Grieving.

My sister-in-law is in New York right now, sitting beside a hospital bed, watching her older sister drift between this world and the next. It is the heaviest kind of grief, the slow, agonizing slide of watching someone half awake and half slipping away.

And then there is my grief.

Sitting across from it, I feel an immediate, stinging wave of shame. How can I justify mourning the end of a complicated, bruising relationship when real, terminal, earth-shattering grief is happening hundreds of miles away? How do you measure pain on a scale?

Yet, the grief in my own chest is real. It is heavy, and it has to be felt.

I am learning that much of my grief isn't just about losing him; it’s about grieving a relationship I desperately hoped would survive because I believed in its potential. I am so often drawn to relationships where I see what could be. I build people up, I support them, I look past the rough edges, even when I am starving for the very care I am handing out.

With him, there was a profound sense of the familiar. Somewhere beneath the surface, there was a frequency in him that felt like a brother: the brother I never had. I genuinely enjoyed his smile and his laugh. I loved the moments of sweetness and hope.

Even so, the dynamic was weighted down from the very beginning. I couldn’t feel truly close to him because he was always leaning on me. The first few months were a revolving door of stories about his ex and his kids, not spoken of with ownership, but as if life simply happened to him. Things were overwhelming. Over time, his self-doubt and frustration bled through. He couldn't give me what I needed because he lacked confidence in himself. Instead of seeing me, he treated me like a muse; collecting "amazing moments" and leaning on my strength, while I quietly wondered: Did he actually see me, or did he just see the person who helped him stand up? I prayed for him. I wanted him to step up, to stop the self-pity, to become the main character in his own children's lives.

Perhaps that was my own judgment at play. When I looked at his self-pity, maybe I was just looking at a mirror of my own: Why can't I be the main character in my own life? Why am I always observing, watching, seeing others grow, while I am left behind and discarded?

He felt judged, I know, but did he ever really feel my sense of urgency, and my distress in having to make choices, unfair choices, so late in the game?

And how much of it was what I said, vs what he assumed, assumed about his own ‘lack’ of masculinity, when in fact I really always did believe in him?

And then, just as I felt like he was finally coming into his own, just as we crossed into intimacy—while I was privately drowning in the terrifying, solitary reality of facing IVF alone, he decided to move on.

know I had been distant, because it had been terrifying to try to feel it. I needed to make choices that were not fair. Why is it at 40 that I need to still be figuring out home, and safety and children. I’ve needed a sense of safety since I’ve been young. I’ve needed a sense of home. And there was a shame in having to figure it out all alone.

How do you explain to someone who already has four kids, who had a house and a home and who just wants to be loved, that I want it all, I want to be loved, and I want a home, and I want kids. How do you play catch up with someone who has finished the game?

I am already paying a heavy price for the choices, the circumstances, and the dead ends life has handed me. I know I am self pitying, but it is hard not to see the patterns, and it is not for a lack of trying.

Now, he wants to "continue being my friend." But how is he a friend when he left me when I need friendship? When I needed someone to say ‘Leah, I really care about YOU. I know this journey has been extra hard, and I know this is not what you wanted, but I will go out of my way to help you’. I don’t need to be put on a pedestal. But maybe I have wants and needs.

At forty, the narrative feels written. I am left confronting the painful, lingering whisper that I will never be enough—that I am perpetually the bookmark in someone else's story, never the main character living a happily ever after. The new shiny thing has come along for him, someone who matches his current chapter, while I am left out in the wind.

It is no irony that the person he has moved on for has everything that I would want: a home, children, a life lived.

My sensitivity, which I have carried like a shield and a wound all my life, feels too raw right now.

Does he care that I have cried more in the last few months than I have in the last few years? Does he care that the moment we finally became equals, the moment I trusted him enough to truly open up, was the exact moment he discarded me?

He has probably already moved on, collecting more "meaningful moments".

I feel the shame of caring this much. But more than anything, my real wish right now is just to forget.

Another irony: he wanted me to do Tvila, as if that would purify all the impurities that has happened to me and my body.

Now I wish to do Tvila, and when I do, I pray that the pain of loving, hoping, and trying can easily wash away by the tide, like it never even happened at all.