I Know She's Dead. I Still Don't Understand It.

Acceptance. It's one of those words that follows grieving people around. Eventually, apparently, we are supposed to arrive there.

Acceptance. It sounds peaceful, almost beautiful. Like one day, after enough crying and processing and counselling and time, you finally put down your bags and say:

Okay. I accept this.

And life begins again.

We know now that grief isn't a neat five-stage journey. There isn't a little emotional staircase from denial to anger to bargaining to depression and, finally, the penthouse suite:

Acceptance.

Most of us know grief doesn't work like that, and yet the idea persists. I was reading about grief again this week and there it was.

Acceptance.

How important it is. And I found myself wondering:

What exactly am I supposed to accept?

The word itself means recognising or consenting to the reality of something, often something difficult or unwanted. And perhaps that's where I struggle, because there is an enormous difference between recognising reality and being okay with it.

I know Kahlia is dead, I know the date she died. I know how she died, I lived through the days and weeks and months afterwards. It has been almost two and a half years since I spoke to her. Almost two and a half years since I hugged her, almost two and a half years since I heard her laugh in the room beside me.

I know….God, I know. And somehow... I still don't quite believe it.

That's the contradiction I live inside.

I know she's dead.

And:

I cannot comprehend that I will never see her again.

Both are true.

Sometimes I still imagine walking home and finding her there. Not in some spiritual sense, actually there. Kahlia… living and breathing. I still look towards the place where we'd meet during breaks at work. There are moments when some part of me seems to be waiting for her call. Waiting for the door, waiting for the universe to correct itself. It's bizarre, because I am not confused about what happened. I'm not waiting for someone to tell me there has been a terrible administrative error and she's actually been living in Auckland for the last two years. My rational brain understands perfectly well that she died. But there seems to be another part of me that says:

Yes, but where is she?

Maybe that is what we misunderstand about acceptance. We imagine grief as a problem of information. Eventually, surely, the brain gets the message.

She died.

Message received, reality accepted. Except love doesn't operate like that. For her entire life, my brain learned Kahlia; her face, her voice, her footsteps, her moods, her routines. Where she would be, when she might call, how she would respond. I didn't consciously learn those things, they became part of the architecture of my world. Kahlia exists wasn't a thought I had to think, it was simply true. And then, in one day, it wasn't. Perhaps two and a half years isn't actually very long when you're asking a human brain to rewrite something it knew for decades. Perhaps that's why I still look, why bereaved people sometimes think they see their person in a crowd, why you reach for the phone, why for half a second after waking, the old world exists before the new one comes crashing back.

It's not stupidity, it's not failure, and I'm increasingly unconvinced that it means we haven't "accepted" our loss. Maybe it's simply what happens when reality changes faster than love can update its map.

And there is another problem with acceptance. The word can sound suspiciously like approval, as though accepting Kahlia's death means somehow making peace with it. I don't. I don't accept that she should have died, I don't accept that 24 years was enough. I don't accept that I should live the rest of my life without my daughter, I don't accept that there will be birthdays she never has, places she never sees, songs she never hears, ridiculous conversations we never get to have.

If acceptance means deciding that any of that is okay, then no.

I don't accept it, I never will. But perhaps acceptance can mean something else. Perhaps acceptance is not:

I'm okay with this.

Perhaps it is:

This is true, even though I hate that it is true.

Maybe acceptance isn't the end of grief. Maybe it's something I do over and over again. Every morning, every birthday, every Christmas. Every time something wonderful happens and I instinctively want to tell her, every time I look towards that meeting place, every time my phone doesn't ring. Reality arrives again, and again I have to live inside it. Maybe that's why the idea of reaching acceptance feels so wrong to me.

There is no finish line, there is no glorious moment when I finally understand how a person can exist and then not exist. I still can't make sense of that, perhaps we aren't supposed to. And I wonder whether we put too much pressure on grieving people when we hold acceptance up as evidence of healthy grief. Because from the outside, my continuing expectation of Kahlia might look like a refusal to accept reality. From inside me, it feels completely different.

It feels like love has an extraordinarily long memory. My life spent years organising itself around her existence, of course some part of me still expects her.

Maybe the goal isn't to teach that part of me that she's gone, maybe I don't need to eradicate it. Maybe I can let both truths live here.

Kahlia is dead.

Kahlia is still part of my world.

One is physical reality, the other is relational reality. They don't cancel each other out. I can build a life while still looking for her, I can laugh while still missing her, I can understand intellectually that she is dead while being completely unable to comprehend a lifetime without her. I can know, and not know. Maybe that isn't madness, maybe that's grief.

So, will I ever accept Kahlia's death?

I suppose it depends what you mean by acceptance.

If you mean, will I learn to live in the world as it is now?

I'm already doing that, every single day.

If you mean, will I stop expecting her sometimes?

I hope not entirely. There's something strangely beautiful to me about the fact that my mind still makes room for her.

And if you mean, will there come a day when the fact that I will never see my daughter again feels reasonable, understandable or okay?

No.

I don't think so. And perhaps it doesn't need to.

Maybe acceptance isn't the moment grief finally lets go of us, maybe it's quieter than that, less triumphant, more human.

Maybe acceptance is knowing something you still cannot comprehend. Living in a reality you would never have chosen, continuing to love someone who is no longer physically here, and somehow carrying both truths without forcing either one to disappear.

I know she's dead.

Some part of me still waits for her.

After almost two and a half years, I think I'm finally beginning to understand that those two sentences are allowed to belong together.