Welcome to my first post in a series called What We Carry, where I explore themes of grief and loss in the context of my experience with Jerry / Jack Stallings.
It’s a lot to process, so grab a seat and maybe a few tissues (just in case). I have been sitting with all kinds of feelings for a long time. Of all the feelings, the one that has kept popping up the most is sadness. This could be ironic given that Jerry told me very specifically that sadness is the only emotion he has. While sadness isn’t inherently bad, mine mostly appears to be stemming from grief. This realization has triggered all kinds of thoughts and ideas that need sorting through. I feel ready to do some serious unpacking. We can do this.
For a long time, I did not think of what I was carrying around my experience with Jerry as grief. I knew I was angry and hurt. I knew I was trying to understand how someone I had trusted could make choices that contradicted so much of what I thought I understood about him and about what existed between us. I kept returning to certain moments and questions, trying to make sense of what had happened. I knew it was affecting me. I just did not recognize some of what I was doing as grieving.
At the same time, I was grieving the sudden death of my former husband. My ex-husband died less than two months after I last saw Jerry. My ex had been part of my life for more than thirty years, and we were married for more than twenty-five of them. We met when I was eighteen and married when I was only 22. We grew up together, became parents together, and built a family and life together. By the time he died, we had been separated as a couple for years and divorced for more than a year, but those decades did not disappear because the marriage ended. We were still family and I knew that he would always be there for me as far as he was capable.
Even that grief was difficult for me to see and feel at first. He was no longer part of my daily life when he died. There was not suddenly an empty place beside me in bed or a daily routine that disappeared overnight. Much of the practical separation had happened a long time ago. I understood immediately that something enormous had happened, but the actual absence did not show up clearly in the structure of my days. Some of the grief came later, and it came in pieces.
I have never thought grief belonged only to death. I have understood for a long time that we can grieve relationships, health, trust, identity, safety, possibilities, and futures that never happen. What surprised me was how difficult it could be to recognize grief in myself while I was living inside it.
I think timing was part of that. My former husband had just died. There was an enormous and unmistakable loss in my life, even if I could not fully feel all of it yet. What I was carrying around Jerry looked different. I was angry. I was confused. I was sorting through information and reconsidering things I thought I understood. It took me a while to notice that underneath all of that there were losses too.
Jerry and I never had a defined relationship. There was no agreed label or clear structure for what we were to each other. But there was intimacy, trust, sex, affection, vulnerability, conversation, and time. There were things I believed about him and about what existed between us. There were choices I made based on what I believed I knew. The absence of a label did not mean there was nothing there to lose.
More recently, the grief around my former husband and the grief I am beginning to recognize around Jerry have started surfacing together. I want to be very careful about what I mean by that. The two connections were not comparable, and the losses are not comparable. One man had been part of my life for more than thirty years and is dead. Jerry was part of my life for a much shorter time and is very much alive. But some of the questions the losses leave behind overlap in ways I did not expect.
I find myself thinking about choices, addiction, responsibility, possibility, powerlessness, accountability, and what it means to care about someone whose life you cannot control. I think about the alternate versions of a life that might have existed if someone had made different choices. I think about what belongs to me to carry and what never did. A thought can begin with one person and somehow lead me to the other.
Grief, apparently, does not always sort itself into neat categories just because I understand intellectually that the losses are different. How inconvenient.
I am also realizing how little help we have culturally for figuring any of this out. There are certainly therapists, books, support groups, religious traditions, and people who have spent their lives studying grief. I have two therapists, a strong relationship with my faith community, and years of recovery work experience. But in ordinary life, the language we tend to give each other is surprisingly thin. We tell people to give it time. We talk about finding closure. We tell them they have to accept what happened, let go, and move forward. Time heals all wounds and all that bullshit.
I don’t necessarily disagree with all of that. I want acceptance. I want to keep moving forward. Time does help lessen some types of pain. But those phrases do not tell me very much about how to get there besides waiting it out, which is less than helpful.
Even death, the loss for which we have the most familiar rituals, comes with only so much of a map. There is a funeral or memorial. People check on you. They bring food. They send cards and messages. And then ordinary life resumes, while the person grieving has to figure out what it means to carry an absence that does not end when everyone else goes home. Many losses never leave us, yet for the most part we don’t know how to support someone who is still grieving twenty years later.
When the loss is harder to name, there may be even less guidance. What do we do with grief for someone who is still alive? What do we do when we made the right decision to leave and still lost something? What about an intimate connection that never had a name? What about lost trust, lost safety, an apology that never came, repair that never began, or a future that still technically could exist but is no longer ours to create?
I don’t have answers to all of those questions. That is part of why I want to write this.
At some point, the question I was asking myself changed. Prompting from my therapist helped me think about different ways to approach my inescapable grief. Instead of Why am I still thinking about this? or Why haven’t I let this go? I started asking something more specific:
What have I actually lost?
That question has been much more useful.
“Letting go” sounds straightforward until I try to identify what I am supposed to let go of. The person? The anger? The questions? The memories? The wish that someone had made different choices? The belief that accountability matters? The part of me that cared? Those are very different things, and I am not convinced healing requires me to discard all of them.
Maybe before I can understand what I want to let go of, I need to understand what I am carrying.
That is what I want to do with the series “What We Carry.” I need to take the time to reflect on exactly what it is that I am carrying. This will be the only way to find out what I am able to lay down. I know it will not be easy but it feels important. I know I need to find a way to keep moving forward.
I am not writing this from some finished place with instructions for how to grieve correctly. I am still in the middle of figuring much of it out. I want this to be more like an invitation to walk with me through that process and see what happens when I start separating things that have been tangled together.
What did I actually lose? What changed? What never happened? What is permanently gone, and what remains possible but is no longer mine to make happen? What did I not lose? What have I gained? What belongs to me, and what belongs to someone else? What am I responsible for, and what am I powerless over?
I suspect those questions will lead me into some uncomfortable places. They already have. But they also feel more useful than trying to convince myself that enough time has passed and I should simply be done.
I know acceptance matters. I also know I have not completely found it yet, and I am not embarrassed by that. Some things take time to understand because they mattered. Taking time is not necessarily the opposite of moving forward. Sometimes taking the time is how we move forward.
The fact that I am still processing what happened with Jerry does not tell me that what existed between us meant more to me than it did to him. I cannot know what it meant to him internally based on how quickly he appears to have moved on. What I do know is that relationship itself matters deeply to me—not only defined romantic relationships, but the fact of being in relation to other people.
I care about what happens between us. I care about how our choices affect one another and what responsibility comes with intimacy, trust, friendship, family, sex, or love. People do not become disposable to me simply because a connection changes or ends.
I know not everyone holds relationship the way I do. I do not need them to, and I would never claim that my way is better. However, I will not apologize for the weight I give it. I will not be embarrassed because something mattered to me long enough that understanding it takes time.
Maybe that is part of acceptance too: not just accepting what happened, but accepting the way I actually move through it instead of performing some cleaner version of healing.
I am beginning to think acceptance has less to do with making myself feel okay about what happened and more to do with learning to live in reality as it is. My former husband is dead. I wish many things about his story had been different, but there is no future in which I can change its tragic ending. Jerry is alive. His future can still be different, but it belongs to him. I cannot make him acknowledge anything, repair anything, or become anyone. Caring does not give me control.
Those are very different kinds of powerlessness, and I am still learning how to live with both.
I also know that loss is not the whole story. There are things I have not lost. There are things I have gained. There are parts of myself that have become clearer to me through all of this. None of those things make the losses worthwhile, and I do not need them to. Something valuable can grow after loss or harm without making the loss or harm valuable.
So I am not setting out to turn grief into a lesson or to find a neat ending for something that is anything butt. I want to understand what I am carrying, why I am carrying it, what deserves to remain with me, and what I may eventually be ready to hold differently.
My losses will not be your losses. The circumstances of my grief may be unusual, but the grief is not. Most of us will eventually find ourselves carrying something that cannot be restored exactly as it was, and very few of us are given much of a map for what to do next.
I don’t have that map either, but I do have some questions.
Maybe we can walk through them together. I can’t promise it will be easy or fun, but if it helps I will hold your hand when things get scary.