Acceptance
I remember learning, following my mother’s death about the stages of grief, as I tried to grapple with my own confusing loss.
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
I now realise you can apply the same list to other kinds of grief. Such as the kind of loss you experience when your partner of eight years, pops out one evening to buy cigarettes and never returns. (A brilliant woman I met in Shetland and I now refer to him as Lacklustre, which is really quite a kind title, given the upset and destruction he caused.) I discovered that the anger stage of this type of heartbreak is quite a long one… the stages are not linear and you can flip back at any time, which is, quite frankly, annoying! Just when you’ve got up, dusted yourself off and congratulated yourself on some tiny progress or small win, you can be blindsided, smacked square in the face with a wet kipper. Do not pass go. Take at least two steps back.
All that said, I tentatively report some green shoots of acceptance. (she typed, darting looks left and right for any incoming fish slapping.) So what does this acceptance I speak of, feel or look like?
It’s firstly, a conscious decision.
Remember the art gallery guy, Mark (Andrew Lincoln) in Love Actually, who is hopelessly in love with his best friend’s new wife, Juliet, played by Kiera Knightly? He finally decides to accept she will never be his and how futile his feelings are for her, so he goes to her door, as a carol singer with a set of hand written cards, to explain himself. As he walks off he says, ‘Enough. Enough now.’ It may be a non PC, cheesy Christmas film but it describes my mini epiphany after my own Christmas, perfectly. ENOUGH!
It’s now some twenty nine months since Lacklustre slunk out, like the utter weasel he is, to go back to live with his mum, at the age of fifty six. (Whoops, that almost sounded like anger, with a touch of sarcasm! Clears throat, straightens crown and resumes the good grace at all times, policy) Those are twenty nine precious months of my life I have ‘wasted,’ added to all those previous years I spent suppressing my gut instincts.
Secondly, it feels easier.
Being able to reach the ‘enough point’ can’t be forced, I suppose it arrives when you are truly ready for it. Once reached it suddenly feels like you’ve stopped wrestling with something you could never win against but you kept fighting it anyway. It’s stopping banging your head on an unforgiving wall and accepting who, what and how you are now.
I’m better off. I live alone. I am enough. I will make this work.
I let go. I look back in my rear-view mirror, I can barely make out Lacklustre, he’s so far back, obscured by my dust. I face forward, drop a gear, accelerate to make up for lost time.
Enough.
“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection” Gautama Buddha
