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

by Megan Devine

First, no one can live your life for you—no one can face what is yours to face or feel what is yours to feel—and no one can make it alone.

in living our one life, we are here to love and lose.

If we commit to loving, we will inevitably know...

knowing both love and loss is what brings us fully ...

those who suffer carry a wisdom that the rest of us need.

to be broken is no reason to see all things as broken.

We see it as something to overcome, something to fix, rather than something to tend or support.

Here’s what I most want you to know: this really is as bad as you think.

Every object in your life becomes an artifact, a symbol of the life that used to be and might have been.

Because we don’t talk about loss, most people—and many professionals—think of grief and loss as aberrations, detours from a normal, happy life.

There is nothing wrong with grief. It’s a natural extension of love. It’s a healthy and sane response to loss.

There are losses that rearrange the world. Deaths that change the way you see everything,

This book is about how you live inside your loss.

And even though that thought—that you can survive something as horrifying as this—is unsettling and horrifying in its own right, the truth is, you will most likely survive.

In order to survive, to find that life that feels authentic and true to you, we have to start with telling the truth. This really is as bad as you think. Everything really is as wrong, and as bizarre, as you know it to be. When we start there, we can begin to talk about living with grief, living inside the love that remains.

Even if you had a deep attention span before your loss, grief has a way of shortening that considerably.

grief is not a problem to be solved.

people make grief feel much worse when they try to pretty it up, gloss over it, or make it go away.

We need to talk about the hierarchy of grief. You hear it all the time—no grief is worse than any other. I don’t think that’s one bit true. There is a hierarchy of grief.

true comfort in grief is in acknowledging the pain, not in trying to make it go away.

Reexamine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul. WALT WHITMAN, Leaves of Grass

When I speak to someone within the first two years of their loss, I always tell them, “This just happened. It was just a minute ago. Of course it still hurts.” Their relief is palpable.

Medicalizing—and pathologizing—a healthy, normal, sane response to loss is ridiculous, and it does no one any good.

To do grief well depends solely on individual experience. It means listening to your own reality. It means acknowledging pain and love and loss. It means allowing the truth of these things the space to exist without any artificial tethers or stages or requirements.

Social scientist Brené Brown argues that we live in “a Gilded Age of Failure,” where we fetishize recovery stories for their redemptive ending, glossing over the darkness and struggle that precedes it.1

Grieving people are met with impatience precisely because they are failing the cultural storyline of overcoming adversity.

It soothes our brains, in some ways, to believe that through our own good sense, we, and all those we love, can be kept safe.

blame is a way to discharge pain and discomfort.

At the root of our fears around grief, and in our approaches to grief and loss, is a fear of connection.

A pre-mapped-out lifetime doesn’t make the death of someone you actually love any less devastating.

It will never make sense, even when my heart stops hurting so much. I miss you. I wish you had never died.

What better way to silence pain than to blame those who feel it?

It’s all part of that cultural storyline that glorifies transformation, while staunchly avoiding the reality of pain in the world.

teachings in any true tradition help us become more human: more connected, not less attached.

The way to get through the pain of being human is not to deny it, but to experience

Your emotional resilience and intelligence has to be quite secure to be able to hold your gaze on the reality of loss.

our cultural dialogue is fundamentally avoidant.

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. ADRIENNE RICH,

We have to be able to say what’s true without fear of being seen as weak, damaged, or somehow failing the cultural storyline.

We need to make it just as normal to talk about our pain as it is to talk about our joy.

Our deeply embedded aversion to pain and hardship—to acknowledging pain and hardship—keeps us from what we most want: safety. Safety in the form of love, connection, and kinship.

The most efficient and effective way to be “safe” in this world is to stop denying that hard and impossible things happen.

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.

How do we become, not only people, but a whole wider culture, comfortable bearing the reality that there is pain that can’t be fixed?

A place that honors the full breadth of grief, which is really the full breadth of love.

The more people tell the truth about how hard this is—how hard it is to be alive, to love, and to lose—the better this life becomes for everyone.

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.

I cannot look directly at this. Everything inside me will explode, and I cannot bear the tearing.

The sheer number of things you need to do when someone has died is mind-boggling.

for everything you’ve had to do, love—I’m so sorry.