When I started writing What We Carry, I was trying to answer what seemed like a fairly simple question: What have I actually lost?
It turned out to be an annoyingly productive question.
I started pulling apart things that had been tangled together for a long time. I thought about what I believed care meant, what I thought I knew about another person, why I felt safe, and the strange grief of possibility when someone is still alive and could still make different choices. I thought about the limits of what bringing something into the light can actually accomplish. Eventually I started thinking about what I had not lost, what I still knew, and what I had gained.
Somewhere along the way, I think I stopped asking how to get rid of the grief.
That may be the most important thing I learned. I believe in moving on. I want to keep moving forward. I do not want grief, anger, regret, or anything else that happened in the past dictating the life I get to have now. But I am much less interested in the idea that moving forward requires completely letting go of what we have grieved.
Some things simply do not work that way.
My mother died recently. My former husband died earlier this year. Those are losses I will carry for the rest of my life. I do not expect to get over either one of them, whatever that is supposed to mean. Their deaths changed my family and changed the shape of my life. I expect the grief to change over time, probably in ways I cannot predict yet, but there will never be a future in which those losses simply stop mattering.
The grief around Jerry is not remotely the same. I want to be very clear about that. The relationships are not comparable, the losses are not comparable, and the grief does not have anywhere near the same weight in my life.
I have moved on from my relationship with Jerry. I do not want it back. I do not wish I were still involved with him. It occupies far less emotional space than it once did, and I expect that to continue. But I also do not think moving on requires the experience to leave absolutely nothing behind.
There are things I learned because I lived through it. There are things I understand differently now, questions I know to ask that I did not know to ask before, memories whose meanings have changed, and parts of myself I discovered along the way. None of that means I am still stuck in the relationship. It means the relationship happened, just as everything else that has happened to me is now part of the life I have lived.
I think sometimes when we talk about letting go, we imagine becoming a person unscathed by whatever happened. We are supposed to release the anger, stop thinking about the loss, find closure, forgive appropriately, become wiser, and apparently emerge from the whole thing carrying only a tasteful little life lesson.
That has not really been my experience of grief. For me, letting go has much more to do with letting go of grief’s power to dictate my life than with eliminating the experience of grief itself. Sadness can exist without deciding what I do next. I can remember someone without living in the memory. I can wish something had happened differently without spending the rest of my life bargaining with reality. Something can change me without getting to define me.
I can carry something and still keep walking because it no longers weighs me down.
A lot of what I understand about this comes from Al-Anon, so this is probably where I am obligated to make my shameless Al-Anon plug. There are worse things to be predictable about.
Al-Anon is a fellowship for people whose lives have been affected by someone else’s drinking. It grew from the understanding that alcoholism is a family illness: its effects rarely stop with the person who drinks, but ripple through partners, children, parents, friends, and whole family systems. I personally think far more of us are affected by someone else’s drinking than we recognize, sometimes directly and sometimes through the people and families around us. Al-Anon is not about figuring out how to make somebody stop drinking. It is about learning how to live our own lives when someone else’s choices are outside our control.
One of the most important things Al-Anon has taught me is about powerlessness. I used to hear that word and think it sounded passive, almost like surrender. What I have learned is nearly the opposite.
Powerlessness is not helplessness.
It does not mean I have no choices or agency. It means getting increasingly honest about what I do not control so that I can stop trying to exercise power where I do not actually have any.
I am powerless over other people’s choices. I cannot make someone recover, tell the truth, understand how their behavior affected me, become accountable, or be ready to change. I cannot undo a death. I cannot force grief to operate on a schedule that is convenient for me.
That all sounds fairly straightforward when I write it down. Unfortunately, knowing something intellectually and actually accepting it are two completely different activities.
I have known perfectly well that I was powerless over something while continuing to argue vigorously with reality about it. Sometimes for an impressively long time. I know I am not alone in that.
Acceptance is hard. Sometimes I think I have finally accepted something and later discover some little corner of myself is still filing an appeal. One of the things I love most about Al-Anon is that nobody expects me to figure all of that out on somebody else’s schedule.
No one tells me what decision I have to make or how quickly I should arrive at it. People share their experience. They tell me what worked for them. They remind me of principles I have forgotten even though I have heard them approximately eight thousand times. Then they keep loving me while I figure out what any of it actually means in my own life.
There is something deeply spiritual about that for me.
No one else can do my acceptance for me. No one can grieve for me or decide what I am ready to release. That work is mine. But doing my own work has never meant doing it alone.
Some of the people who have helped me most have simply been willing to stay beside me while I figured things out. They have listened, challenged me, reminded me of things I already knew and temporarily forgot, and loved me whether I seemed to be making enormous progress or had apparently learned absolutely nothing since the last time we discussed exactly the same issue.
Eventually, sometimes almost without noticing it, I look backward and realize something has changed.
That is part of why the Al-Anon slogan one day at a time means so much more to me now than it once did. It is not a promise that tomorrow will be easier. It is permission not to solve the rest of my life today.
And strangely enough, accepting powerlessness has given me a much stronger sense of my own agency. Once I stop trying to control something that is not mine to control, I have a lot more energy available for the choices that actually belong to me.
I cannot change what happened, but I have quite a bit of say over what I do next. I cannot determine whether another person grows, but I can continue growing. I cannot guarantee that nobody will ever deceive me, disappoint me, relapse, leave me, hurt me, or die. Trying to build a life that protects me from all of those possibilities would also protect me from much of what makes life worth having.
Grief is the same way. I cannot always decide when it appears or how long it stays. I have much more choice about whether I build my life around avoiding it. That distinction matters enormously.
My mother taught me something else that has become increasingly connected to all of this. She believed very strongly that if you are fortunate enough to have gifts – opportunities, education, resources, or anything else that could be useful – you have a responsibility to share those gifts in some way. She was extraordinarily generous.
Our relationship was complicated, and I have already written about the ways she struggled to live her values. But generosity was very real in her, and that stayed with me.
I do not think generosity means giving until I have nothing left. I have done enough work on boundaries to know better than that. Generosity that continually requires me to abandon myself is not something I aspire to. What I took from my mother was the idea that when I genuinely have something to give, I want to be willing to give it. That might be something tangible, but often it is much simpler: my time, attention, practical help, knowledge, experience, or willingness to sit with somebody in something difficult.
Sometimes the most useful thing I have to offer is simply being able to say, This was hard for me too.
I have received an enormous amount from other people over the course of my life. Therapists have helped me understand myself. Recovery communities have taught me how to live with things I cannot control. Faith communities have helped me think about responsibility, justice, love, and what we owe one another. Friends have held me together, called me on my bullshit, made me laugh until my cheeks hurt when I desperately needed to, and reminded me who I was when I temporarily forgot.
People have told me things I did not particularly want to hear and stayed long enough for me to discover that hearing them did not destroy me. I have learned from people who probably have no idea they taught me anything at all.
I have also learned some things the hard way. I know how difficult some of those lessons were for me, and I seriously doubt I am the only person who has struggled with them. One thing I have learned very clearly is that difficult experiences are often easier to understand when we can talk about them honestly with other people.
Conversation does not fix everything. I wish it did. It would make several aspects of life substantially more efficient.
But shame and confusion both thrive in silence.
People carry things around for years believing they are the only person who has ever felt that way.
We do not talk enough about missing someone who hurt us, loving someone we had to leave, knowing a relationship needed to end while still grieving parts of it, or being furious with someone who has died. We do not talk enough about knowing perfectly well that we are powerless over something and still desperately wishing we were not. We certainly do not talk enough about being mostly okay and still grieving.
None of those things means someone is weak, bad, or doing grief incorrectly. They mean human beings are complicated.
This is also where I find myself thinking again about Jerry’s writing. He calls his site The Art of the Unfinished, and the idea has always intrigued me. We are unfinished, all of us, of course we are. Is the Art simply recognizing that we are unfinished or in what we are actually willing to do with that knowledge?
Jerry clearly has some awareness that there is more to understand about himself. His writing is full of questions about becoming, addiction, masculinity, vulnerability, shame, control, and the things that shape us. I have written before about the gap I see between recognizing that we are unfinished and allowing what we learn about ourselves to actually change the way we live. I cannot know what work Jerry may eventually choose to do, and that was never mine to figure out.
But I agree with the premise. I am unfinished too and I always will be. I do not anticipate reaching some enlightened final form in which I perfectly accept reality, never repeat a mistake, never become defensive, never carry resentment, never struggle with grief, and calmly respond to every difficult situation with accumulated spiritual wisdom.
That sounds exhausting anyway. What matters to me is continuing to do the work. I want to keep noticing, listening, asking what belongs to me, and allowing the things I learn to affect how I actually live.
That is what healing has looked like for me. It has required intention, community, and a truly inconvenient amount of time.
There are things I understood intellectually years before I could live them emotionally. There have been lessons I thought I had learned only to discover that apparently there would be a pop quiz. There have been periods when I could see myself changing and others when nothing seemed to be happening at all.
None of that means the work was pointless. Real healing has been slow, messy, nonlinear, and occasionally infuriating. It has also been worth it.
Not because healing gives me a life without pain. It gives me more freedom inside the life I actually have. I know more clearly what belongs to me and what does not. I am better able to care deeply about another person without becoming responsible for that person’s life. I can hear difficult things about myself without immediately collapsing into shame. I can trust without pretending trust eliminates risk. I can accept that some things are going to hurt without deciding pain is a reason not to participate fully in my own life.
When I began What We Carry, I thought understanding what I was carrying might help me figure out what I needed to put down.
It has, although I understand the question differently now. Some things really do need to be put down. Some things were never mine to carry in the first place. Other things will simply become lighter with time. Some grief will remain part of my life because the people I lost will remain part of me.
And there are things I want to carry forward deliberately.
I carry things my mother taught me about generosity and responsibility to people beyond myself. I carry what recovery has taught me about powerlessness, agency, acceptance, and community. I carry things grief has taught me about loving people I cannot save and living with losses I cannot repair. Relationships have taught me about trust, autonomy, boundaries, intimacy, accountability, forgiveness, uncertainty, and the terrifying fact that letting other people matter means giving them the ability to hurt us.
All of that has become mixed together with everything else I have learned through therapy, faith, friendship, parenting, mistakes, loss, repair, love, sex, anger, joy, and ordinary life.
It belongs to me now, and because generosity is one of the things I want to carry forward, I also want to pass some of it on.
I cannot spare somebody else every difficult lesson I had to learn, and I certainly cannot give another person my version of acceptance and expect it to fit her life. What I can do is talk honestly about the things that were difficult for me. I can share what helped. I can make room for someone else’s experience to be complicated without immediately trying to clean it up for her.
I can say that struggling does not make us weak. Taking a long time does not mean we have failed. Sometimes knowing what we need to accept comes long before we are actually capable of accepting it.
And we can still move forward while we are grieving.
Maybe that is what I most want to carry from this series into whatever I write next. I want to keep having conversations about things that are difficult to talk about, because I have learned how much easier difficult things can become when we stop pretending nobody else struggles with them.
I can share my experience, strength, and hope.
When I began this series, I said I did not have a map. I still don’t. I am actually less convinced than ever that there is one.
What I have is a much better understanding of how I want to keep walking. I do not have to wait until grief is gone before I keep living. I do not have to be finished. I do not have to do any of this alone. I know more clearly where my power ends, and because of that I know more clearly where my choices begin.
And certainly, after working through this journal and sharing it with others, my grief feels a whole hell of a lot lighter.
Whatever I am carrying today, I can keep moving forward with it. One day at a time.