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

by Megan Devine LPC

in living our one life, we are here to love and lose. No one knows why. It is just so. If we commit to loving, we will inevitably know loss and grief. If we try to avoid loss and grief, we will never truly love. Yet powerfully and mysteriously, knowing both love and loss is what brings us fully and deeply alive.

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 life you expected to unfold disappears: vaporized. The world splits open, and nothing makes sense. Your life was normal, and now, suddenly, it’s anything but normal.

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.

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

Our hearts get broken in ways that can’t be fixed. There is pain that becomes an immovable part of our lives.

We need to know how to live here, where life as we know it can change, forever, at any time.

If you’ve found yourself here, in this life you didn’t ask for, in this life you didn’t see coming, I’m sorry. I can’t tell you it will all work out in the end. I can’t tell you things will be just fine. You are not “OK.” You might not ever be “OK.”

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

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.

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.

I know you’d gladly give all this up just to have your old life back.

What you’re living can’t be fixed. It can’t be made better. There are no solutions.

I cannot swallow this truth, that you are gone, that the life we planned is done. If I try to look directly at that fact (that I refuse to let be fact), I feel the explosion start inside of me, the world cracks and my lungs fill, and I cannot breathe.

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.

grief is so exhausting.

You can’t wait for the time to feel right, because it likely never will.

There are times that tears leak out at inopportune moments, times when the screaming inside you can’t be held in, situations where holding yourself together is an entirely impossible task and rabid mind-loops keep replaying the events of your loss.

Surviving early grief is a massive effort. Forget getting through the day; sometimes the pain is so excruciating, the most you can aim for is getting through the next few minutes.

relationships—everything. The thought of endless months and years without the one you love is overwhelming. The thought of everyone else going back to their lives while you’re still sitting there in the wreckage is overwhelming.

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.

Sometimes you do not care one bit whether you live or die. Not because you’re actively suicidal, but because you simply do not care.

“I’m not going to kill myself, but I can tell you that if a piano were falling from the roof of this building I’m walking past, I wouldn’t rush to get out of the way.

It’s always seemed so bizarre to me that we have an answer for almost every physical pain, but for this—some of the most intense pain we can experience—there is no medicine. You’re just supposed to feel it.

When your life has been entirely imploded and rearranged, there is not one thing, not one happy, calming place, activity, or image that is not tainted, somehow.

It’s true on so many levels: losing someone changes you.

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.

Your mind is trying to make sense of a world that can no longer make sense.

As you move forward in this life, your grief, and more important, your love, will come with you.

Grief changes you.

Many grieving people feel like they’re on another planet, or wish they could go to one.

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.

This is going to hurt, maybe for a very long time. Broken hearts just do. The love you knew, the love you dreamed of, the love you grew and created together, that is what will get you through.