Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Megan Devine. Megan Devine holds a master’s degree in counseling psychology and has been a clinical mental health therapist for over 15 years. Through her many articles and speaking engagements, she has emerged as a bold new voice in the world of grief therapy.
With Sounds True, Megan Devine has written a new book called It’s OK That You’re Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand, where she debunks a culturally prescribed goal of returning to a normal, happy life, replacing it with the skills and tools to help us experience and witness the pain of loss in ourselves and in others so we may meet our grief, knowing it to be a natural step in the greater journey of love.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Megan and I spoke about the wild howl at the center of grief that will never go away, and her own deep encounter with grief when her partner suddenly died. We also talked about the challenge of carrying what is ours to carry, and the myth of letting go when it comes to grief. We also talked about essential skills of supporting someone’s who’s grieving. Megan offered some dos and don’ts for encountering a person who’s in the grieving process. Finally, we talked about how creating art can’t fix our grief, but how it can help us heal from loneliness in grief; and the connection between grieving well and loving fully. Here’s my conversation with the provocative truth-teller, Megan Devine:
Megan, you begin your new book, It’s OK That You’re Not OK, with a strong, emphatic opening sentence. You write, “The way we deal with grief is broken.” Right here at the beginning of our conversation, I want to talk about that. How do you see our culture being broken in terms of how we deal with grief?
Megan Devine: That’s a really good question. I think a lot of what we do in our culture is broken. We look around and see so much is broken. For me, the center of the overlapping Venn diagram is that we don’t listen to pain very well in this culture, that the way we come to grief, the way we come to loss, is deeply, deeply flawed. We can see the ramifications of that in so many different ways. I think it’s important to claim that for what it is, is that we’re broken. We’re broken around the ways that we’re broken. That has to get different, and the way that it gets different is by talking about it and by calling it out for what it is, and not tiptoeing around it the way that we usually do.
TS: Indeed, talking about grief is what we’re going to do together here. I noticed in reading your book that immediately, right at the beginning, quite honestly, I started to cry, and even shake. Later in the book you refer to something that you call “the wild howl at the center of grief.” I realized it’s that wild howl that I don’t think we name and have conversations about. Talk some about your own experience of coming into this wild howl, and how the fact that it wasn’t acknowledged in your life really set you on this path of acknowledging the wild howl for all of us.
MD: That’s a really great question. I love that line; a lot of my students and my clients will say that that line is what drew them to me or what really felt like such a relief to hear to them. We really do everything in our power to avoid that wildness, because it’s that untamable, unfixable pain that doesn’t get a voice.
My own story, I was a psychotherapist in private practice for a very long time. In 2009, or I should say by 2009, I was really tired and burned out, sitting in an office and listening all day. My partner and I had talked it through, and I was gonna be closing my practice, and he was gonna take over financial support of our family so that I could just figure out what else was out there, what else I needed. We were reorganizing our life for all of those things.
On a beautiful, normal, ordinary, fine summer day in 2009, we stopped for a quick dip. I always pause at “quick dip” because I see it in quotation marks in my mind. We stopped off at our usual river for a quick dip on the way to the airport to pick up Matt’s son. We never did that. We never got a chance to pick up Matt’s son at the airport or do any of the other things that we expected and that we had planned, because he walked into the river that day and he didn’t walk back out.
At that time, that spring, it had been raining in Maine, where we lived at the time, for about six solid weeks. This Sunday morning was one of the very first beautiful, sunny days. We didn’t realize it at the time when we went in to go for our quick dip in the river that the current, that was never there before, was powerful and strong. Matt was half mountain goat. He could climb up the face of waterfalls. He was in amazing physical shape. There was no reason that he should’ve died that day in that river, but he did.
I was in the woods playing with our dog, and Matt went in for a swim. I heard him call. I looked at the dog and I said, “Boy, he makes a lot of noise when he gets water up his nose, doesn’t he, bud?” Then Matt called out for help, and I had turned around and saw him holding onto the top of a tree. I ran into the water after him, and the dog ran into the water after me. The dog and I were carried two miles down the river. Then we got out and we were lost in the woods.
Eventually the dog actually found a housing development. I went over and found somebody and asked for help and called 911 and had the search wardens come out, the search teams come out. After about two hours of searching with divers and helicopters, they finally found Matt’s body tangled in some reeds about six yards from where I had last seen him.
That was the end of ordinary life. Here’s this perfectly normal, typical, ordinary day that suddenly evaporates in an instant, or a very long instant. I wasn’t any stranger to loss or to grief or to “handling the tough stuff.” But this was orders of magnitude different than that.
Sometimes I say there’s a screaming there that has never stopped, and probably never will. What I’ve found in the now almost eight years since that happened is that I found a way to live with the screaming. I think what we do in our culture is we look for ways to silence that screaming or say it’s not that bad or that it doesn’t exist or that it was all a part of the plan—when what we really need, what I needed, was to have that scream reflected back to me, to hear people say, “Oh my god. What the fuck?” Right? That acknowledgment and that reflection, that is the only thing that helps in those moments when the world dissolves.
TS: I do think that in our culture as a whole, we’ve been taught that, yes, there’s that screaming, but that at a certain point, it will resolve, you’ll have closure, and that screaming will go away—but that’s fine, hear the screaming for a period of time. When you say there’s a screaming inside that will never stop, I think that’s where we’re not emotionally literate as a culture about grief. Talk about that myth, if you will, of closure.
MD: It’s such a big, pervasive myth. You said that scream is OK for a little bit. I don’t even know that we’re there. In fact, I know we’re not there. That scream isn’t even supposed to be a peep in this culture.
The night of the afternoon that Matt died, people were already telling me, “Everything’s gonna get better. It’s not always gonna feel this way. Matt would want you to be happy and rise above this.”
TS: Oh my.
MD: The man had just drowned in front of me. I don’t think that we’re comfortable letting any pain exist for very long at all. So when we talk about things like the myth of closure or moving on or transformation, I want to be really clear that we might think that we have a tolerance for giving things a little bit of space, but that tolerance is very, very small. Very, very small. We’re so uncomfortable with evidence of the lack of control we have over a lot of things in our lives that we really want to snuff out that evidence as quickly as possible.
Certainly we see that when we start talking about closure, as though there is some mythical time or some mythical practice that you can do that will close up the wound forever, and you can go back to being normal. You can go back to the cultural dream of things always working out in the end. You can stop making other people uncomfortable with the fact that you know things don’t always work out in the end.
TS: You use this interesting word. You talk about carrying what is ours to carry; that it’s not so much about moving on, but being willing to carry what’s ours to carry. What do you mean by that?
MD: That question makes me think back to—I’ve always loved cemeteries. I love looking at the birth and death dates and who’s buried next to whom and what kind of story I might make from that. Gosh, and I remember reading things. I don’t know that I can actually remember where and when, but throughout my life I can remember hearing and reading stories of folks in their 80s, especially women in their 80s, and they get interviewed about their lives, and what always struck me is that so many of them would say, “I buried the first three of my babies.” What struck me was, of course they were still talking about that. Of course they are.
We carry this stuff with us. It’s not like somebody who’s in their 80s and they “still” think about the children who have died. They’re not perseverating. They’re not broken. They’re not stuck in grief. They’re acknowledging a reality that they’ve carried with them. When somebody dies, you don’t just lose them in that moment. You lose all of the things that they might’ve been and all of the ways that they may have expanded and grown and annoyed you. You lose a future. You don’t just stop carrying everything. You don’t just stop carrying all of those things. They get integrated into who we are.
I talk to people now very often when I’m doing interviews or those sorts of things, and I’ll be talking to somebody and they’ll say, “I don’t usually identify myself as somebody who is carrying grief, but now that you say it, wow, of course I still think about my dog that I had when I was a child or my grandfather who helped raise me. Man, that was 20 years ago, and I still think about them.” Well, of course we do. We carry all of these people, all of these stories. I’m not really pointing out anything new. I’m pointing out what we naturally do and claiming it as healthy, and not a flaw.
TS: I think part of what I found so interesting in that word, “carrying,” is often people encourage you in grief to let go, let go, let go, let go, and here you’re using a word that, as part of honoring our true emotional process, at least the way I understand how you’re using the word “carrying,” that there’s something that stays with us. That’s what I thought was so interesting. What do you think about this idea of people saying, “Let go”?
MD: I think it’s crap.
TS: Pretty clear.
MD: Yes. I think it’s crap. Look, there are lots of things in life that that encouragement or admonition to let go is perfect. Yes, the person who cut you off this morning on the freeway, let it go, yes. You don’t do that with love. You don’t do that with somebody who is important to you. That’s rude. Let it go as though it didn’t matter? Let it go as though it wasn’t important to you? Telling somebody that just lost somebody that they care about that they need to let it go, it’s cruel. I think we say things to other people that if and when those words were applied to us, we would feel the weight of cruelty in them. Everything is not a multi-tool. You can’t use tools that are useful in one part of life and just insist that they’re useful in other parts of life. They’re not.
TS: A really interesting, and I thought very helpful and user-friendly part of your book, It’s OK That You’re Not OK, was a “do this, not that” handy checklist for talking to people when they’re grieving and meeting them in their grief. I thought maybe we could go over some of those dos and don’ts. I’ll offer them up and then you can talk about them. One, don’t compare griefs.
MD: Yes. I think one thing I want to say first is it’s important to talk about practical things you can do versus what you really shouldn’t do. I spend a lot of time talking about how illiterate we are in this culture around things that hurt, and it’s really not enough to just point it out. We have to talk about what you can do differently.
To not compare grief—it’s so tempting. If I come to somebody and they say, “My dog died and I’m having a really hard time,” they’ll come back with, “My dog died when I was a kid. I know exactly what that’s like,” or, “My grandfather died when I was eight,” or even, “My own dog died last week and I know just how this feels.” It’s normal to do that, and it’s not helpful.
What happens when we do that, when we compare grief, we actually take the focus off of the grieving person. It’s a way that we silence that story—not intentionally, because I think what we’re trying to do when we compare griefs is we’re trying to connect, we’re trying to let somebody feel like we understand. Unfortunately, it doesn’t land that way. It lands as, “Oh, we’re talking about you now. OK.”
It’s important—”Just wait your turn,” is the phrase that comes into my mind. When somebody says, “Ow, I’m in a pain,” a better response is, “I’m so sorry to hear that. Do you want to tell me about him?”
TS: There are several of these dos and don’ts that I want to go into because I found them so practical and helpful, but I also realized that I think I skipped a step, if you will, which is just to ask you—so many of us feel awkward when someone we know has recently suffered a death, a loss, and there’s a tendency I think, out of our awkwardness, to actually not do a do or a don’t, but do nothing—just avoid, because we’re afraid of screwing it up. I wonder if you can just speak to that, even before we get into some of these details.
MD: Absolutely. That is a really huge thing, that out of our awkwardness we choose to do nothing, which honestly can be worse for the grieving person or the person going through a hard time, because then it’s like, “Wait, I don’t exist at all?” I’ve actually spoken to grieving people and I’ve had this happen to myself, where people will actually cross the street in order to avoid an interaction. That is weird. That’s weird. Grieving people often feel like they’re in a completely different world anyway. To have people say nothing or do nothing just underscores how lonely and strange this experience can be.
One of the things that I say very often to people when they ask me, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know what to do. How do I help?” I think our biggest thing, as people who truly want to be supportive, is to find a way to manage your own helplessness or to tolerate your own helplessness, because the truth is, there’s nothing you can do to fix it, and that’s OK. It feels weird for us because we are such a problem-solving, fix-it culture, which has its merits, but it doesn’t belong in loss.
None of us know how to do this. Again, I spend so much time, emperor’s-new-clothes here, like, “Ah, this is wrong.” It’s also important to say that it’s never false that we don’t know to do this. When everything in the culture is saying, “Push somebody to move on. Encourage them to let go and get over it and tell them they’re gonna be even better than before,” we can’t really fault people for not knowing what to do or for doing it badly. It’s OK to feel awkward. It’s an awkward thing.
One of my favorite lines is the book is something along the lines of, “Grieving people would much rather have you show up and be awkward and acknowledge that you don’t know how to do this very well than they would that you show up and confidently assert that everything is OK and it’s not as bad as it seems.” We don’t need your false competence. We need your awkwardness. Awkward is fine.
TS: This idea that it’s hard for many of us to tolerate the feeling of helplessness, I think that’s a really important idea, and that feeling helpless to many of us is just horrible. It’s a horrible feeling, “There’s nothing I can do here.” What do you have to say to help people just tolerate helplessness?
MD: I think one of the big things—I think one of the big reasons that we feel helpless is that we think it’s our job to take away someone’s pain. Of course we feel helpless if that is our job. I think it can be a relief when we understand that our job is not to relieve someone’s pain, but instead to support them inside it. I think we have skills in that. When a little kid falls off their bike and skins their knee, you know to pick them up and hold them until they’re finished crying. We know how to do that.
It’s not our job to fix someone’s pain. It’s our job to companion them inside it. I think we short-circuit a lot of those feelings of helplessness if we just reorient ourselves to the task. Of course you feel daunted if your job is to take away someone’s pain. That’s not humanly possible and that is not what you’re called to do.
TS: That’s very helpful. A couple more of these dos and don’ts. You say don’t evangelize. Seemed like that was a very charged one for you.
MD: Yes. It comes out of that fix-things culture. We want people to bounce back and we want to help and we want to fix things and we want to be the one who brings a message of something that will turn this around for the person. One of the big ways we do that, not just in grief, but in most things, is to evangelize—which means, “Hey, did you try this essential oil? This totally worked for me. You should try this.”
I have a friend, who has since died, but my friend Beth was a young, healthy, vibrant, awesome person, and went to the doctor for a nagging cough, and it was discovered that she had stage four cancer. We used to have these long discussions about how people would send her all of these HuffPo articles and emails and things about the benefits of eating broccoli and she really should just try to eat more broccoli and, “Have you heard about broccoli for your cancer?” Gosh, we want so desperately to be of help that we push all of these agendas and things on other people without checking in to see if that’s useful or if they want advice or if they haven’t yet heard about the wonders of broccoli and they really want to know more.
Evangelizing is whenever we take something that worked for us and insist that it will work for someone else, without checking in to see, one, if they’d like some help, or two, if what we’re suggesting feels useful. As I said, it’s common in grief, but it’s common in most things. Unsolicited advice is the scourge of our life. It’s really, really pervasive.
TS: You mentioned after Matt’s death that people gave you a lot of unsolicited advice and said things like, “Matt would like you to be happy now,” or something ridiculous like that. I imagine you felt many things when you heard those kinds of comments. What would you say to the grieving person who hears comments like that? Do you suggest that they say something back to the person, educate them in some way?
MD: It’s really tricky. It’s really, really tricky. It’s a catch-22 here, because if we don’t tell people that what they’re saying is not helpful, the helpful person goes away thinking that they’ve done a good job, and so this cycle of unhelpfulness continues.
Again, not just in grief, but especially often in grief, it’s important that we say, “Hey, this isn’t helping,” because this is how people learn. In any relationship, if somebody does something that doesn’t sit well with you, it is on you to come back and say, “Hey, that interaction that we just had actually didn’t feel very good to me. Can we talk about it?” Those are grownup skills, right? This is what we do; this is how healthy relationships with self and other are built and nurtured.
In those intense early days and weeks and months of grief, you can’t really ask the grieving person to do the emotional labor of educating you. It’s not fair. I think back to my own early days, and I had beautiful, amazing, gorgeous, well-skilled people in my life, and I adore them, and sometimes I avoided hanging out with them because they wanted to know and ask repeatedly how they could best support me. I didn’t have it in me to talk about that. I was busy trying to survive the next 30 seconds. I didn’t have the capacity to come out of that and tell somebody how best to help me. Now first of all, I didn’t know. Second, that is a lot of energy that is just not often available for people in that early period after their lives have exploded. It’s tricky.
One of the things that I love about this book is that section where I say, “Grieving folks, I know this is impossible, and you want people to just snap to it and get better at this and just quit with the advice crap.” I really want people to hand this book off to their teams and be like, “OK, Megan said this. Can you just listen to what the woman says?”
It’s true that we need to get into these conversations, but right at the moment of things exploding, it’s really not fair. One of the things that I often say is I want people practicing these skills before things go sideways. One thing I said—I don’t think it’s in the book, but I was talking with a colleague of mine, and I was like, “This is like the fire drill of love.” You want to practice these things before you need them for something giant.
TS: Let’s talk about that in terms of developing the skills so I can be there for the people I love when they’re grieving. What do you think are the essential skills?
MD: I think listening and acknowledging that something is what it is before and instead of fixing it. One of my favorite interviews that I’ve done, we had this great conversation, we were talking about the skills needed to show up for each other and not fixing things and how grief gets carried, it doesn’t get, “Move on,” or, “Get over it.” The person who I was speaking with said, “These are great tools to use in case of emergency.” I was like, “No, not in case of emergency.”
The thing is, is that we see pain every single day; we just don’t recognize it as pain. Somebody says, “Man, I had such a terrible day at work today,” and we go, “Well, tomorrow’s another day,” or, “Ah, me too. Do you want to go to dinner?” We are so accustomed to glossing over pain in our daily lives. No wonder when things are no longer normal, no wonder we don’t know what to do with that.
The cool thing is, is that—well, two sides of this: we see pain every day, which sucks, and it’s also really cool because it gives us a chance to practice. When somebody says, “Man, I’m having the worst day today,” a great thing to do back is, “Would it be helpful to talk about it?” or, “Are you looking for maybe a solution for things, or do you just want to let it suck right now? Which would feel better to you?” In those sorts of everyday stresses, that’s a great time to have those conversations about, “What would feel useful right now? Do you want to talk this out, or are you ready to talk about solutions?” Basically, “Where are you in this? Do you want a solution or do you need to be heard?”
Those are the basic foundational skill sets that we need in much bigger losses and much more long-term pain. We need to be able to know those skills of paying attention, of acknowledging the truth of a situation without trying to fix it. Basically I think we need to break the habit of fixing things. Wouldn’t that be awesome if we broke the habit of fixing things? That’d be great.
TS: That’s a funny sentence, “Break the habit of fixing.” [Megan laughs.] Just let it be broken.
MD: Let it be broken when it’s broken. No amount of cheerleading or encouragement or you-can-do-it-ness will let someone grow their legs back at will when they’ve been cut off. No amount of encouragement is going to re-heal someone’s heart just because you say it should. If we just stopped trying to fix things and let them be as they are and support and companion somebody inside that, man, things would be so much better—not just in grief, but in a lot of things.
TS: Megan, you mentioned in sharing with us your own story of Matt’s drowning, the nature of a sudden death and how that impacted you. You briefly touched on that. I wonder if sudden death has a different kind of grieving process and asks a different kind of response from the people that are around the person grieving than other kinds of death.
MD: I think so. Not better, not worse, but definitely different. The kinds of death and loss that I intend to work with and hear about most are what I call out of order and unusual; so accidents and illness, baby death and child loss and violent crimes and natural disasters. I have a theory that the more unusual or random the death, the more judgment the grieving person hears, because when something is truly random—
There is no reason that somebody as physically skilled as Matt should have walked into our normal home river and never come out. I have really, really good hearing, and I heard more than once in the days and weeks after Matt died, “Why did she get out and he didn’t? That’s not right.” Well, thanks. I’m so glad you wish it were reversed.
There’s no reason for that. There’s no reason for a perfectly healthy six-year-old to go from a little bit of a cough to dead from some random virus within three days. We don’t like that stuff. We don’t like the things that point out how tenuous our existence is here. We feel that and we go, “OK, they had to have done something wrong,” the judgment and the blame that people get.
A story that I tell often is, a dear friend of mine was actually told by several people that she caused her son’s cancer because of her unhealed childhood issues and because of the stress in her marriage. What? These are the things we say to each other when we’re trying to distance ourselves so that we can feel safe and protected and that these things would not happen to us, and we’re safe.
I think we’re always trying to prove to ourselves that we’re safe. Really, the safety is in acknowledging and accepting that you’re not safe and you’re not in danger either. The more we get better at accepting that discomfort, that uncomfortable reality, the better this gets for everybody. It seems counterintuitive, but it makes perfect sense to me.
TS: We’re not safe, but we’re not in danger; you mean accepting a type of just insecurity, fragility of humanity?
MD: Yes. I think especially after somebody has had—one of the terms I also often use is we’re statistical anomalies. Perfectly healthy people should not drop dead. Ultra-marathoners should not die of undiagnosed heart disease or heart problems. We shouldn’t happen. My people shouldn’t happen, but they do. You can do everything in your power to live a healthy and strong, long life, and somebody running a stoplight can take you out.
There’s a reality there that you can’t control your safety to a large extent in this world. That is just a reality. That can make people really anxious and really afraid, and decide they’re never gonna leave their homes and they’re gonna shrink their lives down to what is controllable. Then you slip in the bathtub, so that’s not useful.
For me, it’s important to say you’re not safe and you’re not in danger either, because both things are true. We want to have that bedrock reality of anything can happen at any time, and we can’t walk around in paralyzed fear like that. For the most part, your day is gonna go great. In the event that it doesn’t, it wasn’t your fault, most likely. I think there’s a lot of that in there, that we blame people, that that whole culture of blame is active in the grief world.
You look at somebody like Matt, and the one and only news story I read after he died actually blamed him for his own death because he wasn’t wearing a life jacket to go swimming. Really? We’re so quick to find fault with someone, because it makes us feel safe. We can look at somebody like that and say, “I would never make that mistake, so I’m safe,” or, “If that did happen to me, I wouldn’t take it as badly as she is. My life would not dissolve like that, so I’m safe.” Well, you’re not safe, but you’re also not in danger.
TS: Megan, you teach courses called “Writing Your Grief.” I knew that before I opened the book, It’s OK That You’re Not OK, and started reading. I noticed I felt stunned, if you will, by a section of the book about writing about your grief experiences. I want to read it. Here’s the section. You write, “Pain is not redeemed by art. Creating something out of what was is no fair trade for not being allowed to continue living what was. There is no fair trade. 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. Being creative won’t solve anything. Art is not meant to make things right.” Wow. From somebody who teaches, this is the introduction to my “Writing Your Grief” course.
MD: Yes. There’s that pervasive idea that you can do something to “solve” your grief. In the early days after Matt died, I heard so many times that I was lucky because I was a writer and a visual artist and I could make something out of this loss; that because I was a therapist and a teacher, I could be so useful for other people. How rude is that? The message there is that if you can make something useful for others, it makes the death worth it. No.
The creative practice is beautiful and it’s useful and I don’t want a life without it. Clearly. I teach writing. I write all the time. It’s how we see its purpose. I talk to a lot of people who, they started foundations after their kids died or do events to raise awareness for pancreatic cancer or any of these things. Very often as a culture, we talk about that as, “They’re doing this great thing. They’re making this loss into something beautiful and useful and right.” I just want to shake them and be like, “No, they’re not. They’re trying to make a life that integrates with the person who is dead.” That is not the same thing.
Writing for me is incredibly powerful. It’s incredibly powerful because we put our truth on the page. We see it outside of ourselves. We reflect our reality back to us. That doesn’t make things OK. That is a symptom of our solution-focused culture, not a reality of the creative process itself. I think that creating things for ourselves or for others gives us a chance to acknowledge the truth.
TS: I’m gonna challenge you a little bit on this point, Megan, partially because you seem like the kind of person who can have a good dialogue. There’s a field of medicine called narrative medicine. I fully get what you’re saying about not having a view towards the creative process that this is going to take away my pain or fix it or somehow redeem it, but at the same time, it’s clearly healing. That’s why, as I said, this field, narrative medicine, where writing, journaling, talking about our experiences, that is healing.
MD: Yes. Healing is different than fixing. It’s a linguistic choice. I am super particular about words. I love narrative therapy. I’m looking at a book on my shelf right now called Poetic Medicine. I love this stuff. It is powerful and it’s necessary and it’s needed and it’s healing, but I wonder sometimes what we think of, of what we mean when we say “healing.”
In this culture, we think of healing as being as good as new, fixed, it’s no longer bothering you. You’ve gone back to normal. Everything is OK. No. What if healing means integration? What if healing means being seen? What if healing means being witnessed for the reality of your situation?
My students, what they’d say—they come into the writing course, and one of the very first things—I’ve been running this course for years now, and every single time I run it, people come in and they say, “Wow, this is the first place I can tell the truth about what this is really like.” How powerful is that? Then they tell me, “Friends and family, if they know I’m doing this course, they’re like, ‘Oh good, I hope it makes you move on. I hope it makes you feel better. I hope you get some healing.'”
What’s the intention underneath our message of healing? Is it, “Can you please go back to normal? Because we want that for you and we want to stop talking about this,” or is it, man, the healing power in any creative practice is to tell the truth and to have that truth acknowledged?
One of the things that I’ll often say is it doesn’t make the pain stop, but it makes it different. There is something so powerful in acknowledgement, and that in itself is healing. If we’re not looking at healing as the resolution of pain, but instead the acknowledgement of pain, then yes, all of these practices, including and especially things like narrative therapy, are deeply healing, and we need them.
TS: How does the acknowledgement of pain change things?
MD: It affirms reality. I really want to tell the story of Ereshkigal, and I’m not sure that I should go off on that tangent, but this idea that we need to hear our own truths mirrored back to us so that we know we exist, so that we know we’re heard. Grieving people spend so much time defending their right to be in pain. That’s ridiculous.
To be able to say, “This hurts,” and to have someone say back to you, “This hurts,” that is powerful medicine. It seems too simple to be of use, but it is, in my opinion, the most powerful medicine we have. To be able to hear what someone claims as truth for themselves and to say, “Yes. I hear that, and it’s true,” it makes things different.
TS: One of the things you write about in It’s OK That You’re Not OK is the loneliness of grief. I wonder if grieving is in and of itself—even if we were emotionally literate, even if we were, do you think it would still be a lonely process?
MD: Yes.
TS: It’s made especially lonely by our illiteracy. You said yes, so how is it that it’s just inherently lonely, even if we are surrounded by loving friends who mirror back to us? Most of us don’t have that experience of really being acknowledged and mirrored, so I don’t even know if we would be able to know what that’s like. Talk some about the idea of the loneliness. Also, you mentioned another point that I thought was so important, that our friendships can change when we go through a deep grief. I thought that was curious too. Why does that happen?
MD: Let’s go first question.
TS: The loneliness.
MD: Yes. I think grief is inherently lonely, because no matter what the level of relationship with the person who died, you had your own world together. No one else had that experience, so you lost a whole world. You can’t express that entire relationship in a few short lines. You can’t really invite anyone into that.
Gosh, I want to use the word isolation, but it sounds negative, and that’s not what I mean. It’s more of a . . . I don’t know. There’s a holy space with any person with whom you have a deep connection. There’s an intimacy. That’s a much better word. There’s an intimacy there that belongs to just you, and no one else can enter that. That’s true when someone is alive. The relationship that you have with your close friends or your partner or your child is your relationship. No one can enter that with you.
I think a lot of times we tell people who are in pain, “You’re not alone.” Again, with the linguistic precision and semantics, yes, they are. They are alone, and we want to acknowledge that, and know that no matter how hard we may try and no matter how much we may want to, we can’t join them in that center of intimacy.
We can be supportive and important and powerful, yes. Friends and support make all the difference. Having places and people with whom you can be seen and acknowledged and companioned, that is how we survive, not just in grief, but in everything. Companionship is how we survive. Also knowing that grief itself is very lonely, even outside of the cultural illiteracy. It is a process that you do go through alone. What was the other question?
TS: It had to do with how our circle of friends can change; that something happens in the grieving process that catalyzes, I would imagine, an unexpected change.
MD: Yes. It’s really crappy. The people who disappear or who are just outright asses, it’s really stunning. It’s really, really stunning. Again, I say this, having had beautiful, amazing, capable, competent, beautiful friends who stuck with me and who are still a part of my life, but most of humanity was really bad, [laughs] from the kind but clueless to the downright obnoxious. The ways that people express their helplessness, shall we say, [are] really, really stunning. A lot of the people that I talk with, they’re surprised at the lack of skill, the lack of kindness in the people around them, the lack of well-boundaried behavior.
One of the things that I’ll often say is however a person was before this death erupted in their circle, they tend to be more of that. The people who are kind, compassionate, emotionally well-skilled people tend to be that. The people who are batshit crazy tend to be more of that, making things all about them or being dismissive or rude or disruptive, all of those things.
It’s the middle ground there, the people who aren’t necessarily always super well-skilled versus the people who are always a little crazy. There’s a middle ground of average, typical folks in there who, I don’t know, I think get surprised really by how unintentionally and sometimes intentionally cruel people can be. It’s shocking.
I think for a lot of people, they’re really stunned at the short window of allowed time to be in pain and how quickly their expected support teams run out of patience, “It’s been six months. You’re still talking about this? When is it my turn to talk about the things that hurt in my life? You’re being a really crappy friend right now, crying all the time, three weeks after your child died.” It’s weird, and it’s common.
TS: As we’re talking, Megan, I’m thinking of how grief is handled in other cultures. One that I’m familiar with, through Sounds True’s friendship historically with both Sobonfu Somé and Malidoma Somé is a grief ritual that they do in their Dagara tribe, where the members of the tribe all gather together and drum and dance and howl and mourn as a group.
I’m curious to know if you have a vision here in the West of what a culture might look like that honors grief and holds grief in a different light. You’ve given a lot of hints and a lot of actual suggestions and viewpoints in terms of how personally we can relate to each other when grieving. What do you think would be different in our culture as a whole? What might you be able to envision?
MD: So many things. I’m so glad you brought them up. One of the things that I worry about, just taking that communal ritual piece for a second, one of the things that concerns me is the foundation we’re standing on when we’re talking about things like that, because in the West certainly we look at something like that and go, “Oh good, they have a way of dealing with it so that people can move on,” which we’re still stuck in that problem, of that foundation of fixing things.
What I think that a lot of cultural rituals and personal rituals really do is they give us an opportunity to acknowledge what’s actually happening, what’s real, instead of trying to erase it. I think a lot of our personal and cultural rituals, a lot of our support tools, a lot of our relational tools could stay exactly as they are if we stood on a foundation of supporting people rather than fixing them. There’s that piece.
Really, your intention with anything you do in the face of your own grief or someone else’s grief, check where you’re standing. If your intention is to make things better so that they can move on, you gotta shift something, because that’s not gonna work, no matter how beautiful the ritual.
Then, gosh, what would it look like if we got better, if we became more competent in coming to grief in this culture? Holy crap, everything would change. I have a pretty tight lens on talking about grief, especially the losses that we like to think don’t exist, or don’t happen, or happen to other people. But what I’m talking about when I talk about grief is one facet of a much bigger problem, which is our unwillingness and our incapacity to listen to what hurts for anyone who is speaking something uncomfortable, something that shakes us and asks us to do something different or asks us to look at the risk inherent in the world or the risk and danger we manufacture by being terrible to each other. What would change, what will change when we get better at acknowledging what hurts? Everything.
When you look at violence in our culture, which has been there for a very long time, it is not new, we are just starting new conversations about it. We look at when a person of color comes out and says, “This is my experience,” what do we do? We immediately jump into defending ourselves, saying, “Oh, but not me. I don’t do that,” or we jump into, “You shouldn’t have been in that position. You shouldn’t have gone to that club. You shouldn’t have been on that street. You shouldn’t have been so mouthy about your beliefs in this world, and it wouldn’t have happened.”
What I talk about when I say we don’t come to grief well in this culture, I’m not just talking about people who identify as grieving. I’m talking about all of us. I’m talking about our willingness to hear the truth of reality from someone else and say, “I hear you. I hear you. I’m gonna do what I can to support you and to make this better in any way I can, and I hear you.” Such a different response than saying, “This is your fault, and I wasn’t part of it.” Everything will change when we change this and we start listening.
TS: I want to ask this next question in a delicate way, which is, I have such an appreciation of what you’re talking about in terms of not trying to fix and move on, but I’m also sure, and as someone who has a background in counseling psychology, that sometimes people do get “stuck” in a certain kind of way, where there’s something that is unhealthy going on, you could say—some experience where they need a little move-on help, if you will. Do you know what I’m saying?
MD: I do.
TS: It seems like we could go to such a far extreme here that we’re also missing how to help a healing process continue to unfold without trying to fix.
MD: I love that question. I love, love, love that question. Very often people will say to me or ask me, “What about somebody who’s stuck in their grief?” or, “My friend seems to be stuck in their grief.” My question is always, “What does stuck look like to you?” or, “What would being not stuck look like to you?” because “stuck” is one of those words like “depressed” or “anxious.” That means different things to different people.
Usually when somebody says, “My friend seems to be stuck in their grief,” and I ask, “What would unstuck look like?” they will come back with something like, “They talk about them all the time. they talk about their dead husband. They mention him as though he’s still here. They still have pictures up in the house.” To you, not being stuck would, they never reference the person at all. That’s interesting. That’s interesting information. Again, linguistic precision, I wonder about what we mean individually and culturally when we say somebody is stuck and what unstuck would look like.
That being said, there are ways that we can be, I don’t know, not acknowledging grief very well. I did a workshop a while ago for a bunch of medical providers. I do this thing where I have them write their questions on a piece of paper and crumple them up and throw them at me, because especially in the medical profession, I think we’re meant to be seen as the one with answers, and so nobody wants to ask questions, so I let them write it up on pieces of paper and throw them at me.
One of the questions was like, “What about the people that come into my office that are still talking about somebody who died 15 years ago and they’re malingering?” Great question. My first response is, when somebody is still only speaking about their loss, and the loss is 15 and 20 years old, and that’s the only thing they’re talking about, my guess is that they haven’t yet been heard. Interesting. Maybe they haven’t yet been heard.
I’m really, really hesitant to say, “By this point,” or, “After so many months,” or, “After so many years, you shouldn’t be doing this or that,” because we’ve got such a pathologized view of grief that we believe that if the person is still referencing the one who’s dead, they still have photographs, they still miss them, they still feel sad sometimes, that they haven’t moved on, that they’re stuck.
I just really feel like, there’s a part in the book where I say I feel like we have an epidemic of unspoken grief or unheard grief. You look at epidemics of violence in our culture, and very often there is deep, deep pain and loss in violent offenders’ childhoods. There is grief there that never got help, that never got companioned. Uncompanioned grief doesn’t go away. It gets stuck. It tries to find a way to speak. It speaks out in violence. It speaks out in depression. It speaks out in addiction and interpersonal wonkiness. Being stuck in grief to me is never being allowed to speak of it, so that it turns toxic, so that it stops the flow of love in a person. It comes out sideways. To me, that is being stuck in grief.
TS: I’m curious to ask you a personal question, which is, what’s your grieving process like now in relationship to Matt’s loss?
MD: It’s different. When Matt first died, people would very often try to comfort me by saying, “It won’t always feel this bad.” That pissed me off, because first of all, talking about some imagined future is completely irrelevant in those early days. Some future where things feel good again, not relevant.
Also, the idea that I could have a good life with Matt not in it felt offensive to me. How the fuck was this ever gonna get better? How could anything still be good or ever be good again? For me and for a lot of grieving folks, the idea of this loss not taking up so much space feels terrible. It feels horrible. The first time I actually laughed after Matt died, I felt sick. How can that happen?
There are days now, at the time that we’re speaking, Tami, I’m coming up on eight years, which is mind-blowing, that I’m like, “Man, my life is awesome. I love my life so much,” and then right on the heels of that will come, “And Matt’s dead. Well, that’s weird.”
I think the biggest thing for me is that it doesn’t feel terrible to have a beautiful life. It doesn’t. There’s no way that I could’ve felt into that in those early years, and there’s no way that anybody could’ve told me, because as I said, irrelevant. What might happen in the future is absolutely irrelevant, not useful in those early days. What’s happened for me is that life has become beautiful. It happened on its own. It wasn’t anything that I forced. It is something that happened.
One thing that I want to say is that it was brutal for years. Years. That does not mean that there was no beauty in those early days, because there was. It just sat alongside an immense crater. That crater is still there, and there’s a big, vast, beautiful life alongside it. It’s still really stunning to me that so much of the amazing that I have in my life right now is only here because Matt’s dead. That is a weirdness that I just carry. It’s weird.
TS: Megan, I notice there are a lot of other things that I feel drawn to ask you about, but I’m gonna end with just one final question, which is, our capacity to grieve well and love well. There’s a quote from the book. You write, “What we all share in common, and the real reason for this book, is a desire to love better.” That really struck me.
I think before this conversation, I was talking to our audio engineer, and I was saying, deep conversations about grief, I find them so nourishing for me. We were talking about how, “Tami, that’s because you like what’s taboo, what people don’t talk about.” I think there’s truth in that. It’s liberating a certain amount of energy to talk about something that is often not talked about. I also think there’s this other really important point that somehow when we let ourselves grieve, we learn how to love better, and that that’s really a big part of what turns me on, loving better, and that that’s the real reason for your book, It’s OK That You’re Not OK.
MD: Loving each other better is the point, isn’t it? Feeling loved and companioned through whatever erupts in our lives, feeling skilled and useful in our ways that we can come with love to each other, that’s the good stuff. I love that you said that conversations about grief, which for me are really conversations about love, are nourishing. We resist them because we’re like, “That’s gonna hurt,” but really, diving into them feeds us. It answers that existential helplessness that we feel by letting us relax into the real skills we need to love each other better. It’s a relief to dive into these deep things and know that our job is to love and companion each other. That’s beautiful.
TS: I want to thank you. Thank you for writing the book, It’s OK That You’re Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand, and also for your website, RefugeInGrief.com, providing a refuge online, but just also on who you are, Megan. Thank you. I’m gonna say one other thing: thank you for your anger about how people don’t handle grief well, because I think that’s part of what helps us evolve as a culture and fuels our creating of a new way. It fuels our activism, that kind of anger. Thank you for that as well.
MD: You are so welcome. Thank you for noticing that.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Megan Devine, and she’s the author of the new book, It’s OK That You’re Not OK. Thank you, everyone, for being with us. SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey.
