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

by Megan Devine

For some people, taking care of these details is the last tangible, intimate act of love they can do for the person who’s died.

Dragging yourself to a party, thinking you need to get out more, only to have every single small-talk question point to only one answer: death.

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.

If there is anything that gives you even a moment’s relief or respite, move toward that. It makes no difference what it is.

Do they have birthdays when they’re dead?

Often, the lead-up to a big date is harder than the date itself.

And even when your friends want to support you, we don’t often have the skills—no matter how skilled we truly are—to witness and withstand another’s pain.

When the body and mind experience pain, we have a biological need to express it.

Suffering comes with being told to not feel what you feel. Suffering comes with being told there is something wrong with what you feel.

The point of any practice, the point of this experiment, is to be the strongest, most whole vessel you can be to hold what is, to live this life that’s asked of you.

One of the first things you can do inside your grief is to start paying attention to subtle shifts in how you feel.

Because our metric can no longer be the cessation of pain, figuring out your relative wellness inside grief can be tricky.

Using tools to reduce your suffering is one of the few concrete actions to take inside grief.

Not wanting to create more pain for someone else was a strong enough motivation to make safer choices.

It’s important to find those places where your grief gets to be as bad as it is, where it gets to suck as much as it does.

Part of this process is learning to trust yourself.

I’m not talking about shutting down your emotions as a long-term solution (that so does not work), but shutting down in a moment where to feel the full intensity of your pain would not be beneficial.

When your pain is too big for the environment you’re in, it can turn into emotional flooding. Emotional flooding is not what we’re going for when I suggest you make space for your pain.

You deserve the utmost care and respect.

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

Early grief is a liminal time. Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold”) is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs when a person is no longer who they once were and has not yet become someone entirely new and solid.

Recurrent dreams, or dreams that have you delivering the news about death over and over, are actually a healthy and necessary part of grief.

It’s healthy, and “healthy” just feels like shit sometimes.

Many people have noticed that it’s their body—their physical reactions and sensations—that alert them to an emotionally heavy date on the calendar.

You are not crazy. You feel crazy because you’re inside a crazy experience. Grief, especially early grief, is not a normal time. It makes perfect sense that your mind doesn’t work the way it used to: everything has changed. Of course you’re disoriented. Your mind is trying to make sense of a world that can no longer make sense.

It impacts your memory, your ability to communicate, your capacity for interaction.

There’s a clumsy forgetfulness, or absentmindedness, that often comes with grief.

Many people feel they’ve lost their competence, their drive, and their former confidence.

grief obliterates their ability to read, comprehend, and sustain attention.

For some, their comprehension returns, but their attention span never returns to its pre-loss state.

The brain cannot make this new reality fit.

Those blips and gaps in your memory and thought process are the brain trying to make data fit into a world that cannot absorb that data.

If something bad does happen, you will deal with it then. It is highly unlikely that anything awful will happen. If it does, you will deal.”

I imagined everyone I loved disappearing in an instant, everyone I knew and loved (including myself) in danger, suffering, dead.

we all want to know we’re safe, cared for, and won’t be left alone, unloved, or unprotected.

We’ve also got that pervasive cultural belief that your thoughts create your reality.

“You create your own reality” is so patently untrue, and so cruel to the grieving heart.