Wholeness or Acceptance?

 I’ve started to really question the meaning of healing.  So often healing is presented as one being cured or made whole again, but is it possible that there are some things that can not be made right or put back together? So often we accept this guise that healing means something is over; that we made it “through” or to the "other side", but is that the only solution for suffering or trauma? Maybe healing means different things for different people - just as everyone’s grief journey is uniquely theirs, their healing journey is uniquely theirs as well. 

I have a huge, thick scar running down the middle of my knee. In one split second on the basketball court in high school, my knee locked and the top half of my leg went one way and the bottom half went the other. I tore everything in the middle. I needed a couple of surgeries and some metal screws to put that knee back together. Is it healed?  No. It still swells and hurts, and even with eight plus months of physical therapy I can’t do what I could before the injury. And that scar will aways be there.  I could wear nothing but long pants so no one has to see it, but it’s still there. 

I think it’s the same with a broken heart. There are some breaks that are too sharp, and some wounds that are too deep to ever go back as they were before. You will never really be the same; it has altered your very existence, rearranged the world for you. There isn't a cure. There's an acceptance and with acceptance comes learning how to be with this new version of yourself. 

The healing comes in not making it go away but learning how to live with it. If the wound stays agape, blood will gush all over everyone else and bacteria can lead to infection. It will literally eat you. That has to "heal to a degree, but the notion that everything will/must take the course of being whole again...

I don’t believe I will ever be healed from the loss of my Dad. Part of me is gone.  In another five, ten years,  I’m supposed to say “Yeah, it’s okay. It doesn’t even hurt anymore”? That's naive and unnatural. I'll never be okay with him not being here. Healing for me has looked very different than what is talked about and overheard. It has been acknowledging what is and then accepting what is and moving forward with that, not necessarily in trying to change something that just is. 

And it's not just death - the loss of a relationship or opportunity or even idea of something - is also heartbreak.  It leaves a mark, profound damage, and I'm not just going to get over it. I have to look at it and see how shitty it is, but it's also out of my control. That is my healing. If I let it consume me...that is in my control. I have to find ways to cope and live with it. It doesn't mean ignoring it or even letting it go, but it absolutely means being free of it. Healing is freedom.