Acceptance
We have to go on. After losing someone, after experiencing a tragic event, after choosing to turn around and face the fact that life as a child wasn’t good, we all must go on. But I was making this very hard on myself, both with my own childhood suffering and with the death of my son. How? I was equating moving on with getting over it, getting over my son, getting over the consequences of the abuse. It was incredibly freeing when that difference was spelled out to me by author Lucy Hone in her book Resilient Grieving. No, I will not and do not want to get over my son; and, I cannot get over the consequences of my childhood. Though I have learned to identify and work around those consequences, they still loom; they still figure in; they still impact my perceptions and my behavior. I cannot and will not get over, but I can move on.
Step one of moving on is acceptance, and Lucy Hone provides a remarkable example to me, though I know the circumstances of her 13-year-old daughter’s accidental death are different than my son’s death. Lucy realized the futility of the what-ifs right away and refused to go down that path. What if she had planned differently that day, what if I had not laid down that ultimatum, accompanied by the thousand other possibilities I’ve constructed since my son died. Lucy refuses, and I need to refuse.
Another way I travel this what-if path is to question what I know, what I remember. Trauma memory isn’t as clear as normal memory. It is not as precise. It mixes events, times, places, even faces. It is cruel, really, in how it works against our reconstruction of the facts. But, just because I may be wrong about the when or the where, I know the what occurred. Its consequences are written all over me.
As long we play the what-ifs, we cannot truly accept; therefore, we cannot effectively move on.
It happened. We suffered. We lost. Our loved one is gone. We must move on, and we get to decide how.
Reflection
In what ways are you refusing to accept that you have suffered or that a loved one has died? Why? Do you keep replaying the what-ifs? What is the refusal to settle in with full acceptance accomplishing for you?
Prayer
Dear God, you are truth itself. If we come at You, You will insist our vision, if it is faulty, be corrected. O Lord, draw us to You. May we be willing to entertain the possibility that accepting truth brings with it a freedom to acknowledge, to deal with properly, to honor. May we see that accepting opens us to ways our loved one is still with us. It opens us to dealing so much more effectively with the consequences of abuse. Acceptance of truth does, indeed, set us free.