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

by Megan Devine

At a time when we most needed love and support, each one of us felt alone, misunderstood, judged, and dismissed. It’s not that the people around us meant to be cruel; they just didn’t know how to be truly helpful. Like many grieving people, we stopped talking about our pain to friends and family. It was easier to pretend everything was fine than to continually defend and explain our grief to those who couldn’t understand. We turned to other grieving people because they were the only ones who knew what grief was really like.

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 As a result, we have outdated beliefs around how long grief should last and what it should look like. We see it as something to overcome, something to fix, rather than something to tend or support.

No matter what anyone else says, this sucks. What has happened cannot be made right. What is lost cannot be restored. There is no beauty here, inside this central fact. Acknowledgment is everything. You’re in pain. It can’t be made better.

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.

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 it is. And people, try as they might, really are responding to your loss as poorly as you think they are. You aren’t crazy. Something crazy has happened, and you’re responding as any sane person would.

them is strange, or weird, or wrong. 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.

Because the truth is, in one way or another, loving each other means losing each other.

Grief is visceral, not reasonable: the howling at the center of grief is raw and real. It is love in its most wild form.

To feel truly comforted by someone, you need to feel heard in your pain. You need the reality of your loss reflected back to you—not diminished, not diluted. It seems counterintuitive, but true comfort in grief is in acknowledging the pain, not in trying to make it go away.

But you can’t force an order on pain. You can’t make grief tidy or predictable. Grief is as individual as love: every life, every path, is unique. There is no pattern, and no linear progression. Despite what many “experts” believe, there are no stages of grief.

Pain is not always redeemed, in the end or otherwise. Being brave—being a hero—is not about overcoming what hurts or turning it into a gift. Being brave is about waking to face each day when you would rather just stop waking up. Being brave is staying present to your own heart when that heart is shattered into a million different pieces and can never be made right. Being brave is standing at the edge of the abyss that just opened in someone’s life and not turning away from it, not covering your discomfort with a pithy “think positive” emoticon. Being brave is letting pain unfurl and take up all the space it needs. Being brave is telling that story. It’s terrifying. And it’s beautiful. Those are the stories we need.

Pain and grief are never seen as healthy responses to loss. They’re far too threatening for that. We resist them in equal measure to our fear of being consumed by them. The problem with this—among many problems—is that it creates a societally acceptable blame structure in which any kind of hardship or pain is met with shame, judgment, and an admonishment to get back to “normal” quickly. If you can’t rise above it, you are, once again, doing something wrong.

The only way I know to start talking about the reality of grief is to begin with annihilation: there is a quiet, a stillness, that pervades everything in early grief. Loss stuns us into a place beyond any language.

There isn’t enough paper in the world to write down all the minute details that death brings into your life. Again, I circle back to acknowledgment as the only form of medicine that helps: for everything you’ve had to do, love—I’m so sorry.

And it’s not just when you go looking for distraction: everyday life is full of reminders and grief land mines that the non-grieving wouldn’t even think of. When someone you love dies, you don’t just lose them in the present or in the past. You lose the future you should have had, and might have had, with them. They are missing from all the life that was to be.

Especially in the early days, the effort to join the world again is Herculean and monumental. Those densely scattered grief land mines are hard to face. Human interaction is often exhausting. Many people choose to shrink their world down considerably, refusing invitations to anything and everything. Even staunch extroverts find that they need a lot more time alone and quiet than they ever did before. Please know that if the outside world feels too harsh or too saturated with all things grief, you aren’t being “too sensitive.” The world is full of things connected to your grief.

And—it’s one of the cruelest aspects of intense loss: at a time when you most need love and support, some friends either behave horribly or they disappear altogether. There are disappointments and disagreements. Old grudges resurface. Small fault lines become impassable distances. People say the weirdest, most dismissive and bizarre things. Grief changes your friendships. For many, many people, it ends them.

Death doesn’t end a relationship; it changes it. Writing, painting, and other creative processes allow the conversation that began in life Before to continue in life After. The stories we create are a continuation of love. And sometimes, creation allows us to connect and relate to the world again, in our own new ways, in this whole new life.

Recovery inside grief is always a moving point of balance. There isn’t any end point. While it may not always be this acutely heavy, your grief, like your love, will always be part of you. Life can be, and even likely will be, beautiful again. But that is a life built alongside loss, informed by beauty and grace as much as by devastation, not one that seeks to erase it.

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. It will deepen and change as all relationships do. Not in the ways you wanted. Not in the ways you deserved. But in the way love does—of its own accord.

If you choose to not reveal your inner life, your broken heart, or even the cold hard facts to other people, you are not betraying the one you’ve lost. Though it feels bizarre to talk around the gaping hole in your life, to answer, “I’m fine, thanks” to a routine question when you are not in any way fine really is a kindness to yourself. It can be a kindness to yourself. 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. Part of living with grief is learning to discern who is safe and who is not, who is worthy and who is not. Part of living with grief is also learning to discern, for yourself, your own right timing in sharing this with others.

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. Random strangers become your biggest, deepest source of comfort, if even only for a few moments. It’s one of the hardest aspects of grief—seeing who cannot be with you inside this. Some people fade out and disappear. Others are so clueless, so cruel (intentionally or not), you choose to fade out on them.

Grief can be incredibly lonely. Even when people show up and love you as best they can, they aren’t really with you in this. They can’t be. It so very much sucks that, in large part, you are in this alone. And also, you can’t do this alone. You may find that people come in and out of your life during this time. There are people who were instrumental in helping me survive those first few weeks who eventually moved back into their own lives, their own needs. They came into my life for a time, and then we let each other go. It hurt, that they had their own intact lives to get back to, but for a time, I was everything for them, and I knew it. Good people will show up as they can, for as long as they can. That they leave is not a failure, even though it hurts. If there are people in your life you love, who love you, but this whole grief thing is making things a little clunky, it’s OK. Grief is difficult on everything; relationships are not immune. There will be people who can handle the choppy relationship bits and make it through with you. Hopefully the love and trust you’ve built together is resilient, giving you a net to fall into. But not everyone will make it through this with you. Not everyone should.

We grieve because we love. Grief is part of love.