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

by Megan Devine LPC

There is no getting over it, but only getting under it. Loss and grief change our landscape. The terrain is forever different and there is no normal to return to. There

not that everything will be alright or repaired or forgotten. But that things will evolve and root as real, that those who suffer great loss will be inextricably woven with life again, though everything will change.

It is courageous work to love and lose and keep each other company, no matter how long the road.

You need someone to hold your hands while you stand there in blinking horror, staring at the hole that was your life.

Everything is different now. The life you expected to unfold disappears: vaporized. The world splits open, and nothing makes sense. Your life was normal, and now, suddenly, it’s anything but normal. Otherwise

Nothing feels real. Your mind cannot stop replaying the events, hoping for a different outcome.

Every object in your life becomes an artifact,

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.

Because the truth is, in one way or another, loving each other means losing each other. Being alive in such a fleeting, tenuous world is hard. Our hearts get broken in ways that can’t be fixed. There is pain that becomes an immovable part of our lives.

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

loss gets integrated, not overcome.

One experience of loss does not translate into another. Grief is as individual as love.