Action #2: Accept what isn’t how we want it to be
If you have ever grieved the loss of someone you love, you know that one of the hardest elements of true grief is an acceptance of finality.
When my team lost our amazing friend and colleague Naomi to a sudden pulmonary embolism, the utter brutality of the grief was knowing that (on this earth at least), we would never see her again. We are so thankful for the reality of heaven. But it was true grief: it’s not like we were holding open the hope that maybe something might change. We had to accept that she was gone.
I need to say here that I’m not a “grief expert.” But in general, it appears that acceptance of things as they are is the core of healthy grief.
There is a model in the counseling world called the Kübler-Ross “Stages of Grief.” Not everyone moves through all five stages (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance), or in the same way, pace, or order. But the last stage of Kübler-Ross’s model – acceptance – is one that many in the counseling world agree is often the final stage. Once we accept the reality of what we’ve lost, we can move past our grief and turn our attention to more positive things.
A Personal Example
About six months ago, I ran into an old friend. This person looked amazing, having lost fifty pounds since the last time we had been together. Turns out, the friend had been diagnosed with diabetes, and a doctor had delivered the brutal news that unless the friend’s weight got under control, vision and neuropathy problems were just around the corner. So under a doctor’s care, an extremely tight eating plan commenced.
Because my ongoing cancer treatments have led to significant weight gain, and I was about to start the same process to get back to a healthy weight, I asked, “How did you do it?” My friend looked at me and said, “I had to grieve that I could never have processed sugar again.”
I felt like someone punched me in the stomach. If the context wasn’t my own cancer drug regimen, I might have seen humor in that statement, given that the yummy bread-based carbs I love were part of the problem. (Any fellow donut lovers out there? You’re my people!)
But the context is a cancer drug. And the drug I take every day to prevent cancer from returning not only causes weight gain but also makes weight loss extraordinarily difficult. I hadn’t realized it until my friend said it, but there is grief in permanently setting aside the foods I love.
I know I need to cut them out, permanently, to get healthy and to avoid the inflammatory response that could invite cancer to return. But it is only grieving that, and then accepting it, that opens up space for me to focus my attention on something more positive.
And that leads me to the third action step we can take when life is going a different direction than we hoped.
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