Grief in a World That Doesn’t Get It

Today I want to remind you that your grief is not a problem to be solved. 

So much of our suffering - and so many of our missteps when we’re trying to support others - happen because our culture thinks that grief is a problem that needs to be fixed.

Grief is a natural, normal process, as old as humankind. It’s not a sign that something is wrong or broken; it’s a sign that we’ve loved and lost.

Yet in a culture that encourages us to move beyond our pain into the land of gratitude and happy memories, it can be easy to believe that we’re somehow doing grief wrong. 

We sense others’ discomfort with our pain, so we start tucking it away. 

We receive cultural messages about turning our loss into something transformative, so we start to wonder what’s wrong with us when we still feel like everything is broken. 

We grow weary of unhelpful platitudes, so we stop telling people how we really feel.

Exhausted by a world that wants to make our grief “better” or make it go away, we stop sharing it with others. We’re robbed of the one thing that our grief needs and wants the most: not a solution, but a witness.

What our grief wants the most is to be seen and heard. It wants room to unfold and to be felt. Our grief wants recognition that there are some things that can’t be fixed, that there are some scars that will always be with us.

And this is what makes grief so damn hard, and what adds suffering to our losses: Our grief is looking for a witness in a world that so often is uncomfortable with our pain.

If you feel like you need to keep your grief tucked away, it’s not supposed to be that way. The problem isn’t you. The problem is that you’re living in a culture that stops talking about the loss after the funeral, that has abandoned nearly all rituals for mourning, and that so often continues to believe that something magical happens after you get through the first year.

If you haven’t yet found a place where your grief can be witnessed - where your pain can exist without someone trying to fix it - I hope you can find some acknowledgement here. I hope you can trust that you aren’t doing this wrong, no matter how the world makes you feel. 

Your grief matters, and all of your pain is welcome here.