Radical Acceptance

Today, it has been 38 weeks since Isabel’s death. I honestly can’t believe it. I don’t want it to be so long since I last got to spend time with her. I can still picture her sitting in her favorite place in our family room. I can still imagine that she is lying in her bed down the hall. Unless we have guests over for dinner, our family hasn’t sat down for dinner at our kitchen table since she has been gone. It is too painful to see her empty place.

From my own experience when I lost my husband, Giles, I know that the first year is the hardest. Each day is the anniversary of something. For Isabel, the year leading up to her death was actually pretty great. So the anniversaries of these days and weeks are incredibly bittersweet.

This week ahead, for example. One year ago, Isabel was getting ready to spend the month of July in France and Italy with her aunt. This was a magical time for her and filled with stories that I hold on to.

A couple of weeks ago was the anniversary of her graduation from high school, a feat that had seemed unimaginable the year before when she was in and out of the hospital. It is impossible to overstate how hard Isabel worked to be able to graduate from high school. She crammed her whole senior year into one semester, and finished and published her book during this time. We still laugh when we remember the online guitar class she took – a course that had really crazy assignments. Her thoughts on those assignments were priceless. Such great memories.

Realizing how quickly we are speeding towards the one-year anniversary of Isabel’s death is frightening. On the one hand, I just want to get it over with. On the other hand, I don’t want the vivid memories we have of her to diminish in any way. I know that time can dim those memories and that scares me.

When I think these confused thoughts, I realize they represent a profound dialectic. Of course that makes me think of DBT – dialectical behavior therapy, something that is a big part of current treatment programs for depression and eating disorder recovery.

Anyone familiar with Isabel’s blog posts or her book knows that she learned and used DBT skills extensively. At one point during her illness, she and I attended a six-month DBT class for parents and teens. While six months is a long time commitment, my only wish is that I had done this before I became a parent. Or at least before I had teenagers! When you look up DBT, you will get the mistaken idea that it is only for people suffering from severe mental illness. This is far from reality and totally misses the point. DBT provides critical life skills that are useful for everyone – how to live more meaningful lives, how to regulate our emotions better, how to listen to others more carefully, how not to judge ourselves or others. In the DBT class, I learned to say “but” less often, focusing instead on “and”.

The dialectic is what is critical here and it’s honestly not very easy to understand. This is the best explanation I could find:  

The word “dialectical” describes the notion that two opposing ideas can be true at the same time.     In DBT, there is always more than one way to think about a situation, and all people have something unique and different to offer. A life worth living has both positive and negative aspects (happiness, sadness, anger) and all of these aspects are necessary and valuable. It is sometimes hard to accept ourselves and our actions while simultaneously recognizing the need for change. Dialectics allows for a balance between acceptance and change, both of which are necessary for establishing a fulfilling life .

Source:  Peachtree DBT

I realize that my desire to get this first year over with AND my fear of losing sight of my beautiful daughter is part of acceptance. It doesn’t make it any easier though. One of the DBT skills that Isabel found most helpful was radical acceptance. It means just what it sounds like – accepting reality. She named her blog Grant Me the Serenity, because the Serenity Prayer was so meaningful for her. It is all about acceptance.

God grant me the serenity

to accept the things I cannot change;

courage to change the things I can;

and wisdom to know the difference.

 Isabel learned to accept many difficult realities through her months of treatment and I know I have to follow her example. Our family has lost a lot and we are still trying to come to terms with this. I don’t have any profound thoughts or magic to share. Life can suck. AND we are going to get through this.