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What does "being okay" after loss mean to you?
Not happy or healed, not successful or self-actualized — but okay.
Would it be having more good days than bad? Feeling capable of meeting your basic needs and the needs of those in your care? Finding peace with difficult memories? Or finding a continued connection with someone who’s died?
The question of what it means to “be okay” may be a helpful one for grieving people to ask themselves when they’re ready. Although, as many have pointed out, it’s okay not to be okay — especially when you’re grieving.
A sense of okayness might be hard to envision for people feeling ravaged by the intense emotions and distressing thoughts of acute grief. When the only world that makes sense feels destroyed by a significant loss, it can be difficult to imagine that any reality other than the one you had before could ever feel acceptable.
But this is precisely why okayness is important to consider. Otherwise, it can continue to feel impossible — as though it’s something you’ll only find when you’ve either "healed" from your grief or finished building a time machine to take you back to before your loss — whichever happens first.
When we think this way, we may find ourselves:
- Focusing on the wrong things - for example, trying to “go back to normal” when that version of ourselves has been forever changed.
- Judging ourselves by impossible standards - for example, feeling like we need to work towards “getting over” or "resolving" our grief.
- Viewing “okay,” “happy,” or “healed” as final destinations - for example, buying into the idea that we battle through grief to get to the other side, where we finally feel better — overlooking the reality that emotions and experiences like joy, sadness, peace, and pain are transient, often overlapping states.
You Can't Wait Out Grief
Have you ever had somewhere you wanted or needed to be, but as you’re getting ready to leave, you notice that it’s pouring outside? You think, "Maybe I can wait it out," so you stand there and wait…and wait, but there’s seemingly no end in sight. Eventually, you say to yourself, "I can’t stand here forever. I have to go about my life despite the rain," and so you make a run for it.
Grief is the longest rainstorm — one that threatens to rage at any moment, even years after it first began. Eventually, you have to find ways to live your life despite the rain. Because one thing time makes evident is that, despite our heartache, the world keeps spinning. We can’t reverse its rotation to return to the way things were before; we must learn to live our lives alongside grief. As we said in our book:
People often mistake hope as something that can only come after grief, but that doesn’t make sense if you think about it. Hope must exist alongside grief because without darkness, why would you ever wish for light? Hope exists because you’re lost in suffering, and before you find the path out, you must have hope that you’ll find it.
In her work on ambiguous loss, Pauline Boss shares a concept she calls “redefining hope.” She says that hope, in the midst of ambiguous grief, is not expecting a perfect outcome. Instead, it’s asking: What might provide me with a small sense of meaning, purpose, connection, comfort, or peace — even in the midst of my current pain and struggle?
Though ambiguous loss is its own experience, this concept is useful for people experiencing all types of grief. Unfortunately, many painful life experiences are not brief or time-limited; they linger. They cast a shadow over your life and cause ongoing daily struggles, so waiting until they resolve to find points of healing, comfort, pleasure, or purpose may not be reasonable.
Being a grieving human in the world means constantly cycling between ups, downs, and in-betweens. Positive states like happiness or fulfillment are not endpoints; they’re passing states just like sadness. The most realistic way to live post-loss is to recognize that these seemingly opposite feelings will, at some point, coexist.
So what does a more realistic sense of “okayness” look like to you? One that recognizes loss has left an unfillable hole and that grief has changed you and the way you see the world. One that acknowledges life is a series of ups and downs and that, when you’re grieving, the potential for setbacks and sad days always exists. One that is reasonable, but not impossible.
We’re not asking you to be this — or any other form of okay — right now. Only to hope that there’s a version of it that makes sense in your life after loss.
Is it an “okay” that needs more room to accommodate the range of emotions that will always be part of your life?
Is it an “okay” that keeps one eye on the past because that’s where the people and places you treasure exist?
Is it a little more guarded and protective because you’ve learned that the worst can happen?
Does it understand the need to value small but meaningful everyday moments?
