In my day job, as an philosophical theologian, I often think and write about how we relate to other beings. I’ve learned to challenge the modern narratives that we are masters of self-possession – self-contained universes of our own making. The philosophical concept which contradicts this popular narrative is intersubjectivity: that our insights, experiences, personality, even our very being, is not our own, but constituted and maintained in a dynamic relationship with all those people around us, even many who we will never know. This will be unsurprising to many people, but I think that all of us still mobilise OG psychology in our everyday lives contradict this simple truth. That old dichotomy between nature and nurture doesn’t hold up, they aren’t separate things that we can pit against one another in pub debates. Our bodies are physical repositories of our experiences – pleasure, pain, love and trauma all shaping how we move in the world. I have grappled with this reality long and hard, and shifted some of the ways I live in response to it. I hold my insights lightly, as they are not mine to hold like an exclusive property, properly seen they arise from all the people and creatures around me.

Some of these intersubjective entanglings are especially dense and knotty.

Noah was a bright soul, full of life and conviction and as I’ve shared in previous writing, he also brought needs and expectations for support in the context of physical disability. The intimacy of providing care and the intensity of sharing life with your children when you fill the role of carer and teacher adds additional thickness to this intersubjectivity. In our family, for better or worse, we know and rely on one another with an intense intimacy that only other carer-parents can understand. And this was even more intensely true for me – in the truest possible way I came to know myself through my relationship with my son – a confused masking autistic man apprenticed to his unmasked curious autistic teenager, who was shy but willing and generous to share what he knew about himself. Noah taught me to embrace and express forms of my weakness and distress and put words to my need for care.

Another way of speaking about intersubjectivity that has been taken up by cognitive scientists and neurobiologists is to refer to the “extended mind,” to observe how our cognition is not performed exclusively by our own brains but that the processes of thinking extends into the environment and the other beings around us. Even in basic day-to-day thinking we borrow from (or to put it in a better way, collaborate and converse with) other minds around us and participate in extensive processes which draw in the knowledge and experiences of others.

As I’ve sat with Noah, sought out his presence and held the pain of his absence these past several months I am keenly aware that I’ve not just lost one of my closest friends, but a basic part of my bodily experience of the world around me. To “recover” (if that word can even be used and I have doubts about it’s usefulness here) from this bereavement is like an amputee learning to navigate and experience a suddenly unfamiliar world. There is no returning to baseline, only a physically exhausting forward motion into something new. Naming this reality gives coherence to the ways that grief extends so far into the future and has such a persistent physical toll. Every member of our family continues to experience unexpected waves of exhaustion, and this is simply our bodies revealing the ways they are in attempting to recover from a traumatic physical injury. Even still, some days it feels briefly nonsensical and I have to remind myself that the part of me that was him is now missing, my body is trying to recover from a traumatic brain injury and that the process of healing requires my body and mind to reconstitute themselves in the wake of that injury. All the grief memoirs I’ve read tell me that it will be not weeks or months but years before I quietly arrive at a new baseline in which daily life feels normal and not eccentric.

I’m so grateful to friends who keep reminding me in messages and conversations that grief is long and intense and that I’m allowed to be honest about my dwelling there.