausted. Your mind, like the rest of you, is doing the best it can to function and survive under very severe circumstances. Please try not to judge your current accomplishments based on what you used to be able to do. You are not that person right now.

All my life, I’ve been a voracious reader. Books have always been my most constant form of support and kinship. But for at least the first year after Matt died, I could barely read a label, let alone sustain my attention for a whole book. When I did read, I found myself not understanding. Well, not exactly not “understanding.” I recognized the words. I knew what I was reading. But nothing sank in. It often took several tries with one paragraph to know where I was. Characters confused me. Storylines didn’t make sense. I would get to the end of a line, forgetting what the first part had said.

Same here.

Mental confusion and a sort of brain-fog feeling are extremely common. It’s as if all our arbitrary human constructs—things like money, time, rules for driving (and other things), social expectations, levels of hygiene—seem utterly unrelated to anything we’re living.

Grief strips life down to its irreducible essentials. In that visceral state, your distance from the “normal” world can feel insurmountable. There’s an uncomfortable truth here: you are not like other people. Not right now.

In grief, your brain has to codify and collate an impossible new reality into itself. The data presented doesn’t make any logical sense. There has never been anything like this event, so there is no way to connect or relate it to anything else. It doesn’t fit. The brain cannot make this new reality fit. Like your heart, your brain resists this loss—it can’t possibly be true.

Eventually, your mind will realize that car keys do not belong in the freezer.

Or in the dog leash tray.

Grief itself won’t make sense, loss itself will not rearrange into something orderly and sensible, but your mind, and your heart, will adapt. This loss will be absorbed and integrated. It’s what your heart and mind are made for: adapting to new experiences. Not good, not bad—it is simply what they do.

Your mind is doing the best it can to keep a bead on reality when reality is crazy. Be patient with yourself. Remember that this is a normal response to a stressful situation; it’s not a flaw in you. You’re not crazy. You’re grieving. Those are very different things.

I caught myself in a fearful thought-spiral one day in early July. Out loud, I said, “Stop!” Out loud, I said what I have told myself a thousand times and have told clients over and over again: “Worrying about what has not happened is not useful. If something bad does happen, you will deal with it then. It is highly unlikely that anything awful will happen. If it does, you will deal.”

Anxiety is exhausting. It sucks. And it’s not even useful, no matter how much it screams that it’s real. Anxiety is patently ineffective at managing risk and predicting danger. Most of our fears never come to pass, and as I wrote above, in true emergencies, anxiety is often conspicuously absent.

The brain is an internal problem-solving survival mechanism. It’s beautiful.

It’s like a dog chewing at a hotspot—gnawing at the rash makes it itch more, which makes him chew on it more, which makes it itch more. Fear thoughts create a brain response, which creates a body response, which conditions your thoughts to come up with more fears, which starts the cycle again.

Of course you’re anxious. After a death or other massive loss, the whole concept of “safety” gets really sketchy. You can’t rely on old comforts of believing that your fears are unlikely to come true. You can’t lean on the statistically low risk of certain illnesses or accidents happening. Just because you saw your people half an hour ago does not mean they’re still OK now. When the ordinary safety of the world has already failed you, how can you ever feel safe here again? It’s not that anxiety is wrong; it’s more that it’s not effective in creating the safety you seek. Here’s the thing: no matter what your anxiety tells you, rehearsing disaster will not make you safe. Repeatedly checking in with people to be sure they’re still safe will never create a lasting sense of safety.

Remember that anxiety is a brain-based, nervous system response to imagined danger. It’s not logical; it’s biological.

If you take nothing else from this chapter, practice making your exhale longer than your inhale. It doesn’t even have to be a deep breath: just exhale for a moment longer. Experiment with it. See how it goes.

Instead of creating trouble out of nothing, you might tell yourself: Right now, as far as I know, everything is fine. If a challenge arises—of any kind—I trust myself to respond with skill. If there’s something I don’t know how to do, I trust that I’ll ask for help. Using a blanket statement of self-trust increases your sense of security far more effectively than running potential disaster-solution patterns. Over time, you can retrain your mind to self-soothe rather than self-implode.

A calm mind and a well-rested body are your best chance at assessing a situation and responding with skill. Relentless self-interrogation, fault finding, and shame will not get you there.

“You create your own reality” is so patently untrue, and so cruel to the grieving heart. Many of us already feel responsible for what’s happened, both the death of someone we love, and the fact that we somehow aren’t doing our grief “well enough.” While this adage might (and I mean might) have a bare thread of truth in it, for the most part, it’s utter junk. Your thoughts can influence how you respond to what is, but your thoughts do not create what is.

If thinking could keep people safe, none of us would be grieving. If thoughts alone could prevent illness, accidents, and suffering, we would not have any of these. Magical thinking doesn’t control reality.