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

by Megan Devine

pain. In order to go looking for your pain, to feel it directly and with love, what would it take? What would need to happen for you to feel safe or strong enough to soften into your pain? Time? Privacy? Wine? An anchor on the other side? A guarantee of outcome?

SUPPORT IN THE WRECKAGE Finding out what you need in order to feel, not “OK” with all this, but somehow companioned and supported inside the wreckage, is the heavy work of surviving grief. To explore your own needs, you might write your responses to the questions below. Or you might respond to something else in Mirabai’s passage. Whatever calls you, write into that. • What would you need in order to feel more supported inside your pain? How can we make an impossible situation more kind, gentler, and easier on your heart? • You might address your pain as a separate being: “In order to feel safe enough to face you, I would need . . .” • You might begin a free write with the line: “If you want me to breathe in this wreckage . . .”

If we boiled down everything in this book about how to survive intense grief, it would come down to this: show yourself kindness.

You might write your response to this question: What would kindness to yourself look like today? This moment?

SELF-CARE MANIFESTO If you created your own manifesto of self-care, what would it include? Write it out. Post it somewhere. Post it everywhere. Practice daily. No matter how many times you’ve slipped into suffering, or allowed your mind to beat you up, you can always return to kindness.

If you can’t sleep or you’re shaken by a dream, don’t fight it. Your body and mind are processing so much emotion. It’s hard to fall into sleep in that kind of pain. As much as you are able, rest when you can, even if you can’t fully sleep. There are certainly things you can do to encourage falling asleep, but as we all know, grief doesn’t always follow predictable rules.

And dream-state sleep is when our minds do the deep, heavy work of breaking down the reality of loss into absorbable pieces. Psychotherapist James Hillman writes, “Dreams tell us where we are, not what to do.”2 Nightmares don’t bring solutions or offer portents for the future. They’re the creative, associative mind trying to orient itself to this loss.

I love what teacher Jon Bernie recommends here: Notice it; bring your awareness to it. But don’t mess with it. Don’t dive in and get sticky trying to analyze it. He’s not talking about nightmares, but it applies. When you’ve had a grief nightmare, you might recognize it, name it, as your mind trying hard to process this loss. Something as simple as repeating to yourself, “My mind is trying to make space for this,” can help calm your mind and soothe your nervous system when a grief nightmare wakes you.

The thing is, tending the organism—the physical body—is one of the few tangible ways you really can change your experience of grief. Finding small ways to care for your physical body can reduce your suffering, even if it doesn’t change your pain. Remember that caring for your physical body is an act of kindness (and you deserve kindness). Do what you can, as you can. Refer back to your answers to the questions and exercises in chapter 7 to help you identify any patterns or habits that might improve your physical well-being: what’s helped a few times might help again. And please be sure to check in with your health care providers if you have specific concerns about your body.

happened for you? Have you lost your mind? In the widowed world, we often use the term widowed brain (though it occurs in many different losses)—it’s a great term for the cumulative cognitive effects of grief. If grief has recently erupted in your life—and by recently, I mean anything from yesterday to a few years ago—you will most likely find that your brain just does not work. You may have been brilliant and organized before this loss, able to multitask, remember, execute. But grief changes all of that.

You are not crazy. You feel crazy because you’re inside a crazy experience. Grief, especially early grief, is not a normal time. It makes perfect sense that your mind doesn’t work the way it used to: everything has changed. Of course you’re disoriented. Your mind is trying to make sense of a world that can no longer make sense.

For a time, we are unhinged from the cultural forms we’ve laid down in human life. Things we agree to as a culture—like pieces of paper being fair trade for groceries, or lunchtime being at noon—are revealed as empty symbols, unrelated to anything intrinsically . . . real. Grief strips life down to its irreducible essentials. In that visceral state, your distance from the “normal” world can feel insurmountable. There’s an uncomfortable truth here: you are not like other people. Not right now.

You aren’t crazy. You aren’t broken. Your brain is busy, and it will simply take a while to come back online.

The thing to remember is that your brain is working hard to make sense of something that can’t ever make sense. All those mental circuits that used to fire so clearly are trying their best to relate to this entirely changed world. Your mind is doing the best it can to keep a bead on reality when reality is crazy. Be patient with yourself. Remember that this is a normal response to a stressful situation; it’s not a flaw in you. You’re not crazy. You’re grieving. Those are very different things.

What physical symptoms have you noticed in your grief? How has grief changed the way your mind works? If you’re outside that initial impact of grief, how have you noticed your mind changing, as you become more accustomed to the weight of grief? Validation is powerful inside grief. What’s it like to hear stories (here and elsewhere) that show you that your experience is normal?

Telling the truth allows you to relax enough to ask yourself what you need in that moment. When you catch yourself imagining disaster scenarios, tell yourself the truth: “I am afraid of more loss.” Lengthen your exhale. Ask yourself what you’re truly looking for: What do you need in this moment? Possible answers to that question might be: reassurance, comfort, attachment, a nap—anything that establishes a truer sense of safety, not a situational one.

Pain, like love, needs expression. The human mind naturally goes to creative expression: it’s the way we’re built. We are storytelling creatures. We look to art, and to story, to help us make sense of the world, especially when what’s happened makes no sense. We need images to live into, stories to guide us in the new life that has come. We need the creative process to bear witness to our own reality—to reflect our own pain back to us. In a world that so often doesn’t want to hear your pain, the page or the canvas or the sketch pad is always a willing companion.

When we separate the creative process from a need to solve or fix things, it becomes an ally. It becomes a way to withstand grief, a way to reduce suffering, even as it can’t change the pain. Creative practices can also help you deepen your connection with that which is lost. Death doesn’t end a relationship; it changes it. Writing, painting, and other creative processes allow the conversation that began in life Before to continue in life After. The stories we create are a continuation of love.

Recent studies show that engaging in as little as ten to fifteen minutes of creative writing can help reduce overall levels of cortisol, the “stress hormone,” in the body. While the studies say other things about emotional regulation, increasing optimism, and decreasing hostility, I think the safest corollary is that writing, in its effect on stress in the body, can help your physical organism survive this loss. As I said in chapter 9 on grief and the mind, tending your body makes grief, itself, easier to bear.

When I ask my students how writing has helped them in their grief, without fail, they say that writing the true reality of their loss has helped them survive.

There’s a freedom in letting all your words out. There is freedom in being heard. On the page, everything is welcome.

“Writing may not fix grief, but it may have given me the most important tool I have to live with it: a means to express the agony I’ve carried for fifteen years and a tribe of fierce and beautiful souls that not only honor that expression, but who also aren’t afraid of it. They aren’t afraid of it. By extension, they aren’t afraid of me. Writing can’t fix what happened. It can’t undo what was done, rewrite history, or bring back my dead brother. It doesn’t erase the pain, dull the grief, or make any of it suddenly “OK.” Writing didn’t fix me. It let me begin to honor myself, my own experience, and my own broken heart. My mantra through this time has been “The only way through is through.” Through is what writing about my grief has given me. A tool to use to get through. Healing happened here. What a gift it is that no matter how heavy my words, they never, ever turn away. GRACE, Writing Your Grief student, on the death of her brother

My students have shown me, over and over again, the power in simply telling your own story, as it is. Your writing doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to be “right.” Through writing, grief and love, horror and companionship weave themselves into this story of your life—the true story. You can write for yourself alone, or you can find places to share your words with others. What matters most is telling the truth, without censure, without apology.

Words may be small, but they contain your heart, and your heart is always welcome to speak on the page.

GIVE GRIEF A VOICE Even if you don’t identify yourself as a writer, please give writing a try. Throughout this book, you’ll find writing exercises and prompts to get you started; there’s also a prompt included below. Set a timer for ten minutes. Even if you have to write the prompt itself, or write “Why am I doing this?” over and over, keep writing until the timer goes off. Once you’ve finished, draw (or type) a line under your writing. Below the line, write a few sentences about what it felt like to write your response to the prompt.1 If your grief isn’t “fixed” (spoiler: it won’t be), is anything different? What did you find in your writing? This prompt is taken from the Writing Your Grief course. I asked my students to nominate their favorites, and this one was the clear winner: If you were writing fiction, you’d want to know the voice of your main character. You’d want to know the way they walk, the kinds of food they eat, how they comb or don’t comb their hair. They would need to be real. In a way, your grief is a character: it has a rhythm and a voice. It is particular to you. If we’re going to be working with grief, let’s find out who it is. The creative tool is called personification. What we’re really doing is giving grief, itself, a voice. When it has a voice, it can tell us things. Let’s think of this exercise as inviting your grief to introduce himself or herself to you. Here’s an off-the-cuff exampl...

As a daily check-in, making a collage is a fantastic practice: no words, no thought. You can use your collage practice as a way to check in with yourself, a way to center yourself inside the swirl of grief. It’s a way to acknowledge what is real, what is true in this moment, no matter what this moment holds.

definition then, there is absolutely no point in time when you will “recover” from such a loss. And that makes it tricky. If there is no “healing” in terms of being as good as new, if we can’t “recover” any more than someone who has lost their legs can simply will them to grow back, how do we go on? In order to live well with grief—in order to live alongside grief—I think we need new terms. I don’t want time to heal me. There’s a reason I’m like this. I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you. CHINA MIÉVILLE, The Scar

appears so beautiful. We walk on the skin of ruins. The earth does heal—and so does the heart. And if you know how to look, you can always see the ravages underneath new growth. The effort and hard work and planning and struggle to make something entirely new—integrated and including the devastated landscape that came before—is always visible. That the devastation of your loss will always exist is not the same as saying you are “eternally broken.” It is saying we are made of love and scars, of healing and grace, of patience. Of being changed, by each other, by the world, by life. Evidence of loss can always be seen, if we only know how to look.

“Recovery” in grief is not about moving on. It’s not about resilience or a return to “normal” life. Recovery is about listening to your wounds. Recovery is being honest about the state of your own devastation. It’s about cultivating patience, not the kind that implies waiting it out until you return to normal, but patience in knowing that grief and loss will carve their way through you, changing you. Making their own kind of beauty, in their own ways.

is true that the pain you feel now is intimately connected to love. And—the pain will eventually recede, and love will stay right there. It will deepen and change as all relationships do. Not in the ways you wanted. Not in the ways you deserved. But in the way love does—of its own accord. Your connection to that which you’ve lost will not fade. That’s not our definition of better. As you move forward in this life, your grief, and more important, your love, will come with you. Recovery in grief is a process of moving with what was, what might have been, and what still remains. None of this is easy.

The most authentic hope I can offer you, or ask of you, is that you find ways to be true to yourself inside of this, inside all those changing things. I hope that you keep looking for beauty, hope that you find and nurture a desire to even want to look for it. I hope that you reach for your connection to love, that you seek it out as your anchor and your constant, even when all else has gone dark.

Recovery is less about becoming “good as new,” or even moving past your intense grief, and more about living this experience with as much skill, self-kindness, and peace-of-being as you can. Recovery takes patience, and a willingness to sit with your own heart, even, and especially, when that heart has been irrevocably shattered.

In your own ways, and in your own time, you will find ways to stitch this experience into your life. It will change you, yes. You may become more empathetic, as you know how the wrong words can cut, even when well-intentioned. It may also make you more short-tempered, with a severely shortened fuse for other people’s cruelty or ignorance. In fact, that happens for a lot of people: in loss, we often become protective of others’ pain, correcting and redirecting others who would inflict more pain by trying to take it away. Grief changes you. Who you become remains to be seen. You do not need to leave your grief behind in order to live a newly beautiful life. It’s part of you. Our aim is integration, not obliteration.

Grief is a natural process; it has an intelligence all its own. It will shift and change on its own. When we support the natural process of grief, rather than try to push it or rush it or clean it up, it gets softer. Your job is to tend to yourself as best you can, leaning into whatever love, kindness, and companionship you can. It’s an experiment. An experiment you were thrown into against your will, but an experiment all the same.

Being dismissed, cheered up, or encouraged to “get over it” is one of the biggest causes of suffering inside grief. There’s a catch-22 in grief support: because we don’t talk about the realities of grief in our culture, no one really knows how to help. The people who can best tell us how to help—grieving people themselves—don’t have the energy, interest, or capacity to teach anyone how to be supportive. So we’re stuck: friends and family want to help, grieving people want to feel supported, but no one gets what they want.

When I open a new community space for the writing course, I’m always struck by the number of people who say, “This is the first place I can be completely honest about my grief. No one else wants to hear about it, or they tell me I’m doing it wrong.”

Personally, I believe in what the mystics call “holy outrage”—the anger that fuels truth telling. It’s the anger that points out injustice and silencing, not just to make a scene, but because it knows what true community might be. Holy outrage means telling the truth, no matter who gets offended by the telling. And equally important, it means doing so in the service of more love, more support, more kinship, and true connection. I spend so much time talking about the reality of unhelpful grief support because I want it to get better. I need it to get better. And so do you. So do the millions of people who will enter this grief world after us. It has to get better. So we have to start telling the truth. It’s not enough to say, “They mean well.” It’s not enough for someone to say they want to be of comfort, but insist on using words that feel dismissive or rude.

So often in grief, we’re told by people outside our experience what the experience is like for us: what it means, what it feels like, what it should feel like. They take their own experiences, their own guesses about what we’re really wrestling with, and offer their support based on their own internal views. People take our social reactions—or nonreactions—personally, ascribing meaning to them without ever checking out their assumptions.

It’s tempting to write everyone off—no one gets it. No one understands. Living in grief can feel like you’ve moved to an entirely different planet, or make you wish you could. It would be so great to be able to just transmit, without speaking, the reality of this loss in your life. To have people feel—just for thirty seconds—what it is you carry every second of every day. It would clear up so much misunderstanding. It would stop so much unhelpful “help” before it ever reached your ears. But we don’t have that. We have words, and descriptions, and endless attempts to be understood and to understand. The excessive, unrelenting need to describe your grief to someone, or correct their assumptions, just so they can support you better is one of those added cruelties inside grief.

Do you have people in your life who don’t deserve to know about your grief or who you’ve lost? I’m talking about those people who don’t handle the information with the skill and reverence and grace it deserves.

If you choose to not reveal your inner life, your broken heart, or even the cold hard facts to other people, you are not betraying the one you’ve lost. Though it feels bizarre to talk around the gaping hole in your life, to answer, “I’m fine, thanks” to a routine question when you are not in any way fine really is a kindness to yourself. It can be a kindness to yourself. Not everyone deserves to hear your grief. Not everyone is capable of hearing it. Just because someone is thoughtful enough to ask doesn’t mean you are obliged to answer.

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. BESSEL VAN DER KOLK, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

When my friend Chris’s young son died, I told her about how my therapist used to ask our group to “be like the elephants” and gather around the wounded member. I knew I couldn’t really help her process the grief, but I could be there, at first just a body sitting close to her, later a voice on the phone. She told her friends about the elephants, and people started giving her little gifts or cards with elephants, just saying “I’m here.” Gather your elephants, love. We are here. GLORIA FLYNN, friend of the author, in a personal message

In that pause, you get to decide what the best course of action truly is. Acknowledgment of the reality of pain is usually a far better response than trying to fix it. Bearing witness is what is most called for. Does your friend need to be heard? Do they need to have the reality of the pure, utter suckage of this validated and mirrored back to them? It seems counterintuitive, but the way to truly be helpful to someone in pain is to let them have their pain. Let them share the reality of how much this hurts, how hard this is, without jumping in to clean it up, make it smaller, or make it go away. That pause between the impulse to help and taking action lets you come to pain with skill, and with love. That pause lets you remember that your role is that of witness, not problem solver.

It’s so much harder to say, “This sucks, and there’s nothing I can do. But I’m here, and I love you,” rather than offer those standard words of comfort. It’s so much harder, and so much more useful, loving, and kind. You can’t heal someone’s pain by trying to take it away from them. Acknowledgment of pain is a relief. How much softer this all becomes when we are allowed to tell the truth. In his essay “The Gift of Presence, the Perils of Advice,” author and educator Parker Palmer writes, “The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed—to be seen, heard, and companioned exactly as it is. When we make that kind of deep bow to the soul of a suffering person, our respect reinforces the soul’s healing resources, the only resources that can help the sufferer make it through.”1

Grieving people would much rather have you stumble through your acts of bearing witness than have you confidently assert that things are not as bad as they seem. You can’t always change pain, but you can change how you hear pain, how you respond to pain. When pain exists, let it exist. Bear witness. Make it safe for the other to say “This hurts,” without rushing in to clean it up. Make space for each other. As a support person, companionship inside what hurts is what is asked of you. By not offering solutions for what cannot be fixed, you can make things better, even when you can’t make them right.

The call to bear witness to pain is something we all need to learn. If you’re already good at it in other areas of your life, draw on that inside your friend’s grief. The more intense the pain you are called to witness, the more tempting it is to try and remove that pain. Stay still. It’s OK to flinch when you see the pain we’re in; just please, don’t turn away from it. And don’t ask us to.

There’s a complicated dance that happens between grieving people and their support teams: most people want to be supportive, but they don’t want to intrude. Or they’re terrified of making things worse, so they say nothing. They pull away rather than risk an imperfect connection. In an article for The Guardian, writer Giles Fraser calls this “a double loneliness”—on top of the loss of someone they love, the griever loses the connection and alliance of the people around them.2 For fear of making things worse, people disappear and go silent just when we need them most. I used to tell my friends that there was no way they could win. If they called me to check in too often, they were crowding me. If they didn’t call often enough, they were dropping the ball, ignoring me. If I ran into someone at the grocery store and they said nothing, I felt invisible. If they wanted to talk about how I was feeling, right there in the produce section, I felt invaded. Caring for each other is hard. It’s all such a mess, at times. The important thing to remember is that we don’t need you to be perfect. It’s OK—more than OK—to lead a conversation with, “I have no idea what to say, and I know I can’t make this right.” Or, “I want to give you space and privacy, but I’m also worried about you, and I want to check in.” Claiming your discomfort allows you to show up and be present. Trying to hide your discomfort just makes things worse. From the griever’s perspective, it’s a huge relief to be around t...

Don’t compare griefs. Every person has experienced loss in their life, but no one else has experienced this grief.

Do: Ask questions about their experience.