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

by Megan Devine LPC

Dante faces a wall of flame, which he balks at, afraid. But Virgil tells him, “You have no choice. It is the fire that will burn but not consume.” Dante is still afraid. Sensing this, Virgil puts his hand on his shoulder and repeats, “You have no choice.” Dante then summons his courage and enters.

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.

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.

All the while, beside me, inside me, was the howling, shrieking, screaming mass of pain, watching this normal and ordinary person being reasonable. Polite. As though anything was OK. As though what I was living was not that bad. As though horror could be managed through acceptable behavior. I could see the fault lines running through everything, knowing that all these reasonable people talking to me about stages of grief, about pushing myself through the pain to some exalted vision of “getting better,” all the books that pointed toward getting out of pain by simply rising above it somehow—I knew it was crap.

We need to talk about the hierarchy of grief. You hear it all the time—no grief is worse than any other. I don’t think that’s one bit true. There is a hierarchy of grief. Divorce is not the same as the death of a partner. Death of a grandparent is not the same as the death of a child. Losing your job is not the same as losing a limb.

When someone tries to alleviate your pain by sharing their own story of suffering, know that they are attempting to connect and relate. And know that there is a reason it feels so crappy: they aren’t actually connecting. They’re unintentionally turning the focus away from you and onto their own stories of pain. Your reality is erased, which is exactly the opposite of what they’d hoped to do.

the reality of grief is to begin with annihilation: there is a quiet, a stillness, that pervades everything in early grief. Loss stuns us into a place beyond any language. No matter how carefully I craft my words, I cannot reach where this lives in you. Language is a cover for that annihilated stillness, and a poor one at that.

“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.

Repetition of the story is a safety mechanism, one way the creative mind tries to reorder the world when it’s been dissolved.

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. Impossible to tell from the outside, but those of us in grief absolutely understand. We all have our stories of exhaustion, avoidance, and the need to just not talk.

The Buddha saw pain. He asked: “What can I do to not lose my mind and my heart, here? How can I keep both eyes and heart open without being consumed by this? How can I keep my gaze steady on that which cannot be fixed?” His response—in my mind anyway—was love. 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.

Suffering also comes when we don’t eat, don’t get enough sleep, spend too much time with toxic people, or pretend we’re not in as much pain as we’re in. Suffering comes when we rehash the events that led up to this death or this loss, punishing ourselves for not preventing it, not knowing more, not doing more. Suffering brings with it anxiety, and fear, and isolation.

we rehash the events, and our roles in them, over and over and over. We process everything: every nuance, every word, every choice. I wrestled not only with what happened that day at the river, but also with the intractable mind-loops I got into nearly every day around how well or not well I was doing, whether or not Matt would think I was doing this well or not, and how unfair it was that I felt I was being judged by his invisible ghost in my mind, given what I had just gone through.

Not wanting to be alive is not the same thing as wanting to be dead. It’s hard to tell non-grieving people that, though, as people understandably get worried about your safety. And because people tend to get upset when we talk about not wanting to be alive, we just stop talking about it altogether. That’s dangerous.

Or, as e. e. cummings wrote, healing of the wound is to be sought in the blood of the wound itself. It seems too intangible to be of use, but by allowing your pain to exist, you change it somehow.

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. When so many others tell you that your grief has to be cleaned up or contained, hearing that there is enough room for your pain to spread out, to unfurl—it’s healing. It’s a relief. The more you open to your pain, the more you can just be with it, the more you can give yourself the tenderness and care you need to survive this.

As we breathed into the truth of what had happened in our lives, safe in the protective community we built together, we began to discover that the unbearable became bearable, that by whispering “yes” instead of screaming “no,” an ineffable grace began to fill the space of our shattered hearts. . . . Try it. If you’ve tried it before, try it again. Find the smoldering ache of loss inside of you and soften into it. Allow yourself to gently and lovingly explore exactly what it feels like to hurt in this way. With compassion for yourself, disarm your wounded heart and breathe quietly inside the wreckage. No need for fancy formulas or prescribed affirmations. No goal. Just be. Right here. Inside the fire of grief. One breath in front of the other.1

When your life has been entirely imploded and rearranged, there is not one thing, not one happy, calming place, activity, or image that is not tainted, somehow.

Grief strips life down to its irreducible essentials. In that visceral state, your distance from the “normal” world can feel insurmountable. There’s an uncomfortable truth here: you are not like other people. Not right now. The world has been split open. Things “ordinary,” non-grieving people do as a matter of course will not always make sense, or feel meaningful, to you.

In grief, your brain has to codify and collate an impossible new reality into itself. The data presented doesn’t make any logical sense. There has never been anything like this event, so there is no way to connect or relate it to anything else. It doesn’t fit. The brain cannot make this new reality fit. Like your heart, your brain resists this loss—it can’t possibly be true.

Eventually, it will understand that this loss can’t fit inside the structures that used to be. It will have to make new pathways, new mental relationships, wiring this loss into the person you are becoming, every day. You aren’t crazy. You aren’t broken. Your brain is busy, and it will simply take a while to come back online. Eventually, your mind will realize that car keys do not belong in the freezer. Eventually, you will read whole lines again, whole paragraphs, without having to repeat the words to yourself so you understand.

And you know what? My fear sensors never made a sound. No panic. No anxiety that morning. Nothing. I’d felt entirely, perfectly calm. When I needed my acute sensitivity to all things dangerous and bad, it failed.

“I don’t usually put into words the ache in my throat, the knot in my stomach, the headache that I get from holding back tears. Words have limits, but pain doesn’t seem to. So what’s the point? Words are imperfect tools. They can and do let us down often. But at their best, words can build a connection between me and another person, and it’s that connection that matters to me. When you’re connected to someone, when they get you, they know that the words you speak are only the tip of a huge iceberg of feelings, regrets, dreams, and memories. I built a bridge with Seth over thirty-five years; it was a work of art. It takes more courage than I realized to risk starting over, building bridges again, with other people. The cynical part of me tells me to get over the idea that words can console me, empower me, connect me. But the part of me that daydreams and hopes and tells stories carries on, uncertainly, toward the bridge. KATHI THOMAS ROSEN, Writing Your Grief student, on the death of her husband, Seth

artist Anders Nilsen’s books Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow and The End

Rosalie Lightning: A Graphic Memoir is a graphic novel written by Tom Hart on the sudden death of his two-year-old daughter, Rosalie. One of my favorite grief books, Michael Rosen’s The Sad Book,

The whole idea of recovery is just plain strange in this kind of grief.

The life you lost can’t come back. That loss can’t be regained. By definition then, there is absolutely no point in time when you will “recover” from such a loss. And that makes it tricky. If there is no “healing” in terms of being as good as new, if we can’t “recover” any more than someone who has lost their legs can simply will them to grow back, how do we go on? In order to live well with grief—in order to live alongside grief—I think we need new terms. I don’t want time to heal me. There’s a reason I’m like this. I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you.

You will not “move on.” You will not return to “who you used to be.” How could you? To refuse to be changed by something as powerful as this would be the epitome of arrogance.

With an abundance of time, people are allowed space to be undefined, neither bending nor broken, but instead, transfigured.

My friend says that people visiting these restored sites see only the beauty there. There is no obvious evidence of the destruction that came before. But for those who did the work, for those who saw what lies beneath all that new growth, those wounds are clearly evident. There are whole lifetimes buried beneath what now appears so beautiful. We walk on the skin of ruins.

knowing that grief and loss will carve their way through you, changing you. Making their own kind of beauty, in their own ways.

Getting better might mean that the person you lost, or the life you no longer get to live, isn’t as important anymore. For many people, their grief is their most vital connection to that which is lost. If happiness returns to your life, what does that mean about what was lost? Was it really not all that important, or special, if you can simply move forward with your life?

In my own early grief, I wasn’t worried that I would always be in so much pain. I was worried that I one day wouldn’t be.

Grief changes you. Who you become remains to be seen. You do not need to leave your grief behind in order to live a newly beautiful life. It’s part of you. Our aim is integration, not obliteration.

Sovereignty is the state of having authority over your own life, making decisions based on your own knowledge of yourself, free of outside rule or domination. We’re such an opinion-giving culture; it can be hard to remember that each person is an expert in their own life. Other people may have insight, yes, but the right to claim the meaning of your life belongs solely to you.

If something—even the very same thing—is foisted upon you by an outside force, it’s probably not going to feel very good. The difference is in who claims it as the “correct” choice. This is your life. You know yourself best. However you choose to live this life is the right choice. One of my teachers used to say, “It doesn’t matter what choice you make; it matters that the choice be what is most true for you, based on who you know yourself to be.”

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.

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.

But not everyone will make it through this with you. Not everyone should. It’s true in all of life, but even more so inside grief: there is no time for relationships that make you feel small, shamed, or unsupported. This is your grief. Your loss. Your life. Honestly, this isn’t really the time for relationship repair, or excessive social graces. It doesn’t matter if some people think they’re helping: if their form of support feels dismissive, judgmental, or just plain wrong, you do not have to keep them as friends.

You will encourage your grieving friend or loved one to do what you suggest because you’re trying to relieve their pain—they have a problem, and you’re doing your best to solve it. You get frustrated because your friend seems defensive. They don’t want to take your advice. The more you try to help—aka fix it—the more obstinate they become. Clearly, they don’t want to get better.

The griever is frustrated because they don’t need solutions. They need support. Support to live what is happening. Support to carry what they are required to carry.

When Matt first died, I wanted a button that said, “Please excuse my behavior. My partner just died, and I am not myself.”

I used to tell my friends that there was no way they could win. If they called me to check in too often, they were crowding me. If they didn’t call often enough, they were dropping the ball, ignoring me. If I ran into someone at the grocery store and they said nothing, I felt invisible. If they wanted to talk about how I was feeling, right there in the produce section, I felt invaded.

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.

He’s real because I’ve heard Elea’s stories. Because her stories of grief sit inside her stories of love, and I know him through both things. Vasu is real, not just because I can see a picture of him happy and alive; he is real because I get to witness the story behind the story of each photograph his mother shares. I get to see the sleepless nights in my friend’s face. I get to see Vasu become, as Elea wrote, “more tumor than boy.” I get to see the days death came and went, and the day death came and stayed. I get to see how grief carves itself into her, shadowing each step. I get to see the love that’s twinned with despair, and she gets to see mine, too. We hear each other. It hurts. And we’re as comfortable with each other’s pain as we are with each other’s love. All of it is welcome.

“Death creates a family. I step forward into the circle Of mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, partners With tears forever in their eyes. Wanting to run all the way back, Wanting to run. But not running. I join hands with the holy mourners. We cannot outrun our pain so we wade into it. We hold each other in love and light And we stumble and catch each other And we walk without knowing why Or where. The meteors stream in the moonlight And we walk a little while together.

As one therapist wrote, after a loss of this magnitude, the world is split between those who know and those who do not. There is a vast divide between you and the outer world. While that divide may not always be so clear, it is now. And now is when you need your tribe.

The entire universe can crumble (and it does), and love itself will never leave. Love is with you here, even and especially in this. Love is what sustains us. When there is nothing else to hold on to, hold on to love. Let it carry you forward.

Finding your middle way inside grief is about finding friendship with your own heart, making a home inside your own heart. It’s in learning to bear witness to your own pain, in treating yourself like someone you love. It’s about claiming your right to be in pain, without cleaning it up or making it pretty for someone else’s comfort. It’s about finding those who can share this path with you, who are not afraid to see your heart in all its pain and all its grace. Your own middle ground gets created as you experiment with grief, finding ways to stitch this experience into your life. It will change you, yes. Who you become, how you carry this loss—these things continue to unfold. The middle ground is always a work in progress. It’s one that neither asks you to deny your pain, nor be forever engulfed by it. It’s one that simply lets you find a home inside the reality of love, with all its beautiful and horrible parts. Held by love, inside an experience of love—it’s the only place we’re “safe.”