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

by Megan Devine

Sometimes, that’s your best metric: this sucks less than most things do.

Creative exploration is a companion inside your grief, not a solution. As a mirror of your own innermost heart, let it be whatever it needs to be.

During the first year, it’s so tempting to say that things get better. I mean, is it really a kindness to say, “Actually, year two is often far harder than year one”? But if we don’t say anything, people enter years two and three and four thinking they should be “better” by now. And that is patently untrue: subsequent years can actually be more difficult.

We need a way to talk about both things—the reality of deep, persistent pain and the reality of living with that pain in a way that is gentle, authentic, and even beautiful.

My sorrow and I are the same, there is no separation.

that insistence on returning to normal says far more about the speaker’s discomfort with pain than it does about the reality of grief.

You will not “move on.” You will not return to “who you used to be.” How could you? To refuse to be changed by something as powerful as this would be the epitome of arrogance.

There is no going back. There is no moving on. There is only moving with: an integration of all that has come before, and all you have been asked to live.

Recovery is about listening to your wounds. Recovery is being honest about the state of your own devastation. It’s about cultivating patience, not the kind that implies waiting it out until you return to normal, but patience in knowing that grief and loss will carve their way through you, changing you. Making their own kind of beauty, in their own ways.

That’s the real work of grief recovery—finding ways to live alongside your loss, building a life around the edges of what will always be a vacancy.

things get different; they don’t get “better.

It is true that the pain you feel now is intimately connected to love. And—the pain will eventually recede, and love will stay right there.

As you move forward in this life, your grief, and more important, your love, will come with you.

Recovery takes patience, and a willingness to sit with your own heart, even, and especially, when that heart has been irrevocably shattered.

When we support the natural process of grief, rather than try to push it or rush it or clean it up, it gets softer. Your job is to tend to yourself as best you can, leaning into whatever love, kindness, and companionship you can.

response from people around you has been clumsy at best, and insulting, dismissive, and rude at worst.

The things they say, the ways they entirely miss the pain you’re in, they’re much harder to deal with.

We’re trained to be polite. We’re supposed to smile and nod and say, thanks for thinking of me, when inside, what we really want to do is scream, “What the fuck are you thinking, saying that to me?”

If someone truly wants to help you inside your grief, they have to be willing to hear what doesn’t help. They have to be willing to feel the discomfort of not knowing what to say or how to say it. They have to be open to feedback. Otherwise they aren’t really interested in helping—they’re interested in being seen as helpful.

Not everyone deserves to hear your grief. Not everyone is capable of hearing it. Just because someone is thoughtful enough to ask doesn’t mean you are obliged to answer.

Those who support your shifting needs are the ones to keep in your life. The others? They can be set free.

It’s amazing how many people drop out of your life in the wake of catastrophic loss. People who have been with you through thick and thin suddenly disappear, or turn dismissive, shaming, strange.

But not everyone will make it through this with you. Not everyone should

They want the “old” you back, not understanding that that old you can’t come back. That self is gone.

The thing is, grief will absolutely rearrange your relationships. Some people will make it through, and some will fall away. Some people you thought would always be by your side will disappear entirely. People who were at the periphery of your life might step up and support you in ways you didn’t see coming.

By shifting the focus away from fixing your grief onto actually supporting you inside it, friends and family can get that much closer to showing you the love they intend. They can make this better, even when they can’t make it right.

We’ve got a medical model in Western culture that says that death is failure. We’ve got a psychological model that says anything other than a stable baseline of “happy” is an aberration. Illness, sadness, pain, death, grief—they’re all seen as problems in need of solutions. How can you possibly be expected to handle grief with any skill when all of our models show the wrong approach? Grief is not a problem. It doesn’t need solutions. Seeing grief as an experience that needs support, rather than solutions, changes everything.

It seems counterintuitive, but the way to truly be helpful to someone in pain is to let them have their pain. Let them share the reality of how much this hurts, how hard this is, without jumping in to clean it up, make it smaller, or make it go away. That pause between the impulse to help and taking action lets you come to pain with skill, and with love. That pause lets you remember that your role is that of witness, not problem solver.

The role of the support team is to acknowledge and companion those in pain, not try to make it better.

The important thing to remember is that we don’t need you to be perfect. It’s OK—more than OK—to lead a conversation with, “I have no idea what to say, and I know I can’t make this right.” Or, “I want to give you space and privacy, but I’m also worried about you, and I want to check in.”

Good things and horrible things occupy the same space; they don’t cancel each other out.

“Are you wanting empathy or a strategy right now?”

Remember that evidence of “helping” is not in the reduction of pain; it’s in knowing the grieving person feels supported and acknowledged inside their pain.

In early grief, the person you love has such a low reserve of energy, they simply cannot show up for your friendship—or even for themselves—in the ways you might be used to.

Observe how things are landing for them, but in those early days, please don’t expect—or demand—that they show up with their normal emotional-relational skills. They do not have them. Asking the grieving person to educate you on how best to help is simply not something they can do.

Here is what grieving people want you to know: We love you. We still love you, even if our lives have gone completely dark, and you can’t seem to reach us. Please stay.

Grief is already a lonely experience. It rearranges your address book: people you thought would stay beside you through anything have either disappeared or they’ve behaved so badly, you cut them out yourself. Even those who truly love you, who want more than anything to stay beside you, fall short of joining you here. It can feel like you lost the entire world right along with the person who died.

No matter how many times people tell you they’re here for you, no matter how well they are here for you, no one can “do” grief with you.

You are alone in your grief. You alone carry the knowledge of how your grief lives in you. You alone know all the details, the subtlety and nuance of what’s happened and what’s been lost. You alone know how deeply your life has been changed. You alone have to face this, inside your own heart. No one can do this with you.

Sadness is treated with human connection. DR. PAULINE BOSS

When someone can look at you and truly see, really recognize, the devastation at the core of your life, it changes something. It helps. It may be the only thing that does.

Companionship inside loss is one of the best indicators, not of “recovery,” but of survival.

When the center has been torn from your life, you need the company of others who can stand there beside the hole and not turn away.

Grief like yours, love like yours, can only be carried.

Survival in grief, even eventually building a new life alongside grief, comes with the willingness to bear witness, both to yourself and to the others who find themselves inside this life they didn’t see coming. Together, we create real hope for ourselves, and for one another. We need each other to survive.

Our hearts have held great, great sorrow. Through that pain, we can be there for each other. As our words knock on the doors of each other’s hearts, we become way stations for each other.

There was love in this world before your loss, there is love surrounding you now, and love will remain beside you, through all the life that is yet to come. The forms will change, but love itself will never leave. It’s not enough. And it’s everything.

Survival in grief lies in finding the connection between the life that was and the life that has been thrust upon you.

love we can carry with us. It shifts and changes like a natural force because it is a natural force, yet somehow remains foundation, bedrock, home base. It connects what is now, to what was, to what is to come. It allows us to travel between worlds.

and to know that there is both goodness and pain in the world, and that I am part of both.