acceptance

i do not prescribe to the belief that grief has five stages. a year and three months is enough time and experience for me to know i could only dream of it being that neat and ordered. it would be a hell of a lot easier. instead, every so called stage is tangled together, and it all comes at once - a wave that knocks me off my feet, and the only thing i can do is just stand up. winded, but alive.

but, if we were in an ideal world, and i could attribute myself a ‘stage’ i’d say i’m at acceptance.

it’s strange to say out loud (or type, even). because i never thought i’d get here. this time last year, or even this time a few months ago, when i was at my absolute lowest, i thought of acceptance to mean the same as ‘moving on.’ so i resisted it as much as i possibly could. i held onto the anger, the heartbreak, the outright misery, with a vice grip. i did not want to ‘accept’. i’d made a home in my grief. i was okay with living there forever.

what i’m realising now, is that i don’t have to move on from ellen’s death to accept it. and acceptance doesn’t mean i’ll stop grieving.

i’ll still have days where the heaviness in my heart will be too much to bear. i’ll still sometimes trudge out of the house and laugh at how comically insensitive it seems that the clock didn’t stop at midnight on the first of may, when my world as i knew it ended. sometimes i’ll still sit in rooms full of people and feel completely alone.

i’ll still sometimes lay awake at night and sit in my fury that everything happened how it did - i’ll still choke on my guilt that i did not advocate for her as much as i should have, that i didn’t spend as much time with her as i should have. i’ll still always believe that this is just not how it’s supposed to be.

but i’ve accepted that this, unfortunately, is how it is. that no time i spent with ellen would ever have been enough. that i was a child, who could not have been expected at such a young age to understand the finitude of life. i’ve accepted that what’s done has been done. all i can wish for the people who let ellen down is for them to understand the gravity of what they did and didn’t do, what they made my family lose, and for them to do better by others like ellen and my mum.

acceptance does not lessen the sadness, or the anger. it does not fill the ellen-shaped hole in my heart — that will be there forever. but my life grows around it. now, for the first time since ellen died, i truly understand what it means to live for her.

for all the pain that she went through, ellen loved life. she knew laughter and love. she lived loudly and unapologetically, and always with her heart on her sleeve. she found the most joy in the smallest things, that we are all guilty of taking for granted. she was fearless, a free spirit, never caring for what anyone thought of her. she was the funniest person i’ll ever know, and she’d do outlandish things just to make me laugh. she was so happy, and she always made sure everyone else was too. she brightened every room she entered.

it was only fitting that she is always called a ray of sunshine, because she was sunlight in human form.

every time i do something i’m scared of, or make someone laugh, or go through something difficult and come out the other end still breathing, every time i make the smallest difference to anyone else’s life, i feel like i’m doing right by ellen. i feel like i’m living for her. in the smallest ways, i’m carrying on her legacy.

i am terrified that the world will forget ellen - that years will go by and her impact on all of our lives will be lost. my heart breaks at the prospect that more of my life will be spent without her than with, that my future children will never know their auntie (she would’ve been the coolest). sometimes, the inevitability that i’ll feel this pain forever is more than i can bear.

i’m not naive to the fact that a year is not a long time. there is still so much on this journey that i haven’t experienced, still so much i don’t know.

but i think that’s what acceptance is — it does not ease the anger, the depression, or the guilt (or whatever the other stages are - i can’t remember) but it gives you the strength to take every ounce of that pain and use it for good. you can acknowledge the heartbreak, and also see hope in the midst of it.

it doesn’t mean i’m leaving ellen, or anyone else behind, but surrounding the hole in my heart is the beginnings of a sunflower garden. and for the rest of my life, i will carry ellen with me, so that in the smallest way, her magic can be known even by those who never got to know her. <3