What Does Acceptance Really Look Like? the Time Machine Test
A few days after my son took his life in October, 2017, I wrote the following post on Facebook: “To those working on a time machine, I’m ready to go back about six days.”
The post got many likes and hearts, and it received many comments. I think everyone could identify with wanting to go back in time to “fix” or change something that has happened to them. Certainly, this is what much of the early period of grief was for me, in addition to the trauma.
And in those first days of our loss, there was much outpouring of care and concern for us, though within a few months, that had mostly receded. After the memorial service, most people we knew tip-toed around us, not wanting to remind us of what we were always already thinking about. I think that there’s an unconscious tension that most of us feel toward grief and the grieving: We are aware that it takes a long time, and five complicated stages, to get through our grief, and at the same time, we don’t know what to say when we meet with grieving people. We want to help but also sense our own inability to help. We are not experts. We think, well, I’ll just step quietly through this and get out of the room without really hurting anyone.
The stages of grief, outlined by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, include denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. As we began really grieving for our son, I couldn’t have told you exactly what I was going through in terms of this five stage model. In those first months or our loss, I could say that I didn’t go into the stages neatly. I was certainly in denial when scheming to find a time machine. And I certainly remained in a state of trauma for quite a while.
Even five years later, I haven’t ever really felt any anger toward my son. I have felt anger toward his therapist. But not him.
I do think that many would acknowledge today that these five stages do not represent a neat, linear model. We do not pass neatly from one stage to the next after X number of days. I think that even Kubler-Ross acknowledged that it is possible to experience different stages again and even again at different times.
That said, I have wondered what it must look and feel like to get through to the place of acceptance. How long does it take?
Today, five years later, I could say that I have learned to live with a certain amount of resignation. I am resigned to my loss. But is that the same state as acceptance?
This is the problem I see with acceptance–why I hesitate to accept acceptance. It seems to mean having to acknowledge that what happened to my son is a part of reality now, but it also sometimes feels like it includes a second, more difficult admission: That I have come to also be at peace, to sort of get along with the fact that he’s not here now. Certainly, I know that we can’t have our son back, even for an hour, but I can still think that losing him was a horrible event in our lives. I’m not sure that this is really acceptance, or that I want this kind of acceptance.
We, my family and I, have lived for five years without the presence of our son. We have gone on to other things and other relationships. We are not the people we were five years ago when he was just starting his senior year of high school. His friends are not there either. We recently went to a restaurant that he and his friends had for a hangout after school. None of them were there. They are all moving from their early to their mid-twenties.
I do enjoy things about my life now. There are times that I don’t think about him. Part of this has come about because I’ve been writing about him and plan to finish a memoir about him. I don’t want to forget.
But recently, at a Survivors of Suicide meeting, I did say something that has struck me as, if not acceptance, then at least moving toward some version of it. I’m not sure, and it still seems, well, sad. I said this.
“If I had the time machine now to go back five and a half years to see him again, I would tell Michael that I love him. I would tell him how much I’m going to miss him. But I would leave it at that. I wouldn’t seek out extra-human abilities to save him.”
A couple of other people present that evening told me that this sounded like a major move forward.
I’m trying to decide what it really means to accept this loss. I’m still thinking in terms of time machines. And that’s quite clearly on the side of extra-human things. And I still feel sadness. If coming to a place of acceptance means still being sad about my loss, it may be that this is the start of things.
But as I think I’ve already said, these stages we pass through are not neat and orderly. But then, I’ve gotten used to that idea.
