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

by Megan Devine

If we try to avoid loss and grief, we will never truly love.

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

If we want to care for one another better, we have to rehumanize grief. We have to talk about it. We have to understand it as a natural, normal process, rather than something to be shunned, rushed, or maligned.

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.

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 wounds in this life that hurt, that hurt immensely, that can eventually be overcome. Through self-work and hard work, many difficulties can be transformed.

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.

Grief is visceral, not reasonable: the howling at the center of grief is raw and real. It is love in its most wild form.

Why do words of comfort feel so horribly wrong?

grief is not a problem to be solved. It isn’t “wrong,” and it can’t be “fixed.” It isn’t an illness to be cured.

Comparison doesn’t work for anyone.

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.