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

And that’s the truth about grief: loss gets integrated, not overcome. However long it takes, your heart and your mind will carve out a new life amid this weirdly devastated landscape.

Grief is not a problem to be solved; it’s an experience to be carried.

We don’t need new tools for how to get out of grief. What we need are the skills to withstand it, in ourselves and in others.

It’s easier to create sets of rules that let us have the illusion of control than it is to accept that, even when we do everything “right,” horrible things can happen. In one form or another, this blame-as-a-form-of-safety idea has been around as long as humans have.

Everything really is as wrong, and as bizarre, as you know it to be. When we start there, we can begin to talk about living with grief, living inside the love that remains.

There may in fact be a spiritual solution to every problem, but grief is not a problem to be solved. It isn’t “wrong,” and it can’t be “fixed.” It isn’t an illness to be cured.

[There is] an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before—one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune and blame only ourselves for our fate. . . . In fact, there is no kind of problem or obstacle for which positive thinking or a positive attitude has not been proposed as a cure.

Reexamine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul. WALT

If it were true that intense loss is the only way to make a person more compassionate, only self-absorbed, disconnected, shallow people would experience grief. That would make logical sense. That it doesn’t? Well, it proves my point. You didn’t need this experience in order to grow. You didn’t need the lessons that supposedly only grief can teach.