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When Grief Defies Our Cultural Scripts
In a world that rushes us toward happiness, Megan Devine's "It's OK That You're Not OK" stands as a revolutionary manifesto for those drowning in grief. The book has become a touchstone for the bereaved since its 2017 publication, with countless readers describing it as "the book that finally understood me." Unlike traditional grief literature that promises stages and timelines, Devine's approach emerged from her own devastating experience of watching her partner Matt drown in an accident. Her background as a therapist couldn't prepare her for the reality of profound loss, leading her to create what The New York Times has called "the grief bible" for a new generation. Celebrities from Glennon Doyle to Stephen Colbert have praised its unflinching honesty, and grief support groups worldwide use it as essential reading. This isn't just another self-help book-it's a permission slip to experience grief exactly as it is.
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The Broken Culture of Grief
Our society has a profound problem with grief. We're taught that grief should follow predictable stages, resolve quickly, and ultimately transform us into better people. When someone experiences a devastating loss, they're often met with platitudes like "everything happens for a reason" or "at least they're no longer suffering." These seemingly comforting phrases carry an unspoken second half: "...so stop feeling so bad."
This cultural discomfort with pain creates a terrible isolation for grieving people. When Matt died, I discovered I wasn't alone in feeling abandoned by those around me. Countless grieving people shared stories of being judged, corrected, and urged to move on before they were ready. The real problem isn't that grieving people are doing it wrong-it's that our culture hasn't taught us how to approach grief with the skills needed to be truly helpful.
Our avoidance of pain is so deeply ingrained that we've created entire systems to pathologize normal grief responses. The medical establishment considers grief lasting longer than six months to be potentially disordered. In practice, the timeline is even shorter-many professionals consider being deeply affected after just a couple of weeks to be problematic. This medicalization of a normal, sane response to loss serves no one.
The misappropriation of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's work has been particularly harmful. Her five stages-denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance-were developed for people facing terminal diagnoses, not for those grieving a loss. Yet these stages have been misinterpreted as a prescriptive path everyone must follow to "complete" their grief work. The message becomes clear: get out of grief quickly and correctly, or you're failing.
Grief cannot be forced into order or made predictable. It's as individual as love-every path unique, with no pattern or linear progression. Despite what "experts" claim, there are no stages of grief. Grieving well means listening to your own reality and allowing pain, love, and loss to exist without artificial requirements.
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The Cult of Positivity and Spiritual Bypass
Our grief-illiterate culture is steeped in transformation narratives. A quick search on "grief" yields countless rainbow-bearing, positive-attitude memes suggesting that with hard work and the right attitude, everything turns out great. Our entertainment reinforces this-movies and books about grief invariably show the grieving person emerging better than before.
We're an overcoming culture that fetishizes recovery stories for their redemptive endings while glossing over the darkness. The cultural narrative insists bad things happen to help you grow, and the end result is always worth the struggle. This creates impatience with grieving people who "fail" this storyline by not transforming quickly enough.
This positivity mandate has deep historical roots as a way to quell dissent and avoid addressing underlying causes of suffering. Barbara Ehrenreich calls it the "tyranny of positive thinking," where patients are told to maintain cheer during illness, and those facing financial hardship are told their situation is a "gift." This deflects responsibility from systems that cause suffering by blaming those who feel pain.
We've also mistakenly come to believe that being "spiritual" means remaining unaffected by pain. But spiritual practices were never meant to erase pain-they're meant to help us live through what is ours to live, to provide breathing room inside what's unbearable. True spiritual practice makes us more human and connected, not less attached. "Spiritual bypass" is often just intellectualizing to avoid feeling. The way through pain isn't to deny it but to experience it.
When we repress pain, we create internally unsustainable conditions requiring medication and management to maintain a facade of happiness. Unacknowledged grief manifests as addiction, anxiety, depression, and social isolation. This avoidance paralyzes us in the face of global heartbreak too-we distance ourselves from environmental devastation, human suffering, and injustice.
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A New Model of Grief
We need a new model for grief beyond the false binary of "eternally broken" or "completely healed." I propose a third path-a middle way that neither turns away from pain nor rushes redemption. This middle ground honors the full breadth of grief, which is really the full breadth of love.
Western culture's "mastery orientation" makes us approach everything as problems to be solved. While this serves us well in many areas, birth, death, grief, and love don't fit inside this narrative. Our intention to fix grief, to cure it, to return to "normal" stops connection and intimacy. What we need instead is a mystery orientation to love-all parts of love, especially the difficult ones.
The new model isn't about cleaning up grief but finding beautiful ways to inhabit what hurts-witnessing each other's pain without rushing to fix it. When we stop resisting pain, we're freed to make real changes that align with a world where suffering is reduced and love becomes our primary medicine.
The more we speak honestly about grief, the easier it becomes. Truth-telling about the difficulty of being alive, loving, and losing improves life for everyone. Our approaches are most useful when they help carry reality rather than trying to solve what can't be fixed. We must stop "other-izing" as protection against loss and instead acknowledge our tenuous, fleeting existence as part of life itself.
Though you didn't choose to join this revolution and would gladly trade it for your old life back, we need you to claim your right to proper support. Understanding the cultural context helps you see that you aren't crazy or broken-the culture is. Your grief isn't a sign of weakness but evidence that love has been part of your life.
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Living in the Reality of Loss
Grief begins with annihilation-a stillness beyond language. Though words are inadequate, acknowledgment helps when nothing else can. What you're experiencing can't be fixed or made better; there are no solutions.
The administrative burden of death is overwhelming-notifying loved ones, speaking with officials, arranging services, handling possessions. There aren't enough pages to list all the details death brings into your life. It's okay to accept help with these tasks, while keeping the intimate acts that feel important to you.
Repeating your loss story-even to strangers-is normal. As storytelling creatures, we retell traumatic events seeking alternate endings or missed details that might change the outcome. This repetition, though torturous, serves as a safety mechanism as your mind tries to make sense of what happened.
The world becomes filled with painful reminders after loss. Well-meaning people suggest "taking your mind off things," not understanding that pain is everywhere. Simple distractions like movies can backfire when unexpected grief triggers appear. Everyday tasks become loaded-filling out forms, answering casual questions, seeing others live the life your loved one should have had.
The grocery store becomes a particular challenge in grief-a place where well-meaning but intrusive questions about your emotional state arise unexpectedly. Many grievers develop avoidance strategies, like shopping late at night or driving far away for anonymity. Abandoned shopping carts are common as people get overwhelmed seeing items they no longer need to buy for their loved one.
There is no "right time" for grief milestones like removing wedding rings or changing a child's bedroom. The vomit metric is helpful: if something makes you feel sick, it's not the right time. You don't need to change anything until you're ready, regardless of others' opinions.
One of grief's cruelest aspects is that when you most need support, friends often disappear or behave poorly. Your loss intersects with their own hidden pain, and many people lack the skills to witness another's suffering. The loss of friendships you thought would endure becomes an additional heartbreak.
Anger deserves recognition in grief but is often silenced. Anger is a healthy response to injustice-and loss is deeply unjust. When repressed, it becomes toxic; when allowed expression, it transforms into fierce protective love and provides energy to face challenges. Your anger about your loss is welcome and healthy, not something to rush through to appear "evolved."
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Pain Versus Suffering: What Can Be Tended
Living inside grief, you know there is nothing to be fixed: this can't be made right. While most grief support encourages you to move through the pain, that's simply the wrong approach. The way to live inside grief is not by removing pain, but by reducing suffering. Pain is valid and normal, while suffering comes from feeling dismissed or unsupported in your pain. Pain gets tended; suffering can be adjusted.
The first weeks after an out-of-order death are a world unto themselves. Few things bring comfort, and ordinary rules don't apply. Platitudes and well-meaning advice feel offensive because they're aimed at removing pain that's actually valid. You can't heal someone's pain by taking it away; you can only companion yourself inside it.
Your grief is as individual as your love, and your way through will be unique to you. Think of grief not as something you do correctly or incorrectly, but as an ongoing experiment. Each new experience of grief gets to unfold and be tended in ways that best suit what hurts. You'll need to identify what is pain (needs support) and what is suffering (can be changed).
Start paying attention to subtle shifts in how you feel. While grief seems to erupt without warning, there are always early warning signs. Keep a log of what you notice-what activities, people, or environments make things better or worse. Map your social interactions, sleep patterns, eating habits. Note anything that gives you even the tiniest bit more peace or calm.
One of the biggest causes of suffering in grief is the self-harm we do with our thoughts. In times of stress, the mind can become ravenous and start eating itself. "Worseness thoughts" grind more stress into your pain, increasing suffering with questions like "Why didn't I do something differently?" "Wellness thoughts" have the opposite effect-your pain still exists, but they bring you closer to yourself with a tiny sense of peace or rootedness.
By differentiating pain from suffering, you understand the connection between activities and their impact on grief. This creates a compass or North Star-a way to recognize evidence of suffering and give yourself a road map for decreasing it when you're lost in pain. What we're trying for is that you find some peace in this moment, that your suffering can be reduced, that you can tend to your pain with kindness.
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How to Stay Alive When You Don't Want To
Surviving early grief requires massive effort-sometimes the most you can aim for is getting through the next few minutes. Feeling like you'd rather not wake up each morning is normal in grief and doesn't mean you're suicidal. Not wanting to be alive isn't the same as wanting to be dead, though it's hard to explain this to non-grieving people.
Survival in early grief isn't about looking toward the future or finding something that gives you reason for living-those ordinary encouragements about life's value feel irrelevant. What helps is finding other motivations: not wanting to create another widow, not wanting to cause more pain for someone else, or making a pact with another grieving person to stay alive for each other.
The secret of grief is that the answer to the pain is in the pain itself. By staying present to your broken heart, by giving pain the space it needs to unfold, you change it somehow. Pain wants and deserves to be heard. When you open to your pain, when you can just be with it rather than trying to escape it, you give yourself the tenderness needed to survive.
Most people don't intentionally ignore their pain; they're just unsure how to face it. We must "find the smoldering ache of loss" and "soften into it"-exploring what it feels like to hurt while breathing quietly inside the wreckage. This requires building trust in yourself-not that everything will work out, but that you won't abandon yourself in your pain.
While learning to companion yourself inside grief is essential, equally important is knowing when to shut off your emotions temporarily-when at work, dealing with others, or operating machinery. Denial and distraction can be healthy coping strategies in moments when feeling the full intensity would be overwhelming.
When emotional flooding occurs, focusing on mundane, external objects can provide an anchor: finding all things that are orange, counting stripes in a parking lot, or naming ingredients in a menu. These techniques interrupt the spiral and give you control when pain becomes too big for your environment.
If we distilled everything about surviving intense grief into one principle, it would be: show yourself kindness. For all you've endured-the phone calls, decisions, funeral plans, the life evaporated in an instant-you deserve tenderness. Self-kindness means recognizing when to back off, allowing pain to exist without judgment, and not letting your mind beat you up.
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The Physical Reality of Grief
Grief is a full-body, full-mind experience with real physiological effects. Neurobiology shows that losing someone close changes our biochemistry, explaining insomnia, exhaustion, and heart palpitations. Respiration, heart rate, and nervous system responses are all regulated partly through close contact with familiar people, so these functions become disrupted after loss.
Early grief is a liminal time-a threshold state where you're no longer who you were but haven't become someone new. Like a caterpillar in a cocoon, you exist in an in-between state, with both your body and mind in flux.
Sleep disturbances are common in grief-either sleeping too much or too little. Grief operates on its own sleep schedule, often waking you at specific times like 3:00 a.m. or the time your loved one died. Many wake up reaching for their person, or have that brief hopeful moment upon waking before reality crashes in.
Though sleep is crucial during grief, nightmares can make it something you'd rather avoid. Recurrent dreams or repeatedly delivering death news in dreams are actually healthy parts of grief processing. Dream-state sleep is when our minds break down the reality of loss into absorbable pieces.
The physical manifestations of grief often surprise people. "Mystery" pains, heart palpitations, headaches, stomach issues, and dizziness are common grief responses. Some people even inherit physical ailments their loved one had. The body often remembers significant dates before the conscious mind does-feeling sick or exhausted on anniversary dates without realizing why.
Grief profoundly changes cognitive function. Previously organized, intelligent people find themselves putting keys in the freezer, forgetting names, and unable to read more than a few sentences. "Widowed brain" describes these cumulative cognitive effects that occur across many types of loss.
If your mind isn't working like it used to, you're entirely normal. You feel crazy because you're inside a crazy experience. Your mind is trying to make sense of a world that no longer makes sense. Grief rearranges your mind, taking away skills you've had since childhood and making simple things confusing.
Looking back on your day, you may be unable to articulate what you've accomplished. Much of grief's work happens internally, not through visible actions. These seemingly unproductive periods are when your body and mind attempt to integrate your loss-almost like an awake sleep cycle where your mind goes offline to heal.
Our brains work by creating relationships and recognizing patterns, connecting new information to existing knowledge. In grief, the brain must process an impossible new reality that doesn't fit existing mental frameworks. The gaps in memory and thought processes represent your brain struggling to integrate data that cannot be absorbed by existing structures.
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Finding Your Tribe of After
Companionship, reflection, and connection are vital to surviving grief. Loss rearranges your address book-people you thought would stay disappear, while even those who love you fall short. We need places to tell the truth about how hard grief is, and it's often fellow grievers who understand best.
Though you are fundamentally alone in your grief-no one can truly enter your experience-finding others who've suffered similar losses shows you who can bear witness to your pain. This isn't about minimizing your grief because "everyone grieves"; it's about finding your tribe within the wider community of loss.
In this tribe, everything is welcome-we know we're alone, and we're not alone in that knowledge. Finding others validates the nightmare of what you already know: some things can never "get better." Companionship inside loss might be the only thing that truly helps.
Finding others who share a similar depth of pain validates your experience. When someone truly sees the devastation at your core, it helps-perhaps the only thing that does. Companionship inside loss may be the best indicator of survival. As Kathi Thomas Rosen wrote after her husband's death: "Death creates a family... I join hands with the holy mourners. We cannot outrun our pain so we wade into it... And we walk a little while together."
Don't listen to those who worry you're spending too much time with other grievers. We naturally seek those with whom we share important things. After profound loss, the world splits between those who know and those who don't. I found my own tribe piece by piece, through obscure blogs and fragmented connections. Reading their stories helped me in ways nothing else could-they were the reason I survived.
Being with others who understand your pain doesn't fix anything. Some things cannot be fixed; they can only be carried. Survival in grief comes through bearing witness, both to yourself and to others in this unexpected life. Together, we create real hope. Your community is out there-look for them, collect them, knit them into a flotilla of light.
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Love Is the Only Thing That Lasts
How do we end a conversation on grief without leaning on a happy ending? I end with love because love is all we've got. We grieve because we love. Grief is part of love. Love existed before your loss, surrounds you now, and will remain beside you through all that's yet to come. It's not enough. And it's everything.
Living in grief means continually crossing the bridge between what was before and what is now. In truth, we can hold onto nothing-not the physical world, not feelings, not even our thoughts. But love we can carry with us. It connects what is now to what was and what is to come, allowing us to travel between worlds.
We often believe love will fix things, like some mythical medicine that removes all pain. That has never been love's role. Love, companionship, and acknowledgment come up beside you to support you in your pain, not take it away. Love is brutal at times, asking more than you can give. This grief-work is about being strong enough to bear what love asks of you.
The poet Naomi Shihab Nye writes, "Love means you breathe in two countries." Bridging between the life that was and the life that is means breathing in two countries: love exists in both, connects both. When there is nothing else to hold onto, hold onto love. Let it carry you forward.
We imagine only two options in grief: eternal sadness or putting it all behind us to live fabulously. But reality offers a vast middle ground between these extremes. This middle ground can only be made by you-living as best you can in alignment with your truth, with love as guide.
You create it by offering yourself kindness, refusing the notion that grief is a problem to solve, giving yourself time to be as broken as you are. None of us will return to the life or self that was. What we can do is bow to the damaged parts and approach what remains with kindness.
By simply stating the truth, we open conversations about grief, which are really conversations about love. We stop blaming each other for our pain, and instead work together to change what can be changed and withstand what can't be fixed. In telling the truth, and in hearing the truth, we make things better, even when we can't make them right. We companion each other inside what hurts. We bear witness to each other. That's the path of love. That's what we're made for.
I know you didn't ask to be part of this story, but you're part of the change happening. It's OK that you're not OK. Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.
