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

by Megan Devine

We need to make it just as normal to talk about our pain as it is to talk about our joy. There is no need to rush redemption.

Hard, painful, terrible things happen. That is the nature of being alive, here in this world. Not everything works out; everything doesn’t happen for a reason. The real path here, the real way forward, is not in denying that irredeemable pain exists, but by acknowledging that it does.

We’ve got this idea that there are only two options in grief: you’re either going to be stuck in your pain, doomed to spend the rest of your life rocking in a corner in your basement wearing sackcloth, or you’re going to triumph over grief, be transformed, and come back even better than you were before. Just two options. On, off. Eternally broken or completely healed. It doesn’t seem to matter that nothing else in life is like that. Somehow, when it comes to grief, the entire breadth of human experience goes out the window.

Each of us, each one of us, has to find our way into that middle ground. A place that doesn’t ask us to deny our grief and doesn’t doom us forever. A place that honors the full breadth of grief, which is really the full breadth of love.

There isn’t much written on the early parts of grief, that close-to-impact zone where nothing really helps. We’re so terrified of intense grief, and the feelings of helplessness it engenders, most resources don’t speak to it at all. It’s much easier to focus on later grief, months and years down the road, where “rebuilding your life” is a more palatable approach.

Grief no more needs a solution than love needs a solution.

The new model of grief is not in cleaning it up and making it go away; it’s in finding new and beautiful ways to inhabit what hurts. It’s in finding the depth of love necessary to witness each other’s pain without rushing in to clean it up. It’s in standing beside each other, offering companionship.

We have to find ways to show our grief to others, in ways that honor the truth of our own experience. We have to be willing to stop diminishing our own pain so that others can be comfortable around us.

Grief is not a sign that you’re unwell or unevolved. It’s a sign that love has been part of your life, and that you want love to continue, even here. You are here now, and here sucks.

The problem wasn’t always in the books themselves. There are plenty of good books out there. The problem was that most of those books spoke to later grief. They spoke to a time when the world had stopped tilting so violently, when all the dust had settled, and the immediacy of grief was not so sharp.

“You would say—why do people need to keep ashes? Can’t they just let go? Yes. Yes, babe. Eventually, I will take those bones and those teeth and that body I love to the river and to the woods. I will release that vessel I’ve loved so much, in so many different ways. But right now, your remains remain—safely sealed in a plastic urn inside a plastic bag inside a cardboard box sealed with tape and a sticker bearing your name. To take them out is to see you, to see the body I have loved, reduced to a permanent state of ash. Right now, I can’t let go. I can’t let this in. I can’t accept this in any way. I cannot swallow this truth, that you are gone, that the life we planned is done. If I try to look directly at that fact (that I refuse to let be fact), I feel the explosion start inside of me, the world cracks and my lungs fill, and I cannot breathe. All I know is that I cannot do that. I cannot look directly at this. Everything inside me will explode, and I cannot bear the tearing. It’s too big. It’s too severe. I’m being beaten by all this—the packing and the moving, your truck in my driveway that will be sold in the next two days, the bed in pieces in my room, waiting to be rebuilt, your photos, your ashes, the people clamoring for pieces of you, all of our things piled in various rooms. You are gone, and I can’t know that now. That you were here, that moment, just a regular moment, and then you were gone.

Telling the story of this loss over and over—it’s like we’re looking for an alternate ending. A loophole. Some way the outcome might have changed. Could still change. Maybe we missed something. If we can only get the story right, none of this would be happening. It doesn’t matter that that’s not “logical.” Logic means nothing.

How many times have people encouraged you to take your mind off this for a while, or they’ve avoided speaking your person’s name so they don’t “remind” you of what you’ve lost? As if you could forget, even for a moment.

everyday life is full of reminders and grief land mines that the non-grieving wouldn’t even think of.

When someone you love dies, you don’t just lose them in the present or in the past. You lose the future you should have had, and might have had, with them. They are missing from all the life that was to be.

No wonder grief is so exhausting. It’s not just the intense actual pain of loss. It’s the sheer number of tiny things that need to be avoided, endured, planned for.

it’s perfectly normal to leave things exactly as your person left them. Evidence that they were here, that they lived, that they were part of you is important. When your life has evaporated, those touchstones become the whole world.

You will do what you need to do when you need to do it. Not a moment before. It will never feel good.

One of the best things someone said to me as I approached Matt’s one-year date was, “You always have the right to leave, even if you just got there, even if you planned the whole thing. No one else has to live this like you do. Leave whenever you need.” Just having that permission to leave made it easier to stay.

Someone asked me the other day if I thought my stepson had “processed” his dad’s death, or if it continues to affect him. How can it not continue to affect him? His dad is still dead.

Sometimes it takes a lifetime to be able to say what you’ve lost, to see the many ways a family member’s death shaped and changed you.

Death throws a monkey wrench into family dynamics. Strained relationships that had found a relatively happy level of mutual tolerance flare into knockdown fights. Opinions and needs all jockey for space; everyone needs to be seen and be heard. Old conflicts get brought up. Relatives who were distant in life come out of the woodwork; people you think have your back disappear into their own wounded silence. Death shakes everyone up.

This boycott on anger is ridiculous. All emotion is a response to something. Anger is a response to a sense of injustice. Of course you’re angry: whatever has happened to you is unjust. It doesn’t matter whether “fairness” is logical, or whether there’s a reason something happened.

What we don’t listen to (or refuse to listen to) doesn’t go away—it just finds other ways to speak. Shushed anger joins a backlog of disallowed emotion, popping up in health issues, interpersonal challenges, and mental torment.

The way to live inside of grief is not by removing pain, but by doing what we can to reduce suffering.

Love with open hands, with an open heart, knowing that what is given to you will die. It will change. Love anyway. You will witness incredible pain in this life. Love anyway. Find a way to live here, beside that knowledge. Include that knowledge. Love through that. Be willing to not turn away from the pain of this world—pain in yourself or in others.

It helps if you think of it not as something you can do correctly or incorrectly, but instead as an ongoing experiment. No matter how many times pain or grief has entered your life, this time is the first time. This grief is unlike any other.

Experimenting in grief means looking for things that bring even the tiniest amount of relief or peace in your heart, or your life. We’re talking micro-distinctions here: What gives you the strength or the courage or the ability to face the next minute, the next five?

It’s important to find those places where your grief gets to be as bad as it is, where it gets to suck as much as it does. Let your pain stretch out. Take up all the space it needs.

There isn’t anything you need to do with your pain. Nothing you need to do about your pain. It simply is. Give it your attention, your care. Find ways to let it stretch out, let it exist. Tend to yourself inside it. That’s so different from trying to get yourself out of it.

“If you want me to breathe in this wreckage, I have to lean into it, head-on. Place my whole weight in the wreckage, allow it to hold me up, hold me down. It means reliving every single moment. The hardest, darkest, sharpest ones. The happy ones before he died that bring a specific kind of pain.

Sometimes keeping your attention on the broken place is just too much to bear. I’m not talking about shutting down your emotions as a long-term solution (that so does not work), but shutting down in a moment where to feel the full intensity of your pain would not be beneficial. Denial is actually a kindness, at times. Distraction is a healthy coping strategy.

Studies in neurobiology show that losing someone close to us changes our biochemistry: there are actual physical reasons for your insomnia, your exhaustion, and your racing heart.1 Respiration, heart rate, and nervous system responses are all partially regulated by close contact with familiar people and animals; these brain functions are all deeply affected when you’ve lost someone close.

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.

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.

It’s as if remembering all those little details are “extra” expenses, and your mind can’t afford them. Your mind can only retain so many things, so it simply drops what is not necessary for survival. It’s like triage in the mind.

Think of it like this: Let’s say you have one hundred units of brain power for each day. Right now, the enormity of grief, trauma, sadness, missing, loneliness, takes up ninety-nine of those energy units. That remaining one unit is what you have for the mundane and ordinary skills of life.

Grief itself won’t make sense, loss itself will not rearrange into something orderly and sensible, but your mind, and your heart, will adapt. This loss will be absorbed and integrated.

Anxiety is an addictive drug, made all the more powerful by knowing that unlikely shit does happen, and there is nothing you can do.

Of course you’re anxious. After a death or other massive loss, the whole concept of “safety” gets really sketchy. You can’t rely on old comforts of believing that your fears are unlikely to come true. You can’t lean on the statistically low risk of certain illnesses or accidents happening. Just because you saw your people half an hour ago does not mean they’re still OK now. When the ordinary safety of the world has already failed you, how can you ever feel safe here again?

When you feel anxious, make your exhale longer than your inhale.

Anxiety is a manufactured feeling state that has nothing to do with current reality: it thrives in an imagined (negative) future. If you keep coming up with imaginary problems, your mind will keep providing imaginary solutions.

Rather than continue to run successive disaster scenarios, coming up with an action plan for each and every one, it’s far more effective and efficient to . . . trust yourself. In the face of multiple challenges presented by your mind, you might say: “I trust myself to handle any problem that comes up with the house. If there’s something I don’t know how to solve, I trust myself to ask for help.”

Right now, as far as I know, everything is fine. If a challenge arises—of any kind—I trust myself to respond with skill. If there’s something I don’t know how to do, I trust that I’ll ask for help.

Your thoughts can influence how you respond to what is, but your thoughts do not create what is.

Anxiety is using your imagination to create a future you do not want. So let’s not do that.

Hiding your anxiety makes it shoot out sideways: you act out of your anxiety rather than respond to it.

What I can tell you, several years down the road from my own loss, is that things get different; they don’t get “better.”

It 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.

“He had a great life, and you were lucky to have him for as long as you did. Be grateful, and move on.” As though a great life lived makes it OK that that great life is now over.