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

by Megan Devine

Faith is not meant as a means to change the outcome of anything.

“Over three years now since you left and I am still tired of having people ask, “How are you?” Do they really think I will tell the truth?

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,

spiritual and meditative practices are not meant to erase pain.

It’s a misuse of so many beautiful teachings to force them into roles they were never meant to play.

Spiritual practices in any tradition, including mindfulness in its many forms, are meant to help you live what is yours to live, not make you rise above it. These tools are meant to help you feel companioned inside your grief. They’re meant to give you a tiny bit of breathing room inside what is wholly unbearable. That’s not at all the same thing as making your pain go away.

Being a spiritually minded person makes you more open to pain and suffering and hardship—which are all parts of love.

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

Whatever faith or practice you claim, it shouldn’t force you to rise above your pain, or deny it somehow.

When we do see suffering, we throw ourselves into outrage, rather than collapse into grief. Activist and author Joanna Macy speaks of the unrecognized, and unwelcome, pain in the hearts of most activists. It’s as if we are afraid the full force of our sadness would render us mute, powerless, and unable to go on. That unacknowledged pain results in burnout, disconnection, and a distinct lack of empathy for others who hold seemingly opposing views.

we have an epidemic of unspoken grief.

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.

Poignancy is kinship.

The real cutting edge of growth and development is in hurting with each other. It’s in companionship, not correction. Acknowledgment—being seen and heard and witnessed inside the truth about one’s own life—is the only real medicine of grief.

A way to tend to pain and grief by bearing witness. By neither turning away, nor by rushing redemption, but by standing there, right there, inside the obliterated universe. By somehow making a home there.

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

We have to be willing to stop diminishing our own pain so that others can be comfortable around us.

I want you to see your own pain reflected back to you. I want you to feel, in the reading, that you have been heard.

there is a quiet, a stillness, that pervades everything in early grief. Loss stuns us into a place beyond any language.

people clamoring for pieces of you,

For some people, taking care of these details is the last tangible, intimate act of love they can do for the person who’s died.

don’t let anyone take over acts of intimacy that feel important to you.

especially in early grief, pain is everywhere. There is nothing that isn’t connected to loss.

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.

the effort to join the world again is Herculean and monumental.

Often, the lead-up to a big date is harder than the date itself.

How can it not continue to affect him? His dad is still dead.

Nothing brings out the crazy in a family quite like death.

wounded silence.

Anger, allowed expression, is simply energy.

we’ve tried to erase pain before it’s had its say.

Suffering comes when we feel dismissed or unsupported in our pain, and

Others have come before you, and others will come after, but no one carries grief—or love—in the same way you do.

Imaginary unwinnable battles are not a kindness.

Not wanting to be alive is not the same thing as wanting to be dead.

You can’t cheerlead yourself out of the depths of grief.

Survival in early grief is not about looking toward the future. It’s not about finding something that lights you up, or gives you a reason for living.

There’s power in witnessing your own pain.

Let your pain stretch out. Take up all the space it needs.

Find the smoldering ache of loss inside of you and soften into it.

There is no place your loss does not touch.

To survive, you have to become fierce about caring for yourself.

May you, to your own sad self, be kind.

dream-state sleep is when our minds do the deep, heavy work of breaking down the reality of loss into absorbable pieces.

“Dreams tell us where we are, not what to do.”

The body remembers. The body knows.

the body as the vessel that holds this entire experience for you.

Finding small ways to care for your physical body can reduce your suffering, even if it doesn’t change your pain.