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

by Megan Devine

The cult of positivity we have does everyone a disservice. It leads us to believe we’re more in charge of the world than we are, and holds us responsible for every pain and heartbreak we endure.

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

We can respond by loving one another, no matter what happens.

Finding that middle ground is the real work of grief—my work, and yours. Each of us, each one of us, has to find our way into that middle ground. A place that doesn’t ask us to deny our grief and doesn’t doom us forever. A place that honors the full breadth of grief, which is really the full breadth of love.

When we stop resisting that which hurts, we’re freed to make real changes, changes that help us align with a world where suffering is reduced and love is our primary medicine.

Telling the story feels both necessary and torturous. It is both necessary and torturous.

It was nearly a year before I changed the sheets on the bed where we last slept. You will do what you need to do when you need to do it. Not a moment before. It

Someone asked me the other day if I thought my stepson had “processed” his dad’s death, or if it continues to affect him. How can it not continue to affect him? His dad is still dead.

The way you behave under this kind of stress is really the only thing under your control.

All emotion is a response to something. Anger is a response to a sense of injustice. Of course you’re angry: whatever has happened to you is unjust. It doesn’t matter whether “fairness” is logical, or whether there’s a reason something happened.

In grief, especially early grief, you have little energy to use any “tools” whatsoever.

Platitudes, “self-help,” well-meaning advice, and suggestions—they’re all about getting you out of pain. Whenever we talk about how much we hurt, someone is right there to help make that pain go away. In this model, pain is a bad thing, and it must be removed. But your pain is valid. It won’t just go away.

Pain that is not allowed to be spoken or expressed turns in on itself, and creates more problems.

You can’t heal someone’s pain by trying to take it away from them.

Love with open hands, with an open heart, knowing that what is given to you will die. It will change. Love anyway.

As we’ve said, pain is a healthy, normal response when someone you love is torn from your life. It hurts, but that doesn’t make pain wrong.

Suffering comes with being told there is something wrong with what you feel.

Suffering also comes when we don’t eat, don’t get enough sleep, spend too much time with toxic people, or pretend we’re not in as much pain as we’re in.

Your grief is not a test of love; it’s an experiment in love.

One of the biggest causes of suffering in grief is the self-harm we do to ourselves with our thoughts.

In times of stress, your mind can get really ravenous and start eating itself. I know mine does. Insightful, self-reflective people tend to be far harder on themselves than other folks.

“Wellness” thoughts have the opposite effect: your pain still exists, but your sense of calm or stillness is increased. Wellness thoughts are the stories, ideas, and inner images that bring you closer to yourself. They bring you just the tiniest sense of peace or rootedness, increasing your capacity to withstand the pain you’re in.

Feeling less than psyched about being alive is normal. It’s important to have at least one person in your life to whom you can be honest about your disinterest in survival.

When your pain is too big for the environment you’re in, it can turn into emotional flooding.

Feelings of anxiety are normal for those who have survived an intense loss or trauma. Inside your grief, the whole world can feel like an unsafe place, one that requires constant vigilance: searching for early warning signs of trouble, guarding against more loss. You rehearse what you would do if you were faced with unthinkable trauma again.

Because I had both art and writing as parts of my professional life before I became widowed, I heard several times how lucky I was: Lucky because I could write and make art from my experience. Lucky because I could turn this death around and make it a gift for others. As though this loss, my partner’s sudden death, were redeemed somehow by the act of writing about it or by making art from it.

There’s a deep cultural presumption that creating something out of grief somehow makes it all even out in the end: That your deepest call is to transform your grief into a work of art that touches others.

Creating something good out of loss is not a trade, and it’s not a cure.

We engage in creative practices because our minds (and our hearts) run on them. Pain, like love, needs expression.

Words have limits, but pain doesn’t seem to. So what’s the point? Words are imperfect tools. They can and do let us down often. But at their best, words can build a connection between me and another person, and it’s that connection that matters to me.

There is freedom in being heard. On the page, everything is welcome.

Your life, and your grief, are a work in progress. There is no need to be finished. There is no need to be perfect. There is only you, and the story of the love—and the loss—that brought you here. Find ways to tell your story.

“And now there is this, what has come after the death, after the sorrow: a softer loss. Not a churning in my gut, but a settling of stones. I sleep softer, and when that is elusive, I don’t fight it. I am still learning about this other side of sorrow and loss. Where I ended and my grief began is no longer a place. My sorrow and I are the same, there is no separation.

The whole idea of getting better—or even integrating your loss—can feel offensive, especially in early grief. Getting better might mean that the person you lost, or the life you no longer get to live, isn’t as important anymore.

Traumatized human beings recover in the context of relationships: with families, loved ones, AA meetings, veterans’ organizations, religious communities, or professional therapists. The role of those relationships is to provide physical and emotional safety, including safety from feeling shamed, admonished, or judged, and to bolster the courage to tolerate, face, and process the reality of what has happened.

When a bone is broken, it needs a supportive cast around it to help it heal. It needs external support so it can go about the intricate, complex, difficult process of growing itself back together. Your task is to be part of that cast for your broken friend. Not to do the actual mending.

I join hands with the holy mourners. We cannot outrun our pain so we wade into it. We hold each other in love and light And we stumble and catch each other And we walk without knowing why Or where.

My fellow widowed people, my fellow grievers, the other broken hearts—together we knit a story of survival inside pain that can’t be fixed. And we did it, simply, by telling the truth. We accepted the immoveable reality of loss. We stayed by each other inside it. We acknowledged each other’s truth.

Love is brutal at times. It asks more of you than you can give. A lot of everything here, a lot of this work-of-grief, is about being strong enough to bear the weight of what love asks of you. It’s about finding ways to companion yourself, to stay present to both the pain and the love that exist, side by side.