Reaching Acceptance in the Unacceptable

What do we do when faced with a paradoxical situation? Where no answer leads us to the justice we are looking for? To continue feels like a Sysiphian feat. To stop isn’t an option. So that’s when we start to build up our ability to accept. 

Acceptance isn’t complacency, complicity, or bypassing. True acceptance, as it pertains to the grief cycle means we have worked through one idea, one aspect, one wisp of a death through to  a place of rest. A place where we will not pick it up to cycle through denial, anger, bargaining, despair again. Acceptance is a place of healing. In her essay, “Notes on Grief,” Chimamanda Nogozi Adichie describes her journey through grief at her father’s sudden passing during the COVID-19 shutdown. Her tone shows which stage she is sitting in as she takes solace in writing, or perhaps, the grappling with meaning. She oscillates between her experience, which includes her four year old daughter holding space for her in the purest way to that of her siblings and mother. The logistics of a burial become=[=]f more complicated in the middle of a global pandemic. “My mother is desperate for a firm date. ‘After the burial, we can begin to heal,’ she says. I am heartsick to see her look so brave and so drained.” 

Burial as ritual becomes a moment in time. A marker that starts healing. Throughout Adichie’s essay, we feel the non-linear grief cycle that has moments of healing, but the real-life break-neck pace of moving from grief stage to stage, desperate for relief, but mindful of what comes with acceptance. Adichie ends her reflection with, “I am writing about my father in the past tense, and I cannot believe I am writing about my father in the past tense.”

Here is one of her timestamps of healing. Ritual of burial. An indicator that acceptance may be near. 

When we are facing the ever presence of grief within the oppressive systems of White Supremacy, Hate, Dehumanization, and Capitalism, it becomes harder to hold on to hope and easier to slip into cynicism. Working toward acceptance seems like submission, resignation, giving in, giving up. However, when we are able to accept these systems exist, we can also refocus on what is on the other side of them. If we believe there is a place for systems of Equity, Humanity, Unconditional Love, and Reciprocity, then we must work toward acceptance. It does not mean we give up, it means we refocus after being hit, over and over, with systems that cause deep deep harm and find community committed to systems grounded in mutual aid and compassion. 

Adichie says of her grief, “It does not matter whether I want to be changed, because I am changed.”

We don’t ask for the injustice, we don’t want to sit in the perpetual weight of it, and as long as we sit in it, we are in grief. When we allow ourselves moments of acceptance, moments to lay down slivers of our grief, then we make room for rest and restoration to refocus our energy in cultivating systems rooted in Unconditional Love. Grief is ongoing and unpredictable. It guarantees we will not be the same, because we are ever changing and forever changed.