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

by Megan Devine

Unacknowledged and unheard pain doesn’t go away. One of the reasons our culture is so messed up around grief is that we’ve tried to erase pain before it’s had its say. We’ve got an emotional backlog sitting in our hearts. You can’t heal someone’s pain by trying to take it away from them. You can’t gloss over pain as though it were in the way of some “better” life. That grief is painful doesn’t make it wrong. Pain is a normal and healthy response to loss. The way to survive grief is by allowing pain to exist, not in trying to cover it up or rush through it. Rather than erase pain, we might tend to it as though it were healthy and normal, in need of our kind, compassionate, simple honesty and care. We might, instead, companion ourselves inside pain. Only in tending to it can we bear what is unbearable.