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

by Megan Devine

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.

And that’s the truth about grief: loss gets integrated, not overcome.

Words of comfort that try to erase pain are not a comfort.

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.

Denial is actually a kindness, at times. Distraction is a healthy coping strategy.

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

You will not “move on.” You will not return to “who you used to be.” How could you? To refuse to be changed by something as powerful as this would be the epitome of arrogance.

It’s tempting to write everyone off—no one gets it. No one understands. Living in grief can feel like you’ve moved to an entirely different planet, or make you wish you could.

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.

but the way to truly be helpful to someone in pain is to let them have their pain. Let them share the reality of how much this hurts, how hard this is, without jumping in to clean it up, make it smaller, or make it go away.

You are alone in your grief. You alone carry the knowledge of how your grief lives in you. You alone know all the details, the subtlety and nuance of what’s happened and what’s been lost. You alone know how deeply your life has been changed. You alone have to face this, inside your own heart. No one can do this with you.

the world is split between those who know and those who do not.

What’s important is that you find a place where your loss is valued and honored and heard. When the center has been torn from your life, you need the company of others who can stand there beside the hole and not turn away.