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

by Megan Devine

If someone truly wants to help you inside your grief, they have to be willing to hear what doesn’t help. They have to be willing to feel the discomfort of not knowing what to say or how to say it. They have to be open to feedback. Otherwise they aren’t really interested in helping—they’re interested in being seen as helpful. There’s a difference.

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.

It’s one of the hardest aspects of grief—seeing who cannot be with you inside this. Some people fade out and disappear. Others are so clueless, so cruel (intentionally or not), you choose to fade out on them.

Grief can be incredibly lonely. Even when people show up and love you as best they can, they aren’t really with you in this. They can’t be. It so very much sucks that, in large part, you are in this alone. And also, you can’t do this alone.

When a bone is broken, it needs a supportive cast around it to help it heal. It needs external support so it can go about the intricate, complex, difficult process of growing itself back together.

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.

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.

When things are dark, it’s OK to be dark. Not every corner needs the bright light of encouragement. In a similar vein, don’t encourage someone to have gratitude for the good things that still exist. Good things and horrible things occupy the same space; they don’t cancel each other out.

Remember that evidence of “helping” is not in the reduction of pain; it’s in knowing the grieving person feels supported and acknowledged inside their pain. But even if your intention is to support them, it still might not feel so awesome for your friend. Your intention is important, but it’s how things feel to the grieving person that defines how well this goes.

That pressure to tell them how to care for me was too much. It made me shy away. I simply did not have the energy to articulate my needs.

“My heart is shattered, still. It is healing, slowly, in the ways that it can mend. It will always have holes in it, and maybe some other evidence of deep, painful loss, and it will never be the same as it was Before. It is both stronger and more fragile. More open, and still, closed off.

If an intense loss has erupted in your life, one thing you’ll hear often is “You’re not alone.” And that isn’t really true. No matter how many times people tell you they’re here for you, no matter how well they are here for you, no one can “do” grief with you.

You are alone in your grief. You alone carry the knowledge of how your grief lives in you. You alone know all the details, the subtlety and nuance of what’s happened and what’s been lost. You alone know how deeply your life has been changed. You alone have to face this, inside your own heart. No one can do this with you.

As one therapist wrote, after a loss of this magnitude, the world is split between those who know and those who do not.

That’s the power of acknowledgment: it comes up beside pain as a companion, not a solution. That’s how we get through this, side by side with other devastated, broken-hearted people. Not trying to fix it. Not trying to pretty it up. But by telling the truth, and by having that truth witnessed, acknowledged, heard.

There was love in this world before your loss, there is love surrounding you now, and love will remain beside you, through all the life that is yet to come. The forms will change, but love itself will never leave. It’s not enough. And it’s everything.

I think we often believe that leaning on love will fix things, like it’s some mythical medicine that removes all pain, negates all hardship. That has never been love’s role. Love, companionship, acknowledgment—these things come up beside you, and beneath you, to support you in your pain, not to take it away. They aren’t replacements for what you’ve lost, and they don’t make being broken any easier.

This is going to hurt, maybe for a very long time. Broken hearts just do.

We have this idea that there are only two options in grief: to be sad forever and never leave the house, or to put all this sadness behind you and go on to live a fabulous life. But the reality is far broader: you are neither doomed to eternal sadness nor forced into a model of recovery that can never fit you. There is a vast middle ground between those two extremes. That middle ground of grief can be made only by you—you, living as best you can in alignment with what you know to be true, for yourself, with love as your guide and companion.

Do not say, “Call me if you need anything,” because your friend will not call. Not because they do not need, but because identifying a need, figuring out who might fill that need, and then making a phone call to ask is light years beyond their energy levels, capacity or interest.