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

by Megan Devine

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.

You allow pain because it’s real. Because it is easier to allow than to resist. Because being with what is is kinder, softer, gentler, and easier to bear—even when it rips you apart. Because bearing witness to pain, without shutting it down or denying it, is enlightenment. Your emotional resilience and intelligence has to be quite secure to be able to hold your gaze on the reality of loss.

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. The real path here, the real way forward, is not in denying that irredeemable pain exists, but by acknowledging that it does. By becoming a culture strong enough to bear witness to pain, when pain is what is. By sticking together inside what hurts. By opening ourselves to one another’s pain, knowing that this, too, could be us the next time around.

The most efficient and effective way to be “safe” in this world is to stop denying that hard and impossible things happen. Telling the truth allows us to connect, to fully enter the experience of another and feel with them.

Poignancy is kinship.

Finding safety means to come together, with open hearts and a willing curiosity about everything we experience: love, joy, optimism, fear, loss, and heartbreak. When there is nothing we can’t answer with love and connection, we have a safety that can’t be taken away by the external forces of the world. It won’t keep us from loss, but it will let us feel held and supported inside what cannot be made right.

What I’m proposing is a third path. A middle way. Not on, not off. 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. By showing that you can make a life of your own choosing, without having to pick one

thing over another: leave your love behind but be “OK,” or retain your connections and be “stuck.” Finding that middle ground is the real work of grief—my work, and yours. Each of us, each one of us, has to find our way into that middle ground. A place that doesn’t ask us to deny our grief and doesn’t doom us forever. A place that honors the full breadth of grief, which is really the full breadth of love.

What we need, moving forward, is to replace that mastery approach to grief with a mystery orientation to love: all the parts of love, especially the difficult ones. Bowing to the mystery of grief and love is such a different response than fixing it. Coming to your own broken heart with a sense of respect and reverence honors your reality. It gives you space to be exactly as you are, without needing to clean it up or rush through it. Something in you can relax. The unbearable becomes just that much easier to survive. It seems too intangible to be of use, but finding the middle ground of grief happens only when we turn our gaze to face it directly. When we allow the reality of grief to exist, we can focus on helping ourselves—and one another—survive inside pain.

Self-compassion is approaching ourselves, our inner experience with spaciousness, with the quality of allowing which has a quality of gentleness. Instead of our usual tendency to want to get over something, to

fix it, to make it go away, the path of compassion is totally different. Compassion allows. ROBERT GONZALES, Reflections on Living Compassion

Our friends, our families, our books, our cultural responses, are most useful, most loving and kind, when they help those in grief to carry their reality, and least helpful when they try to solve what can’t be fixed. Our approaches to ourselves, in our own grief, are most useful, most loving and kind, when we find ways to keep our hearts open in the midst of the nightmare, to not lose sight of love amidst the wreckage.

Suffering comes with being told to not feel what you feel. Suffering comes with being told there is something wrong with what you feel. Suffering comes with all the crap that gets loaded on us by friends and colleagues and random strangers who, with the best of intentions, correct, judge, or give advice on how we need to grieve better. 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.

It helps if you think of it not as something you can do correctly or incorrectly, but instead as an ongoing experiment. No matter how many times pain or grief has entered your life, this time is the first time. This grief is unlike any other. Each new experience gets to unfold—and be tended—in the ways that best suit what hurts.

THIS IS NOT A TEST

The more I noticed these smaller indicators, the better I was at caring for myself. I could see them as cues that I needed to step back, make my world smaller and more care focused, rather than push myself.

If you think of your stability, your capacity to be present to this grief, as a bank account, every interaction is a withdrawal. Every stressor is a withdrawal. Recognizing the signs that your account is getting low is one big way of preventing—and soothing—both meltdowns and grief overwhelm.

GATHER GENERAL DATA

NOTING THE EVIDENCE

discerning wellness thoughts versus worseness thoughts.

“Worseness” thoughts take your pain and grind more stress into it, increasing your suffering.

“Wellness” thoughts have the opposite effect: your pain still exists, but your sense of calm or stillness is increased.

WELLNESS VERSUS WORSENESS

The only way to know what is likely to reduce your suffering is by becoming curious about it. Mapping the territory.

Grief takes a toll on your mind, your body, your relationships—everything. The thought of endless months and years without the one you love is overwhelming. The thought of everyone else going back to their lives while you’re still sitting there in the wreckage is overwhelming. The reality is just too big to let in. For many people, continuing to wake up each morning is a disappointment: Damn, I’m still alive. Thoughts like that make perfect sense.

There’s a reality here, inside intense grief, that we need to talk about directly. Sometimes you do not care one bit whether you live or die. Not because you’re actively suicidal, but because you simply do not care.

Upekkha is the practice of staying emotionally open and bearing witness to the pain while dwelling in equanimity around one’s limited ability to effect change. This form of compassion—for self, for others—is about remaining calm enough to feel everything, to remain calm while feeling everything, knowing that it can’t be changed.

When something cannot be changed, the “enlightened” response is to pay attention. To feel it. To turn toward it and say, “I see you.”

That’s the big secret of grief: the answer to the pain is in the pain. 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. There’s power in witnessing your own pain. The challenge is to stay present in your heart, to your heart, to your own deep self, even, and especially, when that self is broken. Pain wants to be heard. It deserves to be heard. Denying or minimizing the reality of pain makes it worse. Telling the truth about the immensity of your pain—which is another way of paying attention—makes things different, if not better.

There isn’t anything you need to do with your pain. Nothing you need to do about your pain. It simply is. Give it your attention, your care. Find ways to let it stretch out, let it exist. Tend to yourself inside it. That’s so different from trying to get yourself out of it.

Mirabai encourages us to seek out the “smoldering ache of loss,” but facing that pain head-on, coming to it gently, truly feeling the intensity of weight and shape can feel daunting. Even the idea of softening into the pain can be scary. What will you find there? If you soften into it, will you ever find your way back out? Part of this process is learning to trust yourself. Trust is really tricky when the universe has upended itself, so I’m not talking about trust that everything will work out, or trust that you’ll do everything right. Not at all. I’m talking more about trusting that you won’t abandon yourself in your pain.

In order to go looking for your pain, to feel it directly and with love, what would it take? What would need to happen for you to feel safe or strong enough to soften into your pain? Time? Privacy? Wine? An anchor on the other side? A guarantee of outcome?

It rewards you to taste fearlessness. To have nothing to lose. The grief is disarming, but

sometimes the afterward is intoxicating. Because what can you do to me now? This cockiness was

hard-won. I’m new land craving to b...

When your inner world is melting, focus on the tangible, external, physical world. Stop the meltdown. Calm your brain. Stop the spiral from continuing. Instantly, old habits snapped into place. Find all the things that are orange, anywhere around you. Name them: Shoes. The printing on the odometer. The logo on that sign over there. That woman’s jacket. Skateboard. Stupid, ugly bike. The background image on a stamp, poking out from a pile of mail on the passenger’s seat.

Remember that turning away from your pain when your pain is too big for the situation is a kindness. It’s a way to pay attention, to tend to yourself with love and respect. Get yourself through the flood as best you can, and come back to your pain when you have the resources and capacity to do so.

But for all you’ve lived, for all you’ve had to do—the phone calls, the decisions, the funeral plans, the life evaporated in an instant, all of everything you’ve had to live—you deserve kindness. You deserve the utmost care and respect. You deserve love and attention.

Try as they might, the people around you don’t always show you that kind of love. The world itself, with its random acts of pain and violence and general stress, won’t always show you that kind of love. But you can.

Let me be to my sad self hereafter kind.

Kindness is self-care. Kindness is recognizing when you need to back off a bit. It’s allowing your pain to exist without judgment, in trusting yourself, and in saying yes to what helps and no to what does not. Kindness means not letting your own mind beat you up.

upekkha, equanimity, that “calm quiet attention to what cannot be changed”? That describes kindness.

What kindness looks like will change, but your commitment to it? That’s where your safety is. That’s where stability exists, inside this wholly bizarre and shaken world. Knowing you won’t leave yourself. Kindness won’t change anything, but it will make things easier on your mind and your heart. So today, if even just for a little while, can you offer yourself kindness? Can you take a moment to ask what being kind to yourself might mean? Turn toward it, even if you can’t make it all the way there. Turn yourself in the direction of kindness. Hold on to it.

Inside your grief, you have to put yourself first. To survive, you have to become fierce about caring for yourself.

Nightmares don’t bring solutions or offer portents for the future. They’re the creative, associative mind trying to orient itself to this loss.

Something as simple as repeating to yourself, “My mind is trying to make space for this,” can help calm your mind and soothe your nervous system when a grief nightmare wakes you.

Many people have noticed that it’s their body—their physical reactions and sensations—that alert them to an emotionally heavy date on the calendar.

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. Those blips and gaps in your memory and thought process are the brain trying to make data fit into a world that cannot absorb that data. 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.

Seven days later, the highly unlikely did happen. 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.