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

by Megan Devine

much of the work of early grief is done inside your heart and mind,

Grief strips life down to its irreducible essentials.

Like your heart, your brain resists this loss—it can’t possibly be true.

wiring this loss into the person you are becoming, every day.

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.

your brain is working hard to make sense of something that can’t ever make sense.

You’re not crazy. You’re grieving. Those are very different things.

When the ordinary safety of the world has already failed you, how can you ever feel safe here again?

You can’t apply logic to a fear-based system.

“You create your own reality” is so patently untrue, and so cruel to the grieving heart.

What your thoughts will do is influence how you feel about yourself and about the world around you.

Anxiety is using your imagination to create a future you do not want.

Safety does not live in the world around you.

There’s a deep cultural presumption that creating something out of grief somehow makes it all even out in the end:

Whatever you might create in your pain, out of your pain, no matter how beautiful or useful it might be, it will never erase your loss.

Death doesn’t end a relationship; it changes it.

Creative practices are a balm, and a support, inside what can barely be endured.

On the page, everything is allowed. Everything has a voice.

writers live everything twice: once when it actually happens, and then again when they put it on the page.

Words may be small, but they contain your heart, and your heart is always welcome to speak on the page.

The powerful lyrics of death were unknown to me “before,” though I sing them as mother tongue now.

My son died. He is dead, and I love him. I’ve learned a new vocabulary.

Creative exploration is a companion inside your grief, not a solution.

We need a way to talk about both things—the reality of deep, persistent pain and the reality of living with that pain in a way that is gentle, authentic, and even beautiful.

“And now there is this, what has come after the death, after the sorrow: a softer loss. Not a churning in my gut, but a settling of stones.

To refuse to be changed by something as powerful as this would be the epitome of arrogance.

We exist at the edge of becoming.

We walk on the skin of ruins.

in that ripped-open state of early grief, love felt so close to me.

Recovery takes patience, and a willingness to sit with your own heart, even, and especially, when that heart has been irrevocably shattered.

Everyone has an opinion. Everyone has an idea for how you might make meaning of this loss.

My instinctive need to cocoon, to swaddle myself in this horror is what I need to do right now.

When did the death of my baby turn into a story about your life?

When you stop telling the truth because other people don’t like it, that’s a gigantic, unnecessary injustice on top of your pain.

anger that fuels truth telling.

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.

So often in grief, we’re told by people outside our experience what the experience is like for us: what it means, what it feels like, what it should feel like.

not everyone deserved to have this most intimate information.

If you choose to not reveal your inner life, your broken heart, or even the cold hard facts to other people, you are not betraying the one you’ve lost.

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.

Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to bear witness to something beautiful and terrible—and to resist the very human urge to fix it or make it right.

the way to truly be helpful to someone in pain is to let them have their pain.

“The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed—to be seen, heard, and companioned exactly as it is. When we make that kind of deep bow to the soul of a suffering person, our respect reinforces the soul’s healing resources, the only resources that can help the sufferer make it through.”1

Don’t compare griefs. Every person has experienced loss in their life, but no one else has experienced this grief. It’s tempting to offer your own experience of grief to let the grieving person know you understand. But you don’t understand. You can’t. Even if your loss is empirically very similar, resist the urge to use your own experience as a point of connection.

grief belongs to the griever.

Good things and horrible things occupy the same space; they don’t cancel each other out.

Stay in the present moment, or, if the person is talking about the past, join them there. Allow them to choose.

In early grief, the person you love has such a low reserve of energy, they simply cannot show up for your friendship—or even for themselves—in

your grieving person spoke a language that only one other person in the world spoke, and that person died. It’s tempting to ask the grieving person to teach you that language so that you can speak it to them. No matter how much you want to speak to them, to give them back what they’ve lost, they can’t teach you the language. Coming out of their pain to teach you syntax and grammar and vocabulary so that they can then return to their mute state is simply impossible.

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