Learning to Accommodate

by Rebecca Crichton

I’m always on the lookout for ideas, concepts, phrases, and words that help me deepen and articulate my understanding of aging. It’s as if I have a little recorder inside my head that switches on when I hear something that seems like a tip or new approach.

I was trained as a hospice volunteer in 1987. Since then, I have facilitated numerous grief groups. I know most of what is available to know about end-of-life choices, and I recently trained as a death doula. Just stating my creds!

Most people are aware that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was the first to define what became known as the Five Stages of Grief. This well-known model provides concepts that apply to the grief process but not necessarily in a predetermined, orderly manner. I see those stages more like a spiral that a person experiences over the whole grieving cycle.

Acceptance is offered as the final stage in the model. I now question whether this is the right term. A teacher in the grief field suggested replacing the word acceptance with the word accommodation. That seems more appropriate to me because I recognize that on some level, we might never truly accept the losses that we are dealt. And at the same time, even as we continue to grieve, we live with our losses.

Acceptance can feel like a done deal. It is often the final step of many processes that we do online, whether we’re signing up for streaming or agreeing to a loan. We accept, and that concludes the transaction. Accommodation is an ongoing process in which we adapt to what reality requires of us.

A quick search of the meaning of the word accommodation reveals several definitions.  I see them as applying to the grieving process itself as well as the ways we live while we grieve.

• temporary lodgings
• a convenient arrangement; a settlement or compromise
• the process of adapting or adjusting to someone or something

As we grieve, we land in temporary places in which we try to get comfortable. We settle and compromise, attempting to find ways to get used to the many polarities that grief entails. We laugh and cry; we retreat and reach out; we despair, we remember, even as life goes on.

We are always adjusting to what our lives demand in terms of relationships and decisions related to the losses we experience.

Walt Whitman’s famous lines apply to many parts of our lives as we age. It certainly applies to how we see ourselves and the people we are in relationship with.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Grieving reveals the many identities within each of us. Our roles as partners, sisters, parents, and friends all change. The ways we interacted – where we went, what we did – all those are disrupted by loss.

Grief affects all the ways we show up in the world. As friends, as family, the things we used to do that we don’t anymore, the things we never did that we need to now do. We are forced to shed former concepts of ourselves and adopt or discover new ones. We accommodate.