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

by Megan Devine LPC

Having lost a loved one, she knows that life is forever changed. There is no getting over it, but only getting under it.

The truth is that those who suffer carry a wisdom that the rest of us need.

Our work, alone and together, is not to minimize the pain or loss we feel, but to investigate what these life-changing incidents are opening in us. I have learned through my own pain and grief that to be broken is no reason to see all things as broken.

Like John of the Cross, who faced the dark night of the soul, and like Jacob, who wrestled the nameless angel in the bottom of the ravine, Megan lost her partner Matt and wrestled through a long dark ravine.

In Dante’s Divine Comedy, Virgil is Dante’s guide through hell into purgatory, right up until Dante faces a wall of flame, which he balks at, afraid. But Virgil tells him, “You have no choice. It is the fire that will burn but not consume.” Dante is still afraid. Sensing this, Virgil puts his hand on his shoulder and repeats, “You have no choice.” Dante then summons his courage and enters. Everyone who lives comes upon this wall of fire. Like Virgil, Megan is a guide through hell, up to the wall of fire we each must pass through alone, beyond which we become our own guides. Like Virgil, Megan points out a way, not the way, but a way, offering those in the mad turmoil of grief a few things to hold onto. It is courageous work to love and lose and keep each other company, no matter how long the road. And Megan is a courageous teacher. If you are in the grip of grief, reach for this book. It will help you carry what is yours to carry while making the journey less alone.

And though it seems strange, or maybe arrogant, I owe an unending thank-you to myself—to the person I was, the person at the river that day and in the years soon after, the one who lived when she did not want to. This book is a love letter back to her, an act of time travel. In so many ways, through this book, I want for myself what I want for all who read it—to reach back with my words, to hold her, to help her survive. I am so glad she lived.

over it,” put the past behind us, and stop talking about those we had lost. We were admonished to move on with our lives and told we needed these deaths in order to learn what was important in life. Even those who tried to help ended up hurting. Platitudes and advice, even when said with good intentions, came across as dismissive, reducing such great pain to greeting card one-liners.

Our culture sees grief as a kind of malady: a terrifying, messy emotion that needs to be cleaned up and put behind us as soon as possible. As a result, we have outdated beliefs around how long grief should last and what it should look like.

Even our clinicians are trained to see grief as a disorder rather than a natural response to deep loss.

physical aspects of grief (memory loss, cognitive changes, anxiety) and found tools that help.

Here’s what I most want you to know: this really is as bad as you think.

There is no beauty here, inside this central fact.

You don’t need solutions. You don’t need to move on from your grief. You need someone to see your grief, to acknowledge it. You need someone to hold your hands while you stand there in blinking horror, staring at the hole that was your life.

Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.

THE REALITY OF GRIEF When out-of-order death or a life-altering event enters your life, everything changes. Even when it’s expected, death or loss still comes as a surprise. Everything is different now. The life you expected to unfold disappears: vaporized. The world splits open, and nothing m...

Your mind cannot stop replaying the events, hoping for a different outcome. The ordinary, everyday world that others still inhabit feels coarse and cruel. You can’t eat (or you eat everything). You can’t sleep (or you sleep all the time). Every object in your life becomes an artifact, a symbol of the life that used to be and might have been. There is no place this loss has not touched.

Platitudes and cheerleading solve nothing. In fact, this kind of support only makes you feel like no one in the world understands. This isn’t a paper cut. It’s not a crisis of confidence. You didn’t need this thing to happen in order to know what’s important, to find your calling, or even to understand that you are, in fact, deeply loved.

Telling the truth about grief is the only way forward: your loss is exactly as bad as you think

And people, try as they might, really are responding to your loss as poorly...

You aren’t crazy. Something crazy has happened, and you’re responding as ...

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.

How random and fragile life can be. We don’t talk about the fragility of life: how everything can be normal one moment, and completely changed the next.

We have no words, no language, no capacity to face this, together or as individuals.

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.

Whatever grief you’re carrying, it’s important to acknowledge how bad this is, how hard. It really is horrendous, horrifying, and unsurvivable.

This book is not about fixing you, or fixing your grief. It’s not about making you “better” or getting you back to “normal.” This book is about how you live inside your loss. How you carry what cannot be fixed. How you survive.

And even though that thought—that you can survive something as horrifying as this—is unsettling and horrifying in its own right, the t...

Your survival in this life post-loss won’t follow steps or stages, or align with anyone else’s vision of what life might be for you. Survival won’t be found, can’t be found, in easy answers or in putting your lost life behind you, pretending you didn’t really want it anyway. 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, a...

While the book progresses in a somewhat linear fashion, jump around however you see fit. As with grief, there’s no right way to explore this. Especially in early grief, there’s only so much you can absorb. Even if you had a deep attention span before your loss, grief has a way of shortening that considerably. Take things in manageable chunks. (I discuss more on how grief affects your brain and body in part 2.) The first part of the book is about the culture of grief and how we come to pain like yours. It dives into the historical roots of emotional illiteracy, of our deep aversion to facing the realities of pain. It’s the wide view of grief, the view of what grief—and love—looks like when seen through a much longer lens. If your world has just imploded, why should you care about the wider view? Why should you spend any time at all reflecting on how emotionally illiterate this world is?

They can validate the crazy dissonance between your reality and the reality others foist on you. That difference between what the outside world believes and what you know to be true can be one of the hardest aspects of grief.

Trying to keep moving. Doing what was reasonable, expected, ordinary: groceries, dog walks, meeting friends for lunch. Nodding back at people who told me everything was going to be OK. Holding my tongue, being polite, when therapist after therapist told me I had to progress through the stages of grief more quickly. All the while, beside me, inside me, was the howling, shrieking, screaming mass of pain, watching this normal and ordinary person being reasonable. Polite. As though anything was OK. As though what I was living was not that bad. As though horror could be managed through acceptable behavior.

Grief support is kind of like the emperor’s new clothes of the relational world—those in pain know that what passes for support is truly nothing at all, while well-intentioned support people continue to spout off empty encouragement and worn-out platitudes, knowing in their hearts that those words don’t help at all. We all know this, and yet no one says anything.

How irrelevant it is to talk about grief as though it were an intellectual exercise, something you can simply use your mind to rise above. The intelligence that arranges words and dictates stages or steps or reasonable behavior is on a wholly different plane than the heart that is newly smashed open.

Grief is visceral, not reasonable: the howling at the center of grief is raw and real. It is ...

There are checklists, suggestions, and first-person essays to help your support teams be more skilled in how they come to your pain. And just as important, part 3 helps you figure out who simply can’t be there for you, and how to cut them from your life with at least some skill and grace.

And that’s the truth about grief: loss gets integrated, not overcome. However long it takes, your heart and your mind will carve out a new life amid this weirdly devastated landscape.

May this book help you find the thread of love that still exists, following it forward into a life you didn’t ask for, but is here nonetheless. I’m so sorry you have need of this book, and I’m so glad you’re here.

Most of this part of the book focuses on our messed-up cultural models around grief and pain, but this chapter stays personal: it’s important to validate how crazy other people’s responses to your loss can make you feel. Wondering if other people are nuts or you’re just being “too sensitive” adds an additional level of stress. Validation and acknowledgment are important—there really is something not comforting in the way people are trying to comfort you.

Intense grief is an impossibility: there is no “making it better.” Words of intended comfort just grate. “Help” from other people feels like an intrusion. Attempts at connection or understanding come across as clueless or rude. Everyone has an opinion as to how you should be grieving and how you can make this better for yourself. Platitudes about coming through this “even stronger” and admonishments to “remember the good times” feel like a slap in the face.

There may in fact be a spiritual solution to every problem, but grief is not a problem to be solved. It isn’t “wrong,” and it can’t be “fixed.” It isn’t an illness to be cured. We assume that if something is uncomfortable, it means something is wrong. People conclude that grief is “bad” because it hurts. We hear about relieving the pain, getting out of pain, dreaming of a time when there is no pain. We behave as though grief is something to get out of as soon as possible, an aberration that needs healing, rather than a natural response to loss.

Though they often don’t mean to, people make grief feel much worse when they try to pretty it up, gloss over it, or make it go away. Whether comfort and condolences come in person or in those beautiful/awful cards, this chapter goes

over some of the ways the best of intentions can backfire.

Shared loss stories are an attempt to make you feel less alone inside your grief. They don’t usually land that way, though. Comparing one grief with another almost always backfires. One experience of loss does not translate into another. Grief is as individual as love. That someone has experienced a loss—even one similar to yours—does not mean they understand you.

When someone relates their own story of loss, they’re hoping to remove some of your pain. True. But that’s not all. Everyone carries grief—from the everyday losses to the bigger, life-altering ones. Because we don’t talk about grief in our culture, we have personal and global backlogs of unheard and unspoken grief. When you become visible in your grief, it’s like a portal opens, a doorway into acceptability and openness. When you start talking about loss, it’s like there’s suddenly this permission, and we think, Oh, thank goodness, we’re talking about grief now. Let me tell you about the losses I’ve suffered! We all want to talk about our pain. We all carry stories that need acknowledgment. But right now? Right now, when you are in pain, when your loss is primary and powerful? That is not the time for a two-way, give-and-take discussion about the losses we all sustain. Grief comparison and shared grief stories do not bring you comfort. Of course they don’t. It can feel like your own loss has been eclipsed by the speaker’s need to tell their own story—no matter how long ago it happened, or how irrelevant it is to your loss. Talking about their own pain is a way the speaker moves the focus off supporting you and onto getting their own needs met. It seems nefarious, but it’s just one of the subtle ways our faulty grief culture impacts your actual grieving process. There is a time and a place to discuss our shared stories of loss. When your world has just imploded is not one o...

If you respond to the speaker’s shared grief story by saying, “They aren’t the same thing,” what they hear is: “Your grief is not as real as mine.” They hear that their pain wasn’t bad enough. They hear that distinction as an insult to their heart, a dismissal of their pain.

We need to talk about the hierarchy of grief. You hear it all the time—no grief is worse than any other. I don’t think that’s one bit true. There is a hierarchy of grief. Divorce is not the same as the death of a partner. Death of a grandparent is not the same as the death of a child. Losing your job is not the same as losing a limb. Here’s the thing: every loss is valid. And every loss is not the same. You can’t flatten the landscape of grief and say that everything is equal. It isn’t.

That all grief is valid does not mean that all grief is the same.

We need to be careful that we don’t exclude anyone’s grief. We all deserve to be heard in our grief, no matter what that grief may be. At the same time, we can’t assign equal weight to all losses and successfully support someone in pain. Making no distinction between levels of grief does not support the griever.