There are a lot of things about being human that I do not understand. The older I get, the more comfortable I am with that. But there are also things I do know. I know that none of us exists separately from everyone else. Relationship is not something we occasionally choose to enter. We are born into it, formed through it, and spend our lives affecting and being affected by other people, including people we barely know and people we will never meet. Our lives depend every day on the work, knowledge, choices, creativity, generosity, carelessness, and care of people whose names we will never know. We inherit a world shaped by people who came before us, and whatever we do becomes some small part of the world other people will inherit after us. We are all just fucking interconnected, whether we acknowledge it or not. Sometimes that is beautiful. Sometimes it is highly inconvenient. Usually it is both.

When I started thinking about what I had lost through everything that happened with Jerry, the losses were pretty easy to name. Trust in him. A relationship that mattered to me. Some memories that mean something different now. The confidence that what I knew about him was enough to make informed choices about my own life. What I have not lost is harder to put into a list, mostly because the important things were already there long before Jerry ever was. By the time I met him, I had spent years figuring out who I was, what mattered to me, what belonged to me and what did not. I did this in many ways: through therapy, recovery, complicated family relationships, grief, friendship, community, mistakes, repair, and a lot of ordinary life. Healing has been far from an easy or predictable process, and it certainly hasn’t been linear. I also spent plenty of years angry, resentful, hurt, frustrated, grieving, and carrying things I did not yet know what to do with. For much of my life, I believed that I would carry some resentments for the rest of my life. I do not think any of that means I was doing life badly. It means I was living it.

I have spent a lot of time wondering what my grief about Jerry says about what existed between us. For a while, I think I was still trying to understand whether what we had mattered to him in anything close to the way it mattered to me. Not because I needed him to have loved me or wanted some bigger relationship. I never believed that. I just wondered whether the connection itself held anything like the same weight for him. I may never know and I am realizing that I do not actually need to know. Jerry and I never had a clear label for what we were. I do not know how he thinks about that time now. I do not know whether he would describe what we had as intimate, meaningful, casual, complicated, or something else entirely. But I know what it was to me. I spent almost a year knowing him, spending time with him, having sex with him, talking to him, trusting him, laughing with him, worrying about him, getting irritated with him, caring about him, and eventually being hurt by him.

I started writing What We Carry because I realized I was grieving more things than I knew what to do with. Apparently the universe thought I needed more material. My mom died recently. I am still figuring out what that loss even is. Our relationship was complicated, as mother-daughter relationships often are. She was far from perfect. So am I. There are things about our relationship I will probably be sorting through for a long time.

I think I expected getting people to understand what had happened to be the difficult part. It turns out that telling people creates a whole new kind of work. Once you tell the story, you explain it. Then you explain another part of it. You document things, answer questions, clarify details, and try to make sure people understand what you actually know versus what you think might be happening. I have spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to be precise because that matters to me. I do not want to make claims I cannot support. I do not want anger to make me careless. I worry about saying too much. Then I worry that I have left out something important. And after all of that, people are still free to decide what the information means to them. I think that has been one of the harder things for me to accept.

A younger version of me would have had a much harder time separating his choices from my own sense of worth. I can imagine spending years wondering what I had done wrong. Why I was not enough. Why someone could make me feel so seen and important and then behave in ways that seemed to say the opposite. I might have taken all of that confusion and turned it inward. I know there are women who would do that now. That is the part that scares me.

One of the strange things about grieving someone who is still alive is that the future is not actually gone. Jerry could still change. I still believe that, and I think that is part of why this is so sad for me. I have never thought I could make Jerry change. But I did believe he could become different and for a time I thought I was watching it happen.

I felt safe with Jerry. I keep coming back to that because I think it matters. I did not feel safe with him because I ignored a bunch of obvious warning signs or because I desperately wanted him to be someone he was not. I knew pretty early on that Jerry could be very messy. There were things about his life and his choices that concerned me, and I paid attention to them. As I wrote in the last post, because I knew him so well, I thought I knew what the risks were. But nothing about Jerry screamed danger. In fact, he was almost the complete opposite of the kind of man women are taught to watch out for.

I know an extraordinary amount about Jerry. I know about his family and the complicated relationships inside it. I know the people he has lost and which dates on the calendar are hard for him. I know how he became a Christian, how he found his way into ministry, and how some of his beliefs changed over time. I know about friendships that shaped him, things he regrets, and things he wishes he had done differently. I know about his recovery, his therapy, and how much he struggles with ADHD. I know many personal details that Jerry shared with me over the countless hours we spent together. I also know completely useless things, like his favorite ice cream flavor.

When I started asking myself what I had actually lost after my experience with Jerry, one answer kept coming back to me: I thought Jerry cared about me as a person. I don’t mean that I thought he loved me. I don’t mean that I thought we were building toward some conventional relationship. Jerry and I never had a defined relationship, and I was never interested in a long term relationship with him. I liked him. I enjoyed him. I cared about him. I thought he cared about me too.

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.