What If I Never “Accept” That My Daughter Is Dead?

Sometimes I ask myself a question I can’t answer:
What would my life actually look like if I accepted that Kahlia is dead?
Not in theory.
Not in the practical sense.
But really accepted it … all the way in.

And the truth is, I don’t know.
I don’t think my mind knows how.

Because accepting that I will never see her again…
that I’ll never hear her laugh, or watch her walk into a room, or feel her lean against me…
feels like trying to swallow the ocean whole.

People act like acceptance is a step you eventually arrive at,
like a finish line,
like something healthy people do when they’ve “worked through their grief.”

But acceptance isn’t a stage.
It’s a story people tell themselves to feel less afraid of loss.

If I “accepted” it, in the way the world means;
I think something vital in me would collapse.
Something human.
Something maternal.
Something that still anchors me to the girl I love more fiercely than breath.

So I don’t accept it in that way.
Instead, I do what grief taught me:

I talk to her.
I write to her.
I write with her.
I carry her into every room I enter.
I ask her opinion.
I imagine what she’d say.
I keep her in the present tense because letting her go into the past feels like losing her twice.

People see that as denial.
I see it as devotion.

Because the truth that no one wants to admit is this:

The human brain is not designed to comprehend the permanent disappearance of someone we love.
Especially not our children.
Especially not like this.

“Acceptance” becomes a word people throw at grief when they want it tidier than it is.

But I’m not interested in tidying the love out of my life.

I don’t want to reach a point where she becomes “someone I used to know.”
I don’t want her to fade into a chapter I’m expected to close.
I don’t want to turn my daughter into a lesson about resilience or healing or time.

I want her.
Still.
Always.

So maybe the real acceptance isn’t about agreeing that she’s gone.
Maybe it’s accepting that loving her for the rest of my life is not a problem to solve.
That continuing the relationship in the only ways I can
is not a failure to “move on,”
but a refusal to let love be reduced to ashes.

Maybe acceptance, the real kind - is this:

I accept that she died.
I do not accept that the love ends here.
I won’t.

And maybe that’s what so many of us are doing, quietly,
in the dark,
in our journals,
in conversations we have with people who can no longer answer back.

Maybe we’re not stuck.
Maybe we’re honouring.
Maybe we’re carrying the relationship in the only direction time goes now.

I don’t know if I’ll ever “accept” her death in the way people want me to.
But I am learning to accept something else:

I can live my life and still talk to her.
I can laugh and still miss her.
I can love people here and still love her there.
And none of that means I’m doing grief wrong.

It means I remember.
It means I love.
It means I’m human.