Acceptance

It's been more than five years since my husband died, and little by little I've let myself become absorbed back into the flow of life. I've embraced hope for a new life with a good man. I've taken up ballroom dancing. I've regained a zest for teaching. I've begun writing again and was awarded a semester-long sabbatical by my college. which I'm presently enjoying.

I thought I'd written all there was to write about widowhood--my widowhood, anyway. But I was wrong. A friend asked me the other day if I was still grieving. I had to stop and think about what grief really is. Kubler-Ross' stages come in handy as a shorthand. The end of the process she defined is acceptance. I've accepted (as much as one can) the disappearance from my life of the man I would always in some ways think of as my life partner. I am no longer surprised or angered by his absence from my life. But I carry a sadness that wasn't in me before his death. I expect I always will.

I don't really believe in grief as a process with an end. But I think I may have completed some sort of cycle. I've come to feel happiness under the shadow of my knowledge. I've even come to be curious about the complexities and contradictions within my bereavement. Higher knowledge and lower emotions meet within me. I've succumbed to petty thoughts and compromises that I would not have expected five years ago when I was focused on the knife edge between life and death.

In her memoir, The Holocaust Kid, Sonia Pilcher asks her mother, a Holocaust survivor, how she can concern herself with little bargains at the local discount store. How could she descend to such non-essential issues with what she knew about humanity and its inhuman ways. "Life makes you live," her mother shrugs. I've always loved that response, so simple and so true.

I've used it as an inspiration when I've wanted to fight against the flow of life. How else will I find out what comes next?