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

by Megan Devine

knowing both love and loss is what brings us fully and deeply alive.

those who suffer carry a wisdom that the rest of us need.

we live in a society that is afraid to feel, it’s important to open each other to the depth of the human journey,

“Real safety is in entering each other’s pain, [and] recognizing ourselves inside it.”

If you are in the grip of grief, reach for this book. It will help you carry what is yours to carry

it wasn’t just loss that we shared. Every one of us had felt judged, shamed, and corrected in our grief.

We were admonished to move on with our lives and told we needed these deaths in order to learn what was important in life.

those who tried to help ended up hurting.

Together, we can make things better, even when we can’t make them right.

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.

Every object in your life becomes an artifact, a symbol of the life that used to be and might have been.

There is no place this loss has not touched.

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.

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.

loving each other means losing each other.

This book is about how you live inside your loss. How you carry what cannot be fixed. How you survive.

As though horror could be managed through acceptable behavior.

Grief is visceral, not reasonable: the howling at the center of grief is raw and real. It is love in its most wild form.

there really is something not comforting in the way people are trying to comfort you.

Grief is as individual as love. That someone has experienced a loss—even one similar to yours—does not mean they understand you.

To feel truly comforted by someone, you need to feel heard in your pain. You need the reality of your loss reflected back to you—not diminished, not diluted.

true comfort in grief is in acknowledging the pain, not in trying to make it go away.

We use words on one another we would never accept for ourselves.

As though loss and hardship were the only ways to grow as a human being. As though pain were the only doorway to a better, deeper life, the only way to be truly compassionate and kind.

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.

You didn’t need this. You don’t have to grow from it, and you don’t have to put it behind you.

What you build atop this loss might be growth. It might be a gesture toward more beauty, more love, more wholeness. But that is due to your choices, your own alignment with who you are and who you want to be. Not because grief is your one-way ticket to becoming a better person.

When someone else ascribes growth or meaning to your loss, it diminishes your power, gives subtle shaming or judgment to who you were before, and tells you that you needed this somehow.

The most insulting comment is being told to write a book or create art from my loss

Grief is not a problem to be solved; it’s an experience to be carried.

We think “happy” is the equivalent of “healthy.” As though happiness were the baseline, the norm to which all things settle,

We have it so deeply engrained in us that any kind of hardship shouldn’t last more than a couple of months, at most. Anything more than that is considered malingering. As though the loss of someone you love were just a temporary inconvenience, something minor, and surely not something to stay upset over.

In her later years, Kübler-Ross wrote that she regretted writing the stages the way that she did, that people mistook them as being both linear and universal. The stages of grief were not meant to tell anyone what to feel and when exactly they should feel it. They were not meant to dictate whether you are doing your grief “correctly” or not. Her stages, whether applied to the dying or those left living, were meant to normalize and validate what someone might experience in the swirl of insanity that is loss and death and grief. They were meant to give comfort, not create a cage.

Despite what the wider population believes, there are no stages of grief.

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.

Nobody wants to read a book where the main character is still in pain at the end.

Grieving people are met with impatience precisely because they are failing the cultural storyline of overcoming adversity.

No matter how many rainbows and butterflies you stick into the narrative, some stories just don’t work out.

If we’re going to change things, if we’re going to create new, valid, realistic, and useful storylines to live into, we have to start by refusing the happy ending. Or maybe, by redefining what a happy ending is.

A happy ending inside grief like yours cannot be a simple “everything worked out for the best.” That ending isn’t even possible.

living in pain so huge it obliterated everything else.

They needed me to be OK because pain like mine, like yours, is incredibly hard to witness. Our stories are very hard to hear.

We need to stop trotting out the stages of grief that were never meant to become universal scripts.

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. Being brave is staying present to your own heart when that heart is shattered into a million different pieces and can never be made right. Being brave is standing at the edge of the abyss that just opened in someone’s life and not turning away from it, not covering your discomfort with a pithy “think positive” emoticon. Being brave is letting pain unfurl and take up all the space it needs. Being brave is telling that story.

we just can’t reconcile the fact that someone could be alive and well at breakfast and dead by lunch. We can’t understand how someone who ate well, exercised, and was a generally good human being can get cancer and die at the age of thirty-four. We can’t understand how a perfectly healthy child can drop dead of what started as a simple cough. How someone biking to work, using a dedicated bike lane, wearing reflective clothing, their bike adorned with flashing lights, can be struck and killed in an instant. They had to have done something terribly wrong. There has to be a reason.

It’s terrifying to think that someone who seemingly did everything right could still die. It’s terrifying to look at a person torn apart by their grief, knowing that could be us someday.

blame is a way to discharge pain and discomfort.

Being close to someone else’s pain makes us feel pain.

At the root of our fears around grief, and in our approaches to grief and loss, is a fear of connection. A fear of acknowledging—really feeling—our relatedness. What happens to one person can happen to anyone. We see ourselves reflected in another person’s pain, and we don’t like to see ourselves there.

To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not god exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for compassion.