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

by Megan Devine

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

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.

“We’re not here to fix our pain, but to tend to it.”

The truth is that those who suffer carry a wisdom that the rest of us need. And given that we live in a society that is afraid to feel, it’s important to open each other to the depth of the human journey, which can only be known through the life of our feelings.

“Real safety is in entering each other’s pain, [and] recognizing ourselves inside it.”

The way we deal with grief in our culture is broken.

Every one of us had felt judged, shamed, and corrected in our grief.

It was easier to pretend everything was fine than to continually defend and explain our grief to those who couldn’t understand.

Our culture sees grief as a kind of malady: a terrifying, messy emotion that needs to be cleaned up and put behind us as soon as possible.

If we want to care for one another better, we have to rehumanize grief.

By shifting the focus from grief as a problem to be solved to an experience to be tended, we give the reader what we most want for ourselves: understanding, compassion, validation, and a way through the pain.

What we all share in common—the real reason for this book—is a desire to love better. To love ourselves in the midst of great pain, and to love one another when the pain of this life grows too large for one person to hold.

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.

Every object in your life becomes an artifact, a symbol of the life that used to be and might have been. There is no place this loss has not touched.

Telling the truth about grief is the only way forward: your loss is exactly as bad as you think it is.

There is nothing wrong with grief. It’s a natural extension of love. It’s a healthy and sane response to loss. That grief feels bad doesn’t make it bad; that you feel crazy doesn’t mean you are crazy. Grief is part of love. Love for life, love for self, love for others. What you are living, painful as it is, is love. And love is really hard. Excruciating at times.

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.

How random and fragile life can be.

There is not a reason for everything. Not every loss can be transformed into something useful. Things happen that do not have a silver lining.

This book is about how you live inside your loss. How you carry what cannot be fixed. How you 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.

The intelligence that arranges words and dictates stages or steps or reasonable behavior is on a wholly different plane than the heart that is newly smashed open.

And that’s the truth about grief: loss gets integrated, not overcome. However long it takes, your heart and your mind will carve out a new life amid this weirdly devastated landscape. Little by little, pain and love will find ways to coexist.

Intense grief is an impossibility: there is no “making it better.” Words of intended comfort just grate. “Help” from other people feels like an intrusion.

We assume that if something is uncomfortable, it means something is wrong. People conclude that grief is “bad” because it hurts.

Grief is as individual as love. That someone has experienced a loss—even one similar to yours—does not mean they understand you.

Talking about their own pain is a way the speaker moves the focus off supporting you and onto getting their own needs met.

If you respond to the speaker’s shared grief story by saying, “They aren’t the same thing,” what they hear is: “Your grief is not as real as mine.”

Here’s the thing: every loss is valid. And every loss is not the same. You can’t flatten the landscape of grief and say that everything is equal. It isn’t.

We need to be careful that we don’t exclude anyone’s grief. We all deserve to be heard in our grief, no matter what that grief may be.

For each of these familiar comforting statements, add the phrase “so stop feeling so bad.” At least you had her for as long as you did (so stop feeling so bad).

When you try to take someone’s pain away from them, you don’t make it better. You just tell them it’s not OK to talk about their pain.

To feel truly comforted by someone, you need to feel heard in your pain. You need the reality of your loss reflected back to you—not diminished, not diluted. It seems counterintuitive, but true comfort in grief is in acknowledging the pain, not in trying to make it go away.

The unspoken second half of the sentence in this case says you needed this somehow.

As though loss and hardship were the only ways to grow as a human being. As though pain were the only doorway to a better, deeper life, the only way to be truly compassionate and kind.

Companionship, not correction, is the way forward.

As a culture, our views on grief are almost entirely negative.

We stop saying “this hurts” because no one listens.

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.

Being brave—being a hero—is not about overcoming what hurts or turning it into a gift. 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.

There has to be a reason. It’s terrifying to think that someone who seemingly did everything right could still die.

Seeing someone in pain touches off a reaction in us, and that reaction makes us very uncomfortable.

We can see this clearly in our cultural epidemics of violence against women and minorities: the victim must have done something to deserve this.

A fear of acknowledging—really feeling—our relatedness. What happens to one person can happen to anyone.

To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not god exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for compassion.

Hidden inside this seemingly encouraging advice to take charge of your emotions, and therefore your life, is that same culture of blame. It’s the avoidance of pain clothed in positive, pseudo-spiritual speak. It’s the presumption that happiness and contentment are the only true measures of health.

“What could be a better way of quelling dissent than to tell people who are suffering that it’s all their attitude,”

Spiritual practices in any tradition, including mindfulness in its many forms, are meant to help you live what is yours to live, not make you rise above it. These tools are meant to help you feel companioned inside your grief. They’re meant to give you a tiny bit of breathing room inside what is wholly unbearable. That’s not at all the same thing as making your pain go away.

Whatever faith or practice you claim, it shouldn’t force you to rise above your pain, or deny it somehow. If anything, practice often makes you feel more intensely, not less. When you are broken, the correct response is to be broken.