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

by Megan Devine

There is a twin paradox in being human. First, no one can live your life for you—no one can face what is yours to face or feel what is yours to feel—and no one can make it alone. Secondly, in living our one life, we are here to love and lose. No one knows why. It is just so. If we commit to loving, we will inevitably know loss and grief. If we try to avoid loss and grief, we will never truly love. Yet powerfully and mysteriously, knowing both love and loss is what brings us fully and deeply alive.

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 is only the inner task of making a new and accurate map.

I have learned through my own pain and grief that to be broken is no reason to see all things as broken.

And though it seems strange, or maybe arrogant, I owe an unending thank-you to myself—to the person I was, the person at the river that day and in the years soon after, the one who lived when she did not want to. This book is a love letter back to her, an act of time travel. In so many ways, through this book, I want for myself what I want for all who read it—to reach back with my words, to hold her, to help her survive. I am so glad she lived.

It was random, unexpected, and it tore my world apart.

But it wasn’t just loss that we shared. Every one of us had felt judged, shamed, and corrected in our grief. We shared stories of being encouraged to “get over it,” put the past behind us, and stop talking about those we had lost. We were admonished to move on with our lives and told we needed these deaths in order to learn what was important in life. Even those who tried to help ended up hurting. Platitudes and advice, even when said with good intentions, came across as dismissive, reducing such great pain to greeting card one-liners.

Grief and loss happen to everyone. We’ve all felt misunderstood during times of great pain. We’ve also stood by, helpless, in the face of other people’s pain. We’ve all fumbled for words, knowing no words can ever make things right. No one can win: grieving people feel misunderstood, and friends and family feel helpless and stupid in the face of grief. We know we need help, but we don’t really know what to ask for. Trying to help, we actually make it worse for people going through the worst time in their lives. Our best intentions come out garbled.

Our culture sees grief as a kind of malady: a terrifying, messy emotion that needs to be cleaned up and put behind us as soon as possible. As a result, we have outdated beliefs around how long grief should last and what it should look like. We see it as something to overcome, something to fix, rather than something to tend or support.

Here’s what I most want you to know: this really is as bad as you think. No matter what anyone else says, this sucks. What has happened cannot be made right. What is lost cannot be restored. There is no beauty here,

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.

This is not how you thought it would be. Time has stopped. Nothing feels real. Your mind cannot stop replaying the events, hoping for a different outcome. The ordinary, everyday world that others still inhabit feels coarse and cruel.

Platitudes and cheerleading solve nothing. In fact, this kind of support only makes you feel like no one in the world understands. This isn’t a paper cut. It’s not a crisis of confidence. You didn’t need this thing to happen in order to know what’s important, to find your calling, or even to understand that you are, in fact, deeply loved.

Most of what passes for grief support these days is less than useful. Because we don’t talk about loss, most people—and many professionals—think of grief and loss as aberrations, detours from a normal, happy life. We believe that the goal of grief support, personal or professional, is to get out of grief, to stop feeling pain. Grief is something to get through as quickly as possible. An unfortunate, but fleeting, experience that is best sorted and put behind you.

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 losses that rearrange the world. Deaths that change the way you see everything, grief that tears everything down. Pain that transports you to an entirely different universe, even while everyone else thinks nothing has really changed.

How random and fragile life can be. We don’t talk about the fragility of life: how everything can be normal one moment, and completely changed the next. We have no words, no language, no capacity to face this, together or as individuals.

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.

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.

If you’ve found yourself here, in this life you didn’t ask for, in this life you didn’t see coming, I’m sorry. I can’t tell you it will all work out in the end. I can’t tell you things will be just fine. You are not “OK.” You might not ever be “OK.” Whatever grief you’re carrying, it’s important to acknowledge how bad this is, how hard. It really is horrendous, horrifying, and unsurvivable.

And that’s the truth about grief: loss gets integrated, not overcome. However long it takes, your heart and your mind will carve out a new life amid this weirdly devastated landscape. Little by little, pain and love will find ways to coexist.

but 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. We assume that if something is uncomfortable, it means something is wrong. People conclude that grief is “bad” because it hurts. We hear about relieving the pain, getting out of pain, dreaming of a time when there is no pain. We behave as though grief is something to get out of as soon as possible, an aberration that needs healing, rather than a natural response to loss.

That all people experience pain is not medicine for anything.

For each of these familiar comforting statements, add the phrase “so stop feeling so bad.” At least you had her for as long as you did (so stop feeling so bad). He died doing something he loved (so stop feeling so bad). You can always have another child (so stop feeling so bad). If you cringe or feel angry when friends and family try to comfort you, it’s because you hear the second half of that sentence, even when they don’t say it out loud.

Grief is not an enlightenment program for a select few. No one needs intense, life-changing loss to become who they are “meant” to be. The universe is not causal in that way: you need to become something, so life gives you this horrible experience in order to make it happen. On the contrary: life is call-and-response. Things happen, and we absorb and adapt. We respond to what we experience, and that is neither good nor bad. It simply is. The path forward is integration, not betterment.

As a culture, our views on grief are almost entirely negative. Grief is seen as an aberration, a detour from “normal,” happy life. Our medical models call it a disorder. We believe that grief is a short-term response to a difficult situation, and as such, should be over and done within a few weeks.

I also heard seemingly wonderful things—that I was strong and smart and beautiful, that I would find someone new right away. That I would turn this loss around and make it into a gift, that I should think of all the people I could help. That if I would stop being so sad, I’d feel his love around me (but only if I stopped being so sad). Anything to get me out of my pain and sadness and back into a more acceptable way of being.

I’m often asked what to do when a friend or family member seems to be “stuck” in their grief. My response is always the same: “What would ‘not being stuck’ look like to you? What are your expectations?” For most people, “not being stuck” means that the person has gone back to work, regained their sense of humor, attends social events, doesn’t cry every day, and is able to talk about things other than their loss or their grief. They seem . . . happy again. We think “happy” is the equivalent of “healthy.” As though happiness were the baseline, the norm to which all things settle, when we’re living as we should. In short, “back to normal” is the opposite of “being stuck,” and getting back to normal (happy) has to happen fast.

Still. Yes. Five days, five weeks, five years. One of the best things someone said to me in the months after Matt died was that, with a loss of this magnitude, “just happened” could mean eight days ago as easily as it meant eighty years. When I speak to someone within the first two years of their loss, I always tell them, “This just happened. It was just a minute ago. Of course it still hurts.”

To do grief well depends solely on individual experience. It means listening to your own reality. It means acknowledging pain and love and loss. It means allowing the truth of these things the space to exist without any artificial tethers or stages or requirements.

All of our cultural stories are stories of transformation. They’re stories of redemption. Books, movies, documentaries, children’s stories, even the tales we tell ourselves—they all end on a positive note. We demand a happy ending. If there isn’t one, well, that’s the hero’s fault. Nobody wants to read a book where the main character is still in pain at the end.

There’s a gag order on telling the truth, in real life and in our fictional accounts. As a culture, we don’t want to hear that there are things that can’t be fixed. As a culture, we don’t want to hear that there is some pain that never gets redeemed.

The people in my life, close friends, the wider community, and the therapists—they all wanted me to be OK. They needed me to be OK because pain like mine, like yours, is incredibly hard to witness. Our stories are very hard to hear. It wasn’t their fault. Not really. They didn’t know how to listen. But this is what happens when we only tell stories of how pain can be redeemed: we’re left with no stories that tell us how to live in it.

Pain is not always redeemed, in the end or otherwise. Being brave—being a hero—is not about overcoming what hurts or turning it into a gift. Being brave is about waking to face each day when you would rather just stop waking up.

It’s like we just can’t reconcile the fact that someone could be alive and well at breakfast and dead by lunch.

Brené Brown’s research states that blame is a way to discharge pain and discomfort. Intense grief is a reminder that our lives here are tenuous at best. Evidence of someone else’s nightmare is proof that we could be next. That’s seriously uncomfortable evidence. We have to do some fancy footwork (or rather, fancy brain-work) to minimize our discomfort and maintain our sense of safety.

When someone comes to you in your pain and says, “I can’t even imagine,” the truth is: they can imagine. Their brains automatically began to imagine. As mammals, neurobiologically, we’re connected to one another. Empathy is actually a limbic system connection with the other person’s pain (or their joy). Being close to someone else’s pain makes us feel pain. Our brains know we’re connected. Seeing someone in pain touches off a reaction in us, and that reaction makes us very uncomfortable.

Disasters and deaths bring out a level of emotional empathy that asks you to go there, to acknowledge that this could happen to you or someone you love, no matter how safe you try to be. We hate to see evidence of the fact that there is very little in this life over which we have control.

This belief in a god who can be swayed by human petition is incredibly tricky territory.

We can’t reconcile our ideas of a loving god—in any tradition—with the horrors that happen on a personal or global scale. What we’ve created in the face of that cognitive dissonance is the idea that there is a force you can please or displease, through your actions or your petition. It gives us some sense of power and control over what seems to be a random universe full of injustice.

Faith is not meant as a means to change the outcome of anything. This vending-machine god who doles out reward and punishment based on our changing ideas of what it means to be “blessed” is a disservice to those who lean on faith in times of hardship.

It’s easier to create sets of rules that let us have the illusion of control than it is to accept that, even when we do everything “right,” horrible things can happen.

I am tired of hearing how it was all planned before you were born and how you and I agreed to your death for my soul’s learning and for yours. No one here wants to acknowledge that there might just be chaos and that some things happen because they can, like cars running people over, like bullets ripping through a skull or tearing open a heart, like blood clots filling lungs so you can’t get air, or cancer consuming what is left of the body. A pre-mapped-out lifetime doesn’t make the death of someone you actually love any less devastating.

I am tired of hearing there is a reason for your death, for my heartbreak, and that when we get to the other side it will all make sense. It will never make sense, even when my heart stops hurting so much. I miss you. I wish you had never died.

Any external obstacle could be overcome if you believed hard enough. As a way of deflecting responsibility away from the actual corporations that created the collapse, enforced positivity was a brilliant strategy: “What could be a better way of quelling dissent than to tell people who are suffering that it’s all their attitude,” writes Ehrenreich.5 What better way to silence pain than to blame those who feel it?

This kind of blanket rule against complaint, discomfort, or doubt has deep roots. As a way of not addressing the real underlying causes of poverty, violence, inequality, or instability, governments and ruling bodies throughout history have quelled dissent by mandating optimism and by silencing accurate portrayals of the situation.

Somehow, we are meant to both accept suffering as a gift that we needed in order to become better people and refuse to let loss shove us out of our normal, happy, rosy, optimistic demeanor.

The way to get through the pain of being human is not to deny it, but to experience it. To let it exist.

“I am angry at the Buddhist priest I desperately consulted early on to make myself be “mindful” in my grief. He told me about the Four Noble Truths—that my suffering is all in the mind, and that I needed to let go of my attachment. Those were the cruelest words I ever could hear. He kept saying “it’s all in the mind, it’s all in the mind.” And when I rocked back and forth through my tearstained pain and asked him, “But what about the heart?” he had no answers for me. MONIKA U. CURLIN, Writing Your Grief student, on the accidental death of her husband, Fred

Our foundational inability to tolerate pain, hardship, and horror also keeps us paralyzed in the face of global heartbreak. The amount of pain in the world is staggering, and we work hard not to see it.

Our rampant avoidance of feeling-with-each-other requires us to distance ourselves from environmental devastation, from human suffering, from child abuse and sex trafficking, from global wars, from hate crimes of all kinds. When we do see suffering, we throw ourselves into outrage, rather than collapse into grief.