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

by Megan Devine

Love, companionship, acknowledgment—these things come up beside you, and beneath you, to support you in your pain, not to take it away. They aren’t replacements for what you’ve lost, and they don’t make being broken any easier.

This is going to hurt, maybe for a very long time. Broken hearts just do. The love you knew, the love you dreamed of, the love you grew and created together, that is what will get you through.

The entire universe can crumble (and it does), and love itself will never leave. Love is with you here, even and especially in this. Love is what sustains us. When there is nothing else to hold on to, hold on to love. Let it carry you forward.

It’s about claiming your right to be in pain, without cleaning it up or making it pretty for someone else’s comfort.

In telling the truth about our own hearts, we let others around us begin to find their own truth. We begin to shift the dominant paradigm that says that your grief is a problem to be solved. We get better at bearing witness to what hurts. We learn how to survive all the parts of love, even the difficult ones.

We begin to overhaul the falsely redemptive storyline that has us, as a culture and as individuals, insist that there’s a happy ending everywhere if only we look hard enough.

It’s OK that you’re not OK. Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.

at refugeingrief.com/help-grieving-friend.

Stick with the truth: This hurts. I love you. I’m here.

“She has better moments and worse moments and will for quite some time. An intense loss changes every detail of your life.”

Be love. Love is the thing that lasts.