IT'S OK THAT YOU'RE NOT OK in English

APPENDIX How to Help a Grieving Friend My essay on how to help a grieving friend is among the top three most shared posts I’ve ever written. A lot of what I’ve mentioned in part 3 is summarized in this essay, so I’ve reprinted it here. To give it to friends and family who want to help, you’ll find a printable copy at refugeingrief.com/help- grieving-friend.

LOVE IS THE ONLY THING THAT LASTS How do we end a book on loss if we don’t lean back on the expected happy ending? If we don’t search for a tacked-on transformation, or a promise that everything will work out in the end? I end this book with love because love is all we’ve got. It’s neither up-note nor doom. It simply is. We grieve because we love. Grief is part of love. There was love in this world before your loss, there is love surrounding you now, and love will remain beside you, through all the life that is yet to come. The forms will change, but love itself will never leave. It’s not enough. And it’s everything.

PART IV THE WAY FORWARD 15 THE TRIBE OF AFTER Companionship, True Hope, and the Way Forward Companionship, reflection, and connection are vital parts of surviving grief. As I mentioned at the beginning of this book, attachment is survival. We need each other.

RALLYING YOUR SUPPORT TEAM Helping Them Help You Our friends, our families, our therapists, our books, our cultural responses—they’re all most useful, most loving and kind, when they help those in grief to carry their pain, and least helpful when they try to fix what isn’t broken. Most people want to help; they just don’t know how. There’s such a huge gap between what people want for us, and what they actually provide with their support. It’s no one’s fault, really. The only way to close that gap is to let people know what works, what doesn’t, and how we can all improve our skills in caring for each other.

PART III WHEN FRIENDS AND FAMILY DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO 13 SHOULD YOU EDUCATE OR IGNORE THEM? If you’re like most grieving people, the response from people around you has been clumsy at best, and insulting, dismissive, and rude at worst. We talked about the deep roots of pain avoidance and the culture of blame in earlier parts of this book. It’s also important to bring it all back to your personal life, to help you understand—and correct—the unhelpful support of the people around you.

FIND YOUR OWN IMAGE OF “RECOVERY” Talking with people in new grief is tricky. During the first year, it’s so tempting to say that things get better. I mean, is it really a kindness to say, “Actually, year two is often far harder than year one”? But if we don’t say anything, people enter years two and three and four thinking they should be “better” by now. And that is patently untrue: subsequent years can actually be more difficult.

WHAT DOES ART HAVE TO DO WITH ANYTHING? I want to tell you that the creative process will be healing for you, in and of itself. But I’m a terrible liar. I can’t bring up the creative process without being honest about my own path. The arts, or any artistic practices, were hard for me in the early days of grief. I resented words and writing for a really long time. I resented any creative process for a really long time. Even as I needed them.

GRIEF AND ANXIETY Calming Your Mind When Logic Doesn’t Work Grief changes your body and your mind in strange ways. Cognitive capacity isn’t the only brain function that gets wonky. Anxiety—whether it’s new to you, or you experienced it before your loss—is a huge issue in grief. I used to struggle a lot with anxiety.

WHAT HAPPENED TO MY MIND? Dealing with Grief’s Physical Side Effects Descriptions of the many ways grief impacts your body and mind are not always easy to find. This chapter covers some of the most common— and strange—effects of grief and offers tools to help support and nourish your body and mind as you navigate the new landscape of life after loss.

HOW (AND WHY) TO STAY ALIVE Using tools to reduce your suffering is one of the few concrete actions to take inside grief. Reducing suffering still leaves you with pain, however, and that pain can be immense. Surviving early grief is a massive effort. Forget getting through the day; sometimes the pain is so excruciating, the most you can aim for is getting through the next few minutes. In this chapter, we review tools to help you bear the pain you’re in, what to do when that pain is too much, and we explore why kindness to self is the most necessary—and most difficult—medicine.

YOU CAN’T SOLVE GRIEF, BUT YOU DON’T HAVE TO SUFFER Living inside grief, you know there is nothing to be fixed: this can’t be made right. While most grief support (and well-meaning friends and family) encourages you to move through the pain, that’s simply the wrong approach. The way to live inside of grief is not by removing pain, but by doing what we can to reduce suffering. Knowing the difference between pain and suffering can help you understand what things can be changed and what things simply need your love and attention.

WHAT TO DO WITH YOUR GRIEF ON RIGHT TIMING: A NOTE BEFORE WE GET STARTED I devoured books on grief and loss when Matt first died. I hated most of them. I would flip to the back of a new book to see if the widowed author had remarried. If they had, I wouldn’t read the book—clearly, they did not understand what it was like to be me. I would get all excited reading the first few chapters of a new book on loss, only to hurl it away in disgust when subsequent chapters started talking about rebuilding my life and all the great things I might do as a result of this loss.

THE NEW MODEL OF GRIEF Having traveled down into the cultural roots of grief avoidance, how do we find our way back out? How do we become, not only people, but a whole wider culture, comfortable bearing the reality that there is pain that can’t be fixed? How do we become people who know that grief is best answered with companionship, not correction?

EMOTIONAL ILLITERACY AND THE CULTURE OF BLAME There’s such a pervasive weirdness in our culture around grief and death. We judge, and we blame, dissect, and minimize. People look for the flaws in what someone did to get to this place: She didn’t exercise enough. Didn’t take enough vitamins. Took too many. He shouldn’t have been walking on that side of the road.

IT’S NOT YOU, IT’S US Our Models of Grief Are Broken When someone you love has just died, why does it matter that our cultural models of grief are broken? I mean—who cares? This is about you, not everyone else. Except that, especially in early grief, everyone thinks you’re doing it wrong. The reflection you get from the outside world can make you think you’ve gone crazy on top of everything else.

THE SECOND HALF OF THE SENTENCE Why Words of Comfort Feel So Bad It’s incredibly hard to watch someone you love in pain. Those who love you tell you you’re strong enough to get through this. You’ll feel better someday. It won’t always be this bad. They encourage you to look to your much brighter future, to a time when you aren’t in so much pain.

PART I THIS IS ALL JUST AS CRAZY AS YOU THINK IT IS 1 THE REALITY OF LOSS Here’s what I most want you to know: this really is as bad as you think. No matter what anyone else says, this sucks. What has happened cannot be made right. What is lost cannot be restored. There is no beauty here, inside this central fact.

INTRODUCTION The way we deal with grief in our culture is broken. I thought I knew quite a bit about grief. After all, I’d been a psychotherapist in private practice for nearly a decade. I worked with hundreds of people—from those wrestling with substance addiction and patterns of homelessness to private practice clients facing decades-old abuse, trauma, and grief