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

by Megan Devine LPC

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

The life you expected to unfold disappears: vaporized.

Something crazy has happened, and you’re responding as any sane person would.

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.

This isn’t simply not getting something you deeply, truly wanted.

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.

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.

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.

Grief happens.

Being brave is letting pain unfurl and take up all the space it needs.

I am tired of hearing there is a reason for your death, for my heartbreak, and that when we get to the other side it will all make sense. It will never make sense, even when my heart stops hurting so much. I miss you. I wish you had never died.

Practice nonattachment. Don’t let it stress you out. Find the good in it.

To let it exist.

We think barricading ourselves against pain and suffering will help us survive.

The tricky thing is, true survival never exists in a world where we have to lie about our own hearts, or pretend we’re more in control than we are.

That you see your own potential for grief and loss in someone else’s grief? That’s beautiful. Poignancy is kinship.

The real cutting edge of growth and development is in hurting with each other. It’s in companionship, not correction. Acknowledgment—being seen and heard and witnessed inside the truth about one’s own life—is the only real medicine of grief.

Just two options. On, off. Eternally broken or completely healed.

Each of us, each one of us, has to find our way into that middle ground. A place that doesn’t ask us to deny our grief and doesn’t doom us forever. A place that honors the full breadth of grief, which is really the full breadth of love.

It won’t be a world with less grief. But it will be a world with so much more beauty.

We have to find ways to show our grief to others, in ways that honor the truth of our own experience.

Continuing to show up, continuing to look for support inside your pain, when all the world tries to tell you it’s a problem, is an act of fierce self-love

love and tenacity.

Acknowledgment is one of the few things that actually helps.

Naming the craziness of this time is powerful: it helps to know what’s normal when nothing feels normal.

That you were here, that moment, just a regular moment, and then you were gone.

A day (or more) inside a blanket fort of your own choosing is healthy.

You will do what you need to do when you need to do it. Not a moment before. It will never feel good. But if it makes you feel sick, now is not the time.

One of the best things someone said to me as I approached Matt’s one-year date was, “You always have the right to leave, even if you just got there, even if you planned the whole thing. No one else has to live this like you do. Leave whenever you need.”

Do your best to maintain healthy boundaries, voice your needs, and step away from battles when you can. If something is important to you, advocate for yourself and your family, and remember that no matter what the outcome, your love and connection to the person you’ve lost can never be taken away.

It simply is. Give it your attention, your care. Find ways to let it stretch out, let it exist. Tend to yourself inside it. That’s so different from trying to get yourself out of it.

Kindness is self-care. Kindness is recognizing when you need to back off a bit.

“I’m scared,” and your brain responds with a cascade of images and hormones to help you find safety. Because you’ve experienced the world as drastically unsafe at one point, when one fear gets resolved, your mind comes up with another fear, in a perpetual bid for safety: it’s a natural survival tool on tilt.

Anxiety is using your imagination to create a future you do not want. So let’s not do that.

Death doesn’t end a relationship; it changes it.

Refusing to explain or defend your grief doesn’t mean you let other people go on and on about it, continually telling you how you should live.

the people in your life can handle, even appreciate, you staying true to your own heart, then they’ll make it through with you. If they can’t, let them go: gracefully, clearly, and with love.

But grief made me lonely in ways I had never known, and I had known lonely.

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.

Be fierce about it.

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

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.

Acknowledgment is everything, and so I end this love letter to you where we began: I’m so sorry you have need of this place, and I’m so glad you’re here. It’s OK that you’re not OK. Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.