Acceptance is a bitter medicine.

The last stage in the five phases of grief is acceptance. The other four may sound familiar: denial, bargaining, anger, and depression. The first four are fearful of the last. Acceptance is scary; it is to be avoided at all costs. The psyche makes attempts to shelter us from a painful reality.

When we lose someone, whether by the forces of life or by death, not having them can be very hard to accept. "I can always call them," "They are with me in spirit," "We will see each other again one day," "If it's meant to be, we will get back together"—perhaps these placations, though helpful and necessary, are merely faces of denial and bargaining. The reality of doneness, goneness, perpetual absence is often too painful to bear.

I have been coming to a reckoning of my own past. Though not appropriate for me to publish and share explicitly at this time, there were aspects of my childhood that are hard to accept. There are opportunities that are forever lost, that perhaps could be experienced in my life now or later but have a fundamentally different character and quality than they would if I had experienced them in my youth. They are lost forever.

It is scary to accept a painful truth. Sometimes, like a foul medicine, we cannot yet take it. We throw it back up. Our psychological body may reject the very medicine we need; in more extreme cases, it may even produce an autoimmune response to attack the medicine by constructing an alternate reality.

A story of King Solomon comes to mind. Two women approached his court, arguing over the motherhood of an infant. They both claimed the child as theirs; one of the women's real child died, and in her denial and pain, she kidnapped the other woman's child and claimed it as her own. It was the king's job to decide who was the mother—he makes a judgment to have the baby split in half and give each mother one side. The real mother, upon hearing the judgment, immediately offers the baby to the other woman, after which the king discerns she is the true mother and restores custody of the child to her.

Imagine the denial of the kidnapping mother. Her grief was so strong, so bitter, so painful, that she constructed an alternate reality where another infant could replace her lost baby, where she convinced herself that this baby was truly hers. Of course, I am reading into the story with my own color and inflections, implying that the woman was on some level blinded by her grief not only to commit a conscious act of kidnapping but an unconscious act of deluding herself, of genuinely believing that the child was hers.

Grief can drive us to dark places, where the psychological body, if unhinged, causes harm to itself and others. Unfortunately, we cannot skip the phases. Acceptance is on an altar, and there are trials to go through before we can reach that altar. We can feign acceptance, we can bring our intellectual mind to acceptance perhaps before the other phases, but in my experience there is no other way to acceptance but through the other phases of grief.

It is not a particularly comforting thought to surrender ourselves to the throes of grief. We do not know when it will end, and that uncertainty is a purgatory worse than hell itself. There is no deadline to it, and it is often more cyclical than it is linear. What then can we do to move through our grief, to offer us some assurance that we move without adding more suffering than necessary?

I hate to disappoint, but I don't have a definitive answer. My best shot is this: confront the grief and move with it day by day. If you cannot accept the reality, then accept the stage of grief you are in: be angry, bargain, be depressed, deny. Go through these phases, talk through them, get a therapist and do the work.

Grief may demand all our attention all at once. It may appear like a child, needy and loud, yelling for our attention, screaming at us. We must tend to it, but we cannot be a slave to it; instead, we must also tend to the responsibilities of our lives, to keep what we can moving forward. Some words of caution: do not let the grief become your life. It is an important part of your life, sure, but do not let it become your life. It's a trap.

Acceptance is hard. Call to mind a difficult loss you've gone through. How did you experience the phases of grief? Was there a lightbulb moment or a gradual approach to acceptance? What did acceptance look like for you?