Understanding is an important part of living with loss and grief.
For 16 years, it has been at the heart of my writing. Much of that time has been spent learning about a disability I didn't know I had, making sense of the experiences that came with that discovery, and understanding how they shaped my life. Looking back, I realise that understanding was never simply about finding answers. It was about making sense of my experiences and giving language to those experiences.
What remains now is something different.
Not because understanding no longer matters, but because I am beginning to see 16 years later it is no longer the question that occupies my mind in quite the same way.
Writing a memoir often begins with a desire to understand what happened.
Those stories matter because they give shape to experiences that might otherwise remain hidden. They allow people to say, "This is what happened," and, in doing so, begin to make sense of experiences that might once have felt confusing or fragmented because the context needed to understand them had always been missing.
For the writer, writing can be part of the process of understanding their own story.
We all need to understand.
We all have questions about our own stories.
For many people, these questions are essential.
Without questions, it is difficult to make sense of ourselves.
I recognise those questions because they have shaped much of my own life. I needed to understand myself, the disability I only discovered later in life, and why some experiences stayed with me long after they had passed.
Understanding matters because it helps us see our lives more clearly. It allows us to recognise patterns, name losses, and make sense of experiences that once felt overwhelming.
But understanding cannot do everything. There comes a point when it has taken us as far as it can. It cannot change the past. It cannot return what was lost. It cannot give us back the years we lost to grief.
The facts remain the same. The losses remain. We cannot rewrite our childhoods or undo the experiences that formed and shaped us. We cannot become the people we might have been had life unfolded differently.
So, when we reach that point, perhaps then another question needs to emerge.
How do we live well with what we now understand?
That feels like a different kind of work.
For me, it is no longer about gathering more evidence or finding another explanation for the past. It is about deciding how I want to live alongside what I already know.
It's not an acceptance that says, "It was okay."
It's also not an acceptance that requires us to approve of the past.
Instead, it's a quieter acceptance that says, "This happened. It is part of my life. I don't have to spend the rest of my life grappling with it."
I am not sure that is peace, at least not in any final sense. But it may be the beginning of a different relationship with the past. It becomes one voice among many, alongside the ordinary business of living. Loss and grief don't disappear, nor does the understanding you have fought so hard to find. What changes is that neither has to define every moment that follows.
Living with a disability teaches you that some things cannot be changed. Over time, I have come to see the same is true of loss and grief. We carry them with us whether we want to or not.
There can be a freedom in recognising that our past no longer has to explain who we are.
It remains part of us, but it no longer has to define the whole of us.
After 16 years of writing, I am now not searching for another explanation of my story.
It has become clear that understanding "my story" was only part of the work.
The work now is different.
It is learning how to live with what happened and what I know.
Perhaps that is what happens when the questions change. We stop asking the past to explain itself and instead begin learning how to live with what we have come to understand.
