Psychiatrists talk about the five stages of grief. The stages include denial, bargaining, depression, anger, and acceptance. They tend to leave out the fact that these different stages don’t necessarily stick to any particular order. What’s even more annoying is it isn’t like you go through all of them and you’re suddenly cured. Grief doesn’t go away. You learn to live with it.

Looking back over the ten months I can see some of me in all of the stages. However, I also feel there seems to be a few different parts to acceptance. The acceptance stage of grief for me has been mostly about learning to let go. I cling easily to pieces of information, items of importance, and memories of moments. It is so challenging for me to accept that I will never see Kody again. I’m not in denial anymore, but I’m not ready for that to be true either.

So far, a big part of the acceptance for me has been following Kody’s wishes. Whenever Kody and I talked about death (more than I’d like to admit), he would say that he had two different desires when it came to his body. He wanted his body to be helpful to nature and feed the critters and at the same time wanted to be cremated. I take some gruesome pride in the fact that in the end he was able to do both things as his body wasn’t found for almost a week.

He wanted to be as he liked to say “scattered to the four winds”, taken on any great adventure and spread where there was nature and beauty to behold. For me a huge part of acceptance and letting go has been releasing parts of his ashes part by part. I scattered him in a river on the mountain loop, a beach in ocean shores, and off a boat in the islands of Alaska. Each moment reminds me of loss, love, and hope.

When Kody and I climbed Mt. Pilchuck to scatter part of my grandpa, the ashes blew into my face and got in my mouth. After that, Kody always told me that when I scattered his ashes he would do the same. So far, he has kept that promise well. I don’t know what it is about cremains and their tendency to hang on the air, but it seems impossible to scatter them without some getting into your mouth.

Releasing the ashes one small amount at a time helps me to let go slowly of all that Kody was and all that I wished for him to be. Of all the stages of grief, acceptance is the one that seems to come less naturally. Some part of my mind argues that once I accept that he is gone forever, it will really be true. The truth is that he is gone already, whether I accept it as truth or not.