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

by Megan Devine LPC

How do I feel after I see this person? Do I feel supported and centered, or crazy and exhausted? Are there times of day I feel calmer and more grounded? Are there certain books, or movies, or places that take the sharp edge off my mind, if only for a little while?

Be sure to note what things gave you even the tiniest bit more peace of being or calm. Especially in very early grief, nothing is going to feel amazing.

GATHER GENERAL DATA For the next week, keep a log of how you feel throughout the day, under different circumstances, in various places, and in various social situations. What do you notice?

It can be hard to separate pain from suffering.

Evidence of suffering: poor sleep, no appetite, excessive appetite, nightmares, intrusive thoughts, anxiety, self-judgment, emotional reactivity (reactivity is different from grief or pain), short temper, sense of guilt disproportionate to actual responsibility, inability to breathe through intense emotion or to compartmentalize intensity enough to care for yourself, feeling victimized by your own pain or by the responses of others, a sense that your pain is too large to be contained or survived.

Evidence of relative calm: emotional evenness, self-kindness, sense of being held or companioned inside your pain, validation, feeling somewhat rested, eating enough for your body’s needs, feeling an acceptance of your emotional state (no matter what that state is), ability to respond to others’ poor behavior with clear redirection or correction, taking things less personally, ability to compartmentalize intense emotion or remove yourself from a situation in order to tend to that emotion, sense of connection to self, others, and those you’ve lost.

On one side of the page, make a list of signs you’re really suffering. On the other side, a list of signs that you’re caring for yourself well.

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.

create a side-by-side list of what makes you feel saner and what makes you feel crazy.

Feeling consumed by rage and a sense of injustice? Your data might show that your justifiable anger gets much larger when you’ve spent time with “friends” who judge or dismiss your grief.

Feeling like you’d rather not wake up in the morning is normal in grief, and it doesn’t mean you’re suicidal. Not wanting to be alive is not the same thing as wanting to be dead.

Not because you’re actively suicidal, but because you simply do not care. There are moments inside grief when it seems easier to just be reckless, let death happen, a sort of daring the universe to pick you off. Sometimes you do not care one bit about your own “safety.” I know.

It rewards you to taste fearlessness. To have nothing to lose. The grief is disarming, but sometimes the afterward is intoxicating. Because what can you do to me now? This cockiness was hard-won. I’m new land craving to be built upon.

For the first year or two after Matt died, I couldn’t follow meditations or visualizations that had me focus on my breath. When I tried, or was directed to do so, all I could see or feel or remember was that Matt’s body had no breath. Putting attention into my body itself reminded me, viscerally, painfully, that Matt no longer had a body. That my own body could fail at any time. 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.

That’s why I have you focus on something mundane and ordinary: there is less chance of an exercise like this setting off more pain when you focus on what is boring, repetitive, and outside your body.

May you, to your own sad self, be kind.

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...

Early grief is a liminal time. Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold”) is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs when a person is no longer who they once were and has not yet become someone entirely new and solid.

Everything we’ve been—both physically and emotionally—is in a state of flux.

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.

“Dreams tell us where we are, not what to do.”2 Nightmares don’t bring solutions or offer portents for the future. They’re the creative, associative mind trying to orient itself to this loss.

Diagnosis: stress. The effect of stress on the physical body is well documented. Out-of-order death, unexpected grief, massive life changes—it’s the understatement of the century to say those things cause stress.

Many people have noticed that it’s their body—their physical reactions and sensations—that alert them to an emotionally heavy date on the calendar. You might not consciously know today is the seventeenth of the month, but you’ve been more exhausted and rather sick to your stomach all day. It’s only when you look at the calendar that you recognize it: the seventeenth is when he entered hospice, or when you got the first phone call that she was missing. The body remembers. The body knows.

In many ways, I think of the body as the vessel that holds this entire experience for you. That it cracks and breaks and otherwise shows signs of stress makes sense when we think of what it has been asked to endure.

Some people develop serious, lasting physical challenges due to what we call “the grief diet.”

widowed brain (though it occurs in many different losses)—it’s a great term for the cumulative cognitive effects of grief.

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.

Think of it like this: Let’s say you have one hundred units of brain power for each day. Right now, the enormity of grief, trauma, sadness, missing, loneliness, takes up ninety-nine of those energy units. That remaining one unit is what you have for the mundane and ordinary skills of life. That one remaining circuit is responsible for organizing carpools and funeral details. It’s got to keep you breathing, keep your heart beating, and access your cognitive, social, and relational skills. Remembering that cooking utensils belong in the drawer, not the freezer, that your keys are under the bathroom sink where you left them when you ran out of toilet paper—these things are just not high on the brain’s priority list.

I hear the same thing from just about everyone in grief’s early days: grief obliterates their ability to read, comprehend, and sustain attention. Forget reading several books at once, as you used to. Reading one chapter—even one page—is emotionally and mentally taxing.

No matter how much of a book person you were before your loss, your capacity to read has most likely been impacted by grief. There’s not much you can do about that. For some, their comprehension returns, but their attention span never returns to its pre-loss state.

If you’re grieving this secondary loss of your reading ability, know that, in most cases, it is transitory. It just takes longer than you might think to regain (or rebuild) your reader’s mind.

For a time, we are unhinged from the cultural forms we’ve laid down in human life. Things we agree to as a culture—like pieces of paper being fair trade for groceries, or lunchtime being at noon—are revealed as empty symbols, unrelated to anything intrinsically . . . real.

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. The world has been split open. Things “ordinary,” non-grieving people do as a matter of course will not always make sense, or feel meaningful, to you.

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.

“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 an addictive drug,

Feelings of anxiety are normal for those who have survived an intense loss or trauma. Inside your grief, the whole world can feel like an unsafe place, one that requires constant vigilance: searching for early warning signs of trouble, guarding against more loss. You rehearse what you would do if you were faced with unthinkable trauma again.