No, it might not be fine

Found this scanning my Facebook newsfeed – a comment on a thread with condolences for a woman who had lost her father: ‘It shall all be fine.’

It might be. Sometimes you recover from loss and pain and incredible difficulty. Sometimes it makes you stronger and happier in the end. Sometimes you learn to live with it. And sometimes it’s not going to be fine. Ever.

Augusten Burroughs wrote in his beautiful – and, to me, so true – essay To Live Unhappily Ever After:

‘So we can be filled with holes and loss and wide expanses of unhealed geography—and we can also be excited by life and in love and content at the exact same moment. This is among the oldest, deepest, most primal truths: The facts of life may be, at times, unbearably painful. But the core, the bones of life are generous beyond all reason or belief. Those things which ought to kill us do not. This should be taken as encouragement to continue.

The truth about healing is that you don't need to heal to be whole.’