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

by Megan Devine

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.

Telling the truth about grief is the only way forward: your loss is exactly as bad as you think it is. And people, try as they might, really are responding to your loss as poorly as you think they are. You

Grief is visceral, not reasonable:

From close friends to casual acquaintances, everyone has a take on your grief; everyone wants to make it better for you somehow.

Our popular psychology, self-help books, movie storylines, book plots, and spiritual texts all glorify grief and loss as a way to grow as a person; to transcend loss is the biggest goal.

Grief gets a narrow window to be expressed. After that, you are expected to return to normal, carrying with you the gifts you’ve learned from the experience. You’re supposed to become wiser, more compassionate, and truly understand what’s important.

It’s not just the intense actual pain of loss. It’s the sheer number of tiny things that need to be avoided, endured, planned for.

And—it’s one of the cruelest aspects of intense loss: at a time when you most need love and support, some friends either behave horribly or they disappear altogether. There are disappointments and disagreements. Old grudges resurface. Small fault lines become impassable distances. People say the weirdest, most dismissive and bizarre things.

Grief changes your friendships. For many, many people, it ends them.

The injustice of these second losses makes grief itself that much more difficult.

Your entire system is working so hard to help you survive, and nightmares are often part of that process. It’s healthy, and “healthy” just feels like shit sometimes.

Let’s say you have one hundred units of brain power for each day. Right now, the enormity of grief, trauma, sadness, missing, loneliness, takes up ninety-nine of those energy units. That remaining one unit is what you have for the mundane and ordinary skills of life. That one remaining circuit is responsible for organizing carpools and funeral details. It’s got to keep you breathing, keep your heart beating, and access your cognitive, social, and relational skills. Remembering that cooking utensils belong in the drawer, not the freezer, that your keys are under the bathroom sink where you left them when you ran out of toilet paper—these things are just not high on the brain’s priority list.

Recovery is about listening to your wounds. Recovery is being honest about the state of your own devastation. It’s about cultivating patience, not the kind that implies waiting it out until you return to normal, but patience in knowing that grief and loss will carve their way through you, changing you.

Sovereignty is the state of having authority over your own life, making decisions based on your own knowledge of yourself, free of outside rule or domination. We’re such an opinion-giving culture; it can be hard to remember that each person is an expert in their own life. Other people may have insight, yes, but the right to claim the meaning of your life belongs solely to you.

because we don’t talk about the realities of grief in our culture, no one really knows how to help. The people who can best tell us how to help—grieving people themselves—don’t have the energy, interest, or capacity to teach anyone how to be supportive.

Expecting me to support you because the nature of our friendship has changed since my child has died is more than I can handle. When I tell you I am not up for big social gatherings (by big I mean more than one other person), please believe that I know what I can and cannot deal with. My instinctive need to cocoon, to swaddle myself in this horror is what I need to do right now.

It’s the most common, most universal, feedback I get from grieving people: the way they’re treated in their grief is horrendous. People say the most incredibly insensitive and cruel things to people in pain.

SO validating

No one likes to be told they’re doing something wrong. But if we can’t say what’s true for us inside our grief, what’s the point? If we can’t say, “This doesn’t help,” without being shamed or corrected, how are people supposed to know what we need?

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Educating people about the reality of grief is important—and sometimes you just don’t have it in you to care if they get it or not. Sometimes it makes it easier on you if you simply stop trying to explain.

Or you find out, days or weeks after the fact, that someone’s feelings were hurt when you didn’t respond to them in a certain way, or that you didn’t seem to want to talk to them. Meanwhile, you have no recollection of even seeing them at all. Or people launch into long speeches about what you should do to fix your pain because this is what they did when (fill in the blank) happened to them. How stunningly odd that is, to hear that you might just need to go out dancing after your child dies because that’s what the speaker needed after their divorce. I

People who have been with you through thick and thin suddenly disappear, or turn dismissive, shaming, strange.

It’s one of the hardest aspects of grief—seeing who cannot be with you inside this. Some people fade out and disappear. Others are so clueless, so cruel (intentionally or not), you choose to fade out on them.

you. Not everyone should. It’s true in all of life, but even more so inside grief: there is no time for relationships that make you feel small, shamed, or unsupported. This is your grief. Your loss. Your life. Honestly, this isn’t really the time for relationship repair, or excessive social graces. It doesn’t matter if some people think they’re helping: if their form of support feels dismissive, judgmental, or just plain wrong, you do not have to keep them as friends. If there are people in your life causing more harm than good, it’s OK to cut them out. Your life is very different now, and some people simply do not fit.

Defending yourself against someone who cannot possibly understand is a waste of your time and your heart.

The thing is, grief will absolutely rearrange your relationships. Some people will make it through, and some will fall away. Some people you thought would always be by your side will disappear entirely. People who were at the periphery of your life might step up and support you in ways you didn’t see coming. If 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.

Both are very true