A Natalie Observed

Blog

  • I am alive.

    It happened. I met a man in the wild. I went to The Barn for the free show on May 2nd. I like Whiskey River Band, proving you do not have to know or listen to country music to appreciate the crowd attending and the performance. I promised myself as I talked about in the last post that I would keep putting myself out there. Keep learning. I wrote that the day after I met this new person and I cannot believe how much has happened in the 29 days since.

    I decided I will not write as much about this person as I could. I feel protective of whatever is happening between us. Of myself. Of him. It’s still early and while Parts of me are Confident, Parts of me are Traumatized. Those are the parts I can write about, the parts who feel tied to the trauma and to the grief. What I will say is that when he sat down next to me and introduced himself, my body felt quiet. There was no anxiety. My body felt quiet the entire evening as we went from The Barn to the next show and until he dropped me off at home. I have felt that way every time when we see each other. It is a quiet I have not felt before in my life. It feels warm and gentle and confident.

    So, the contrast of the panic I am having all the time since we met when not with him is dystopian and shocking. I am plunged from the sauna into an ice bath. The first time he did not text back, my body felt like I was in the living room waiting to see how much Jeffrey drank or what would happen once he finally got the key in the lock. There is logically no reason to panic. This new person is consistent so far. Communicates when he cannot communicate. A gap in communication means he’s busy. Which is normal. But here I am, my body preparing for war despite the logic we are in peace times. And it is preparing for battle at every single new piece of data I receive.

    I am bombarding my friends, ChatGPT, and my therapist with questions since we met. Intuition Trauma. Can confirm: it’s real.

    Am I seeing this correctly?

    I don’t think that’s a flag, is it?

    He said this and did this, am I being ridiculous to notice that?

    What if? What if? What if?

    Every time I think I have a map of the PTSD, new edges show up. This is not a fun Maurader’s map. No, this is the fucked-off architectural CAD drawings of the Grief Palace. New corridors emerge, new secrete passages to nowhere. I suddenly understand Lady Winchester. I am at once climbing the stairs to investigate a new attic while my body lights itself on fire. I talk myself through it. I breath as I know to do. I go for a walk until it feels better. But as I told my new EMDR therapist, I need to shorten the distance I am traveling between the new attic in the Grief Palace and the water needed to put out the fire (ineffectively stored in the basement). I need an elevator. Or the ability to apparate. Yes, that is two Harry Potter references in one paragraph. I am aware.

    Another experience alongside all of the panic at every new thing is more related to something personal about sex. I am putting the caveat here for those who do not want to know those details about me. Read the rest of this blog at your own risk. Although I talk about this in what I think is a very PG and clinical way because, well, I do have some training here and I am pretty private on this topic. That said:

    My body cannot release in front of him. I felt scared to talk about this, but I imagined another widow out there wondering if they were normal as I am now and decided to include it. I can hear Emily Nagoski reminding me I am normal, and yet the shock of how different this is compared to my history keeps me questioning what I know. I would love for anyone to tell me “me too” as I feel very alone in my experience of it. Do other people who have experienced traumatic loss experience this? All parts of emotional and physical intimacy with this new person have been enjoyable, fun, consenting, and wonderful. But my brain cannot hold the novelty AND let me relax and stay present. It is devastating. A new room in the grief.

    I think there are two parts for the reason my body cannot release. First, and quite obviously, PTSD is present in my body. My body still does things as a wholly separate entity from my brain. I am still panicking a lot. Yesterday for the first time in several months, I panicked at the park when a siren surprised me. It was familiar and frustrating. It makes sense intimacy would be hard for me. I am now aware of yet another mental path to forge and walk. I need new neuropathways which means clearing out the old ones.

    Adds more time to the healing road and mutters “dammit” under her breath.

    The second part is emotional. We have not added each other on social media yet. He does not really post much and being social media friends was not a high-stakes thing to me. Except it is now. When he becomes an Instagram or Facebook friend, he will see the magnitude of this grief. He will see The Palace. All the things I cannot figure out. This blog. How big the love was that I lost. How stupid I feel for being in a relationship as tumultuous as ours was. All the fear. Showing someone all of this fear feels so terrifying. I know in logic the right person will be able to hold it. I think in logical fact-viewing brain, that this person can. He has held everything I have given so far carefully and with reassurance. Every nervous thought. Every question. Every retreat when the pace feels too fast. He says the right thing and opens up about similar fears. I feel seen and not placated.

    And yet, to show all of the Grief? When I imagine it, I stop breathing. My body braces for impact, torso hardening, chest constricting and heating up. I imagine a train running off the tracks in my spinal column, the crash wreaking havoc on my stomach. I catch myself holding my breath. I exhale before taking a slow inhale in. I focus on the cool air on my skin. The sound of the couple walking their dog on the sidewalk below. I am alive.

    Part of me wonders if the difficulty my body is having with intimacy is also tied to how much he has not seen yet. To these parts of who I am now that I struggle to hold alone, let alone show someone. And I just do not know. There is no magical math problem to help me sort out what is what on this journey. I have to look at and pay attention to all of it to make sure I do not lose sight of my inventory. The books are still falling all the time. It is exhausting.

    Again, I come into awareness that my hypervigilance around all of my grief is part of the PSTD also. It would be so lovely to let all of this go. To rest in the glow of falling for someone, for learning that I can fall for someone, for allowing myself to feel happiness. This is all so new and I am so grateful. But alongside all the good happening, there is all of this fear. A metaphorical see-saw thuds on the ground, bouncing me off.

    I met with the EMDR therapist for our intake. We talked about the plan for how we would proceed. I explained that I want to start with what is happening in present day and see where my body takes it. I do not have an idea of the path or where else to begin, but I trust my body to do it. I trust the process to get me to where I need to go. I trust the therapist. Part of me, a protector, pops up and asks how I can trust anything and then I remember:

    I made it here, didn’t I?

    The fear quiets a little. She takes another baby step and reminds herself once more: I am alive.

  • Body Keeps the Damn Score

    I love the smell of the rain. Those first moments when water that formed in clouds above us falls, eventually hitting the pavement. Humans created pavement to improve how often people walked through feces. Pavement also created safer passageways for fire trucks and medical care even in adverse weather. Americans did not start paving until the mid-19th century. Less than two hundred years in the history of the planet is very recent. An ambulance got to me as I gave Jeffrey CPR because someone said “The New World should be paved”. All of this swirls inside of me as aerosol releases from the water drops sitting on the surface of the pavement outside. A gift.

    Writing lately has been difficult. I cannot do it without an edible. My body does not relax enough sober, too afraid of the inevitable panic attack I will have. Something about THC allows my body to let my brain go there, back to the week he died. While I do not always have a panic attack when I write, their frequency has increased and I am too tired and in demand at my job to recover from how exhausted I am after each attack. The topics I am trying to process are so massive, my body short circuits. I picture a librarian trying to hold a stack of books as it tumbles onto the ground, those painful few seconds where you can see the floor grow closer and your brain realizing there will be humiliating impact. I am scared I will always be this way, that what happened will always be bigger than I am.

    The amount of marination I have done in this fear has pushed me into finding an EMDR therapist. I have spent the past two months in observation of “am I getting better?” and feel I am at a place to actually explore how far I can push my body in healing. I want to help my body process the multiple stage traumatic loss that happened to me the week Jeffrey died. I am not the same person anymore, and it feels overwhelming to integrate this new me with what happened. When I try to put them together, I panic. It is almost eighteen months since I found Jeffrey on my living room floor, and it feels like forty years. So much has happened. So much is not the same. Part of me is not ready to give up on my present circumstances improving. Since Jeffrey died, I promised myself I would listen and trust my instincts more. I told myself I will know what to do when I am ready. So, here I am: I am ready for EMDR now. That is why you waited, Natalie. You were not ready before now. Another Part of me is really worried to feel any hope this will ever change. I want to have a big, beautiful, and loving life. To not accept my life as it is now feels like betrayal to any potential future. I want to be as present as I can for whatever happens next. I want to trust myself to know what I need. I was lost for so long. Now realizing just how much of me I have found, I want to find all of me.

    I am doing my best to live my life around this experience. I have consistently treated myself to Roselle’s for a cocktail and dinner on Thursday night after work. I am attending the free bands at The Barn on Saturday night. I have met someone new at The Barn each time and gotten several of their numbers. Two introductions converted to more time spent outside of the show. One followed up with me after the fact. I feel proud of myself for being in public alone, for talking to people and putting myself out there. It is a dopamine hit and confidence boost I need.

    I am so proud of myself. And I am exhausted. I am having a struggle under the weight of the grief my body is still holding. I need multiple days to recover, but I am having less time to recover because I am trying to practice my brain’s social muscles and practice trusting myself.

    I am protecting Sundays as my day where I do not leave the house if I can avoid it. I do not let myself shower as a security measure (no one needs to see that). I am so grateful to have the energy to even do anything and yet so aware of how much more healing I need to do by how tired I am. I increased my exercise time to a minimum of an hour, 7 days a week, with reset days being spent on longer walks. My body is increasing its capacity for distress in all areas. Despite these physical increases in my exercise, I have not lost any weight. I am not saying this because I have shame about weight loss, but becuase it is interesting to me. This is my body getting older or is it that I feel like my body is holding onto everything it can, that it is stuck in the worst week of my life? I am again filled with wet cement. I am moving any possible way to unkink the tension my muscles hold as I restrain the intense horror within me.

    I tell myself my body is a miracle worker, that it is working so hard for me with what I went through. That I am strong. I feel in relationship with my body, extremely attuned to the things it says I need. Alignment. There is alignment here. And then something happens and I remember a sound or a machine I do not know during the week in the ICU and a panic attack interrupts the connection. I watch my thoughts escape me, unleashing a cortisol firestorm.

    Panic.

    Inhale.

    Exhale.

    Inhale.

    Hold.

    Exhale.

    Hold.

    Inhale.

    So here I am, in reflection of how despite being the strongest I have ever been, I am still not strong enough to hold the week Jeffrey died. I told my therapist I feel like a light turned on in a room I did not even know was there. I cannot unsee the leaded Grief Jacket I wear now. I need the jacket because I stand one hundred yards away from a house on fire, a fight I keep having in my honor because giving up on me is what I used to do. I am not that person anymore. I force myself to keep walking towards the fire even as I feel the burn of my melting skin. I do not know what is next, but that I am going.

    Thunder rolls in low and thick in the distance. Dottie looks at me to see if I am okay. And I remember that feeling any of this means I am here.

    I am alive.

  • Time Does Not Really Exist

    Last night I felt the familiar vibration in my body and I knew I need to sit with Grief. I doodled freely in my art journal. As I mindlessly scribbled whatever I felt like, I listened to music in my headphones. I made circles that eventually looked like balloons whose strings became a tree whose roots became a brain. After an hour, I looked at it and reflected on how the chaos of the page felt like my life: no clear picture, no clear color scheme. Just energy. Then lightning struck and I felt my body slip away from me, nothing underneath me and nothing attached to my neck. Weightlessness settled in as I floated above myself and saw me think. “We could have made this place beautiful”, followed by “I’ll keep trying.” The room fluttered out of view. I started sobbing, convulsive auditory wails exorcising themselves out of my body. I wanted to stay in the feeling forever. I felt catharsis as I touched a new layer of something I have not permitted to exist within my consciousness.

    As tears leaked out of my face, Kate Havnevik’s “Unlike Me” started playing.

    There are no guarantees in life
    Not for the present, nor for the future

    I told Jeffrey I was sorry for not being able to do more to keep him here. “I know I do not need to feel sorry”, I told him, “but I am”.


    All I know is that I’m here
    Don’t know for how long

    Part of me will always wonder if we were almost to the turning point where things got easier. What if there was another side to where we were? What if we got to have happily ever after?

    I love the way you live so intensely
    Enjoy every minute of life
    With space to swing your arms around
    Laughing loudly

    I always knew in my core things would not stay the way they were. What was happening was untenable for both of us. I tell clients something I know is infuriating but is true: We are always stuck until we are ready not to be. I just never knew it would turn out like this, that what would unstick me would be Jeffrey dying. A lump forms in my throat as I edit this post now thinking about it. Part of my feels guilt for not being stronger, for not knowing how to help him, for not realizing what was happening sooner to get us help. What if I could have saved him? What if I could be in a world where he did not die and we got to have everything we ever wanted?

    Unlike me, unlike me
    Do you think I’m strange?
    Unlike you, unlike you
    I am not pretending

    There is no time

    I need to be very, very clear: I do not need reassurance on this Part of me in any way. I do not want to hear “there’s nothing more you could have done” or whatever version is coming up for those reading this. I in no way believe there was more I could do. I do not feel responsible. In Self, I know everything unfolded as it needed to and my Soul will learn whatever she needs to from it. There are many things for me to carry in this life and responsibility for Jeffrey dying is not going to be one of them. I cannot change what happened.

    But Part of me resorts to wondering when she is so overwhelmed by new feelings. I do not want to pretend like this Part is not in the experience I have of losing Jeffrey. She’s difficult to ignore and sits on my chest, throws cannon balls at my throat, pours tears down my face, slows my heart rate, and steals my body from the room. This Part loved Jeffrey so much and wonders all the time what he thinks about the things happening in my life. Like, what would he think the odds are “Unlike Me” would come on the shuffled playlist while processing all of this?

    I waffle between these two stark differences in my experience of the grief. There is Part of me trying to heal the wounds formed when I lost myself with Jeffrey. This Part wants me to put away the photos, wants to remove any traces of him. Then there is the Part of me who misses him every day, wishes she could play Wolf Parade I’ll Believe in Anything to see if it brought as much joy to him when he found it as it did me. This Part wants to show Jeffrey my art journal and ask what he thinks about it, wants to know what memorial tattoo he would get of himself and what he thinks of this apartment I am in now.

    For both of these Parts to exist in my one body is disorienting. My panic attacks used to happen when either Part showed themselves to me at all. The magnitude of the love or the shame would disappear my body. Both feelings are so massive my body split how I feel about Jeffrey dying from the reality that he died. My healing journey requires my body to reach a capacity to hold both experiences at the same time. Last night, it felt like both of them met and shook hands. I floated above myself for only a moment before telling Jeffrey I missed him. I felt him sitting with me, a tunnel between where I am and wherever he is. Then I started writing this post to relieve the distress in my body, to navigate my way through the panic attack.

    I feel like I see the pathway of my healing even if I have no idea where it is going. I feel patient as I continue to make space to notice where I am, what my body needs, and what my capacity is to care for it. It is a surrender like nothing I experienced in my life before now and I am so grateful for it. The freedom to let go and have no idea where I am going is anomalous. I still feel like I am touching time, grounded in a present awareness and I never want to let go. I feel awed by this experience, as devastating as it is. Part of me will always wonder if we could have made it, while Part of me will always know we never could have. Or else we would have. Right?

    Kate Havnevik “Unlike Me”

    There are no guarantees in life
    Not for the present, nor for the future
    All I know is that I’m here
    Don’t know for how long

    I love the way you live so intensely
    Enjoy every minute of life
    With space to swing your arms around
    Laughing loudly

    Unlike me, unlike me
    Do you think I’m strange?
    Unlike you, unlike you
    I am not pretending


    There is no time
    There is no time
    Time doesn’t really exist

    The past, the present and the future
    Are all side by side, hand in hand
    You move and change, yet you go nowhere
    Everything stays the same (same)

    You stare at me and ask me questions
    Makes me nervous, mm
    This room, it keeps a constant tone
    While I’m on a rollercoaster

    Unlike me, unlike me
    Do you think I’m strange?
    Unlike you, unlike you
    I am not pretending

    There is no time
    There is no time
    There is no time
    Time doesn’t really exist

    There is no time
    There is no time
    There is no time
    Time doesn’t really exist

    Patching more life
    Patching more
    Patching more life
    Patching more

    Time

  • This Post Talks About Abuse

    We were kissing and I felt Jeffrey’s skin on my skin. I felt the bumpy texture of his freckles and moles, the braille of his scars along his hips and back. I felt what it felt like to feel completely present in my body next to him, to learn what it felt like to not be concerned about what was happening and escape my constant, fluttering uneasiness. Then Jeffrey starkly got up and left me on the sofa in a manner that shifted presence into worry. The energy moved and I did not see when or how. Jeffrey stomped into the bedroom belligerent, bumping into walls like a bowling ball against bumpers down the hallway. I could both see and hear Jeffrey rifling for a change of clothes while still sitting on the sofa. I could hear him foraging from his closet to the space under the dresser. Jeffrey was looking for the cane he made with his father, the one with wood he picked for the handle because he liked the chatoyance. I found myself in the doorway of the room where my office was in the apartment we shared. I did not walk there, so how was I there? I gave Jeffrey space as to not overwhelm him more than he clearly was. I asked what he was doing, why he was leaving. “Why don’t you come sit with me and we will have some quiet time? Or take a nap?” I said all the things I knew to say that might interrupt what was happening and, in his loudest and most abrasive octave, he yelled as he shoved his feet antagonistically into the Nike shoes I bought him, “Y’never unnerstand anythin’… you don’t, you just… you never do. Are you… are you an idiot??!” As he spoke, I noticed my whole body was solid, my torso bracing for whatever could happen next. It was never physical, but I was never sure. Psychosis meant we were not in the same room at the same time. A more fucked up Inception but no one knows the plot or who is stealing our dreams.

    Jeffrey threw open our front door and slammed it shut behind him. I heard his key stumble to find the lock followed by the hall door clatter shut behind him. I started to wonder about what to do next. Do I follow him? Does he have his phone? It is not my job to babysit him, but is he safe in this headspace to be out in the world? What does this mean? What if he gets hurt or someone hurts him? What state will he be in when he gets back? Will he be drunk? Would he come back still angry at the ghosts in his soul? I sat on the sofa again.

    Just as I felt the texture of the woven, olive-green material, I woke up. It was 1:29am. “I am in Chico,” I thought, “I have to wake up for therapy in Sacramento soon. Jeffrey is dead.” I slept a few more hours, dreamless. My alarm went off at 5am and I got ready to take Dottie and me to therapy in Sacramento. I go to therapy in person whenever I can. It is a 90-minute drive and the time in the car is helpful for the unwinding I need to do after I process my new hellscape I still struggle to logic. And now I have this super-fun trauma dream to discuss on top of feeling overwhelmed by people wanting me to feel hopeful again, and the one-year anniversary of moving to Chico.

    I told my therapist that I felt my body remember what it felt like to be there in the seconds after Jeffrey left. I felt the relief of his energy not being in the room, that he could not yell at me or get injured while I watched him refuse help. I explained the absolute dread about what would happen when he came back. I have rarely dreamt of Jeffrey since he died. Only two other times. Once, right after he died, I dreamt about a bike ride we planned together and I woke up in a panic attack because I missed him. The second time was the first night in the hotel room when we moved me from Seattle. I dreamt Jeffrey was angry at me for not saving all of his things. I woke up in a panic attack I hid from my parents who slept in the same room. And now this. A dream that encapsulated what feels so confusing about grieving him.

    In psychosis, Jeffrey blamed everyone else for the miswiring in his body, his brain, and his soul. I always knew the words spewed at me, laced with the venom of a lifetime of self-loathing, were not about me. It always felt like what he yelled at me he was yelling at himself. I always knew and still know it was not my fault.

    I told myself over and over again he could not help it. He was not in his grounded mind to have any agency in what was taking place. He almost never remembered what happened or how. He always apologized and we always made plans for what to do next time. I explained to my therapist I feel like I still do not understand about what was happening between us. And she softly, gently asked me the thing: “What if he was mentally ill, could not help it, loved you, AND was abusive?” Something in my body relaxed when she said it. What if all of these things are true at the same time and I do not have to know which one is right? What if?

    I feel embarrassed I let this happen to me. I feel deep shame. I taught clients about abusive relationships while entrenched in my own. A hypocrite defined. I know all the things to say to myself to help complicate my own judgement. Abuse happens to everyone and does not discriminate. You had unmet needs that were fulfilled in your relationship with Jeffrey and it is okay to have filled them. He really did try to do better for you. He really did love you. This is not your fault. You are still a good person. But none of these things change what is true. I both loved Jeffrey and was abused by him.

    I feel like a traitor when I talk about the shadowy parts of us. How do I grieve someone I loved so deeply and who hurt me this much? I have asked myself this question every day for fifteen months. Because today is fifteen months since Jeffrey died. I told my therapist I wish I could ask Jeffrey what he thought about us. I wish I could know how he thinks of it now that his soul is theoretically unburdened by everything Jeffrey navigated while he was alive. Would he see it the way I do now? The way I did then? Does he feel bad about it? Does he feel like I betrayed him by talking about it with people? Am I betraying him by writing about it?  Part of me still misses the part of our cycle that reassured me we were still on the same side of something. It was us against his mental illness, right? The thing we did the next morning after he rested and was himself again, when I got to tell him how his behavior hurt me brought us together. He listened, validated, and apologized. That is the thing about abusive cycles: the two people in the cycle are often the only two people who know about it. Our pattern of Jeffrey exploding and then reconciliation afterward allowed both of us to foolishly believed we solved it after every incident, but we never did. It never stopped, even the week he died. It is as they say: you cannot see the forest through the trees when the trees are all falling on you. I have yet to meet anyone who can.  

    Today, I talked a client through how normal it is to know someone does not intend to hurt them, but to be hurt by them. How normal it is to not know how to make sense of what is abusive behavior by someone they love and care for. I reassured my client of the thing I always needed to hear: I was not crazy. It was real. I asked them a version of what my therapist asked me: what if they do not mean to hurt you, and it still hurts?

    The burden of knowing exactly what to say to people because I have also heard these things is heavy.

    I hope I win the lottery soon.

  • Initiation

    Yesterday, I was vibrating. I woke up vibrating and took Dottie to hike further up Upper Trail than I have before. 1.5 hours up before turning around when I realized my body needed to take a break. Dottie did not want any water and my quads clenched with each step, a reminder of the tremendous pain in the muscles of my hips. Despite accomplishment of the distance, I got home and was still vibrating. It was not enough to relieve whatever was happening.

    The energy in my body was unfocused, exhausted, and mired in the Grief that is living in my hips. I spent an hour after this hike attempting to pick something to watch but could not identify my mood to select something. I started cleaning my coffee table which led to unloading the dishwasher when I got up to fill my water bottle and then I looked at the cake I made in the fridge before remembering I had laundry in the dryer and when I put away a towel I remembered I needed to shower followed by “oh yeah, the coffee table project” and then trying to pick something out to watch while I clean because I could not find something to listen to. I hiked this morning to help my brain with this frenetic lack of focus but still had it afterwards. It is times like this I wonder about ADHD, but I know I do not have it.

    This lack of focus is from the energy of the Grief living in my hips. It has been here all month. I cycled less this month than any month this past year because my hips are yelling at me, screaming that I am not doing enough, that I am drowning. I am in hip pain because I am in soul pain. Francis Weller talks about trauma as a rough initiation of the soul onto its new path. I love the way this idea relieves my body of the responsibility I feel to “get better”. I do not want Yoga that is a “work out” because the body should be “worked with”. Grief is the same. I let it wander into the space whenever it needs to because that is what my body needs. I cannot force that timeline because I cannot rush an injury into healing. I tend to it, witness it, create community with it, and invite Grief to sit alongside me until such time my body needs to sit inside of Grief, to sit in the presence of it’s altar. I am still learning how to surrender to the idea that, despite everything I learn, I will never be the master here. The Grief Palace has more detail than ever before and yet I know I will never know everything about it. Mine is to accept the invitation to keep learning, to learn the art of working with.

    I stretched before and after hiking. The pain in my hips lessened with each inhale and exhale as my muscles lengthened and released the acid they held onto. With every step during the hike, I imagined the wince of the muscles in my hips as they held their breath pulling other areas of my back and legs closer to them. The hike was good for them ultimately; they hurt less afterwards than they did when I woke up. But the hike did not help the feeling of vibration in my body. I started writing to harness it somewhere. Here we are.

    Last Saturday, after several days off from riding the Peloton because my hips scream when I am on it, I woke up with a goal of being lazy and watching a show. While scrolling to find something, I stumbled on the second season of Drops of God. I had no idea AppleTV was making more of this show that so beautifully explains everything I will never remember about wine. “I wonder what Jeffrey would think of there being a second season.” As soon as I thought it, I started sobbing. I immediately felt resistance to the sadness that overcame me. I did not want to feel Grief and I felt resentful of it’s intrusion. I did not want to remember how painful Longing is. I wanted to numb this feeling, but could not. I did a 30-minute stretch to see if my hips were in any shape to ride the Peloton. They were without any pain for the first time in a week and I did an hour-long ride. I knew I should take it easy, but I did not because I was vibrating and avoiding. Something had to happen to release this energy. After the ride, I was still in it, in the energy of the Grief, so I stretched another thirty minutes. I took a bath with lavender bath salts to ensure my muscles could get the relief they needed and to force stillness.

    After the bath, I still could not focus and decided to reorganize my entire kitchen. Mom and Phil gifted me the Franciscan Desert Rose dishes Grammy had given to mom after my parent’s divorce. I wanted to put them away in an effort to keep the apartment tidy as I have managed to do. Putting them away gave me reason to solve a problem I had not had time to solve until now: I kept reaching for coffee cups in the wrong cupboard. Yesterday marked 365 days in this apartment, one whole year in Chico, and things are eerily the exact same as when I moved in. A shrine to where I was one year ago, to the absolute shock my body was in. It strikes me I went 357 days reaching for coffee cups in the wrong place before fixing it. After completing two rounds of dishes in the dishwasher, removing everything from every cupboard, cleaning the cupboards and putting everything away in new homes, I took Dottie to the dog park. I was still vibrating and avoiding which meant I needed to keep my body moving. Dottie and I spent almost an hour amused by a hot pink tennis ball. The sun started to dip behind the buildings. “Finally”, I thought, “I can go home.” I made myself a Hello Fresh dinner and went to bed by 8pm. I made it through one day of avoiding grief. I avoided Grief because I knew I had Grief Art Therapy Group on Sunday. I would confront feeling the Longing for Jeffrey tomorrow.

    I am realizing as I write this that I feel a need to nest in this apartment. I want to finalize decorating, get organized, and feel visually less cluttered. I am getting rid of clothing and sorting the medicine cabinet. I am staying busy with tasks that help me feel anything but how I feel about losing Jeffrey. To function right now still takes a level of dissociation that is harder for me to do when sober. I am keeping up with cleaning tasks, completing longer workouts, taking Dottie for more frequent long walks, more stretching, more meditating, more getting work tasks done on time, more clients, more professional training. I am absolutely more productive which does feel better for me. A month without THC has given me a baseline for where anxiety is in my life, for how I function alongside Anxiety. Alongside Grief.

    I still feel the least Anxious I have ever been in my life. And the most confident. I know exactly what my body is doing, thinking, and saying. I listen to her well. My hips hurt because I am grieving. I am moving my body differently trying to manage the distress of Jeffrey’s loss and my hips are hurting. My hips hurt the same way they did the weeks after he died. My body is still healing. One year ago, I spent my first night in the apartment I moved to from Seattle because Jeffrey died from an alcohol related heart-attack. I was traumatized to the point of moving to another state within two months of his death. My life changed so much and so quickly. I am one year in Chico because Jeffrey died. When processing the enormity of trauma, I tell clients that you cannot put the universe in a box. The task itself is impossible. I have to sit here and try to sit amidst the universe, amidst the fall out of Jeffrey dying. I have to sit, experience, and witness the process of my initiation.

    I do not recognize the person I was only one year ago which is a new layer to the Grief. In the Grief Art Therapy Group, I brought in the creamer dish from the Desert Rose dishes as my offering and intention for our suggested theme: New Beginnings. The sugar bowl and creamer dish are original to the first batch of dishes hand-painted in California in the 1940s. Grammy gave the set to mom when mom moved out from Grammy’s. Mom was living somewhere as an adult without a partner for the first time in her 30s. Grammy collected dishes with the gusto of a hoarder and the taste of someone well beyond her station. I set the creamer dish on the altar and explained the origin of the set, that they are now in my cupboard at my first apartment after Jeffrey died. Threads of my life weave together, generation to generation, creating something ornate, intentional, familiar, yet foreign. It is beautiful even in all the despair.

    For two hours, I painted the roses on those dishes. I meticulously layered acrylic paint, mixing and remixing the colors to get the hue of pinks as close as I could to the original design. As I added leaves, sparks fired somewhere deep in the core. I wondered about why I was painting these remnants of a past no longer familiar to me. They are absent of all the pain that has led me to this moment. Tears formed in my eyes as I found magazine photos that cultivate the feeling of loneliness. I finalized the image by writing words associated with anger and rage in black marker, the words violently overlapping and obscuring what used to exist in simple ignorance beneath them. I am the picture of the roses violated and disfigured and marred by Grief. This is who I am now. I am a woman who touched time, whose hips hurt when grief gets stuck in her body. I am a woman who has the energy to nest into this next phase of learning. I am doing a good job of surviving. Even when vibrating, I am enough.

    I woke up this morning, and my hips are no longer hurting. I do not know if it was the hours spent in the park, the stretching before and after, the heated blanket while writing, or the writing itself, but somewhere in this distracted grasping for anchor, in the living alongside Grief, I found relief. This story is still in process.  

  • Helpless, Helpless, Helpless, Helpless

    I wrote the last blog post over the course of a couple days. My first attempt to write it caused a panic attack and after recovering I was too tired to finish it. When I returned a couple days later to complete writing it, I realized I wrote the entire post about Jeffrey and not “to you”. I do not know what it means that I instinctively wrote about Jeffrey and not to him, but here we are. Writing about Jeffrey and not to him.

    Today is fourteen months since I looked across a small hospital room at Jeffrey’s dad and agreed it was appropriate to donate his organs. A powder keg of energy lights up my body and has all weekend. I am weepy and lonely and confused on how to pass time. Without weed or alcohol, I vacillate between complete boredom and needing anything to help me take a break from the intensity of integrating how lonely I feel. I told Heather no one is witnessing my life. There is no one here to know I did my laundry, vacuumed, made myself dinner, or worked out. There is no one to come home to and explain that I felt very emotional after going to a movie last night. Dottie and Carla can only provide so much validation of my existing and it mostly comes from them in the form of demands for pets, walks, and feeding.

    I woke up still in a somatic lightening storm and knew I could only alleviate it by walking. I took Dottie to Upper Park and headed straight up Monkey Rock, losing the trail as water seeped out of the Earth absconding clear pathways. Wisps of cirrus clouds reminded us Earth dwellers the vastness of the atmosphere. In contrast, damp lava rock anchored the ground peppered by green grasses nourished by a wet winter. There has been so much gray weather since November I bought a SAD lamp. Lived in Seattle sixteen years and Baby bought her first SAD lamp because she could not delineate the edges of depression and grief and overcast weather. It is likely placebo effect, but I do think it helps me wake up in the morning. I sit with coffee with the SAD lamp on for 20 minutes while I watch my progrums (spelled how I say it in my head) before I start the day.

    As I walked along the canyon, Dottie trotted ahead of me, looking back every so often to make sure I was still there. I never walk with her off leash as I do not trust she will have good manners when seeing another dog. Dottie always gets so excited to show other dogs how well she can play, but not all dogs have the patience to let her show them. A pesky, loving little sister. Today we chanced no leash, and somehow did not come across any dogs for Dottie to perform for. We walked mostly alone, the occasional trail runner passing us, pairs of female friendships coming their way back down. The air was crisp, the kind that burns your throat when you take a deep breath. The warmth of the sun embraced my body between the knife cuts of the whispering breeze. I asked myself “Is that you?”. I find Jeffrey in the moments where two things are true at one time. The air bit with bitterness and the sun defrosted my insides. The canyon is hibernating and alive. I feel both the weakest and the strongest I have ever been. There is some metaphor tied to Jeffrey’s bipolar diagnosis here, but I am not sure how to paint it.

    I took Jeffery to Upper Park when we visited Chico for his birthday in 2023. I feel him when I am there. Just as film would splice back in time the memories of a loved one gone, I braid together the pieces of him in parts of Chico I loved. I know he would have loved living here. Chico is a container; a place my body knows is okay to be honest and messy. It arguably held the messiest parts of me, the parts that forged in the fiery template that became the barometer of everything I ever did after leaving and since coming back. I always tell clients that even in the messiest, most traumatic childhoods, the body knows where the nervous system formed and will feel quieter. Mine formed here, in the spaces between finches and dark-eyed juncos dancing in the winter sun. In the sincere “good mornings” offered by each person I passed by.

    I have not had any THC since 12/30 and have noticed a considerable lift to depressive symptoms. I no longer feel shame, despair, or fear of never clawing my way out of this hole. I cannot know if that is because of THC’s biochemistry leaving my body (withdrawal is 30 days), a natural cresting of the Grief, or something else. I am sharing in the event anyone else is wondering if THC is having unintentional side-effects. I am not at all claiming a forever abstinence from it but am relieved to not feel so weighted in my experience of living. I told myself 2025 was my year to survive, that I would not judge the way I remained alive the first year of living without Jeffrey. I knew I would need to reevaluate if the techniques were worth keeping and am doing that now.

    The most painful part of 2026 is realizing I can no longer say Jeffrey died last year. He died fourteen months ago, but it is no longer last year. Jeffrey died in 2024. I can feel the energy of my own want to move past this experience, to be in something new. But then I remember I never will move past it. This is who I am now. This is part of me. It is forever. Jeffrey did not die last year; he died in 2024. Fourteen months ago, today. I will forever be chasing the feeling of his wonderment about the canyon alongside me. Chest tightens as Grief sits on it. Tears form and fall. I gasp for breath and realize I was not breathing. Dottie trots back toward me and stands leaning against my thigh so I will pet her. We keep walking. The sun is whole-hearted and the breeze is bitter. Neil Young Helpless starts playing in my headphones. I am alive.

  • Unattractive Gray Box

    Last Friday, a friend posted about the time and date for a community member’s Hero Walk and I had a panic attack. I remembered what it felt like to be posting the same updates for people in my life about your Hero Walk and immediately without warning left my body. I watched myself at the Hero Walk. I watched myself in the room with you. I watched what it looked like to watch me post about the Hero Walk online, to be the people who learned you died. Just as quickly as I left my body, I came back, gasping for air, standing up from the sofa and trying to get to the kitchen sink so I could splash cold water on my face. I grabbed an ice cube. Earlier this month, I saw a doctor and received medication to help with panic attacks, but I have never taken medicine like this before. I was nervous in my panic to try it without someone being around. What if my body does not like it? What if the panic gets worse? I laid in bed at 7pm and turned on Law and Order SVU. I am rewatching old episodes because they do not require much focus. It is interesting to notice how much Stabler bothers me now. His macho, patriarchal ideas of how to be a man are grating. The panic subsided as I watched season five attempt to explain why conversion therapy is wrong.  I was asleep by 9pm and slept until 7am the following morning.

    On Saturday, I sorted all of my mementos into new boxes I purchased for whenever I was ready to sort them. I found a card written by my best friend in second grade thanking her for the Sky Dancer I gifted her. I looked at photos of people whose names I cannot remember, found evidence of my past relationships, of my sister’s past relationships. Of my father’s and my mother’s past relationships. I found birthday cards from my father’s mother who I only remember in images. I read all of the carefully dated and filled cards from Grammy and reminded of all the evidence of her past relationships. I sorted napkin drawings and love letters and poems and and took photos of the things to send people from my past. Here we are, I was telling them. Here is the evidence of who you are in my life. I kept these things to remember you, to remember how you made me feel, to remember the complexity and delicacy of loving and being loved by so many people.

    On Saturday, I also touched all of your shirts. In sorting the mementos, I pulled out the things that are you. You cannot mix into the other boxes. You require your own. A few months ago, I bought an unattractive gray storage container so I could consolidate all of you into one place. I was in the storage aisle at Target for a long time deciding on a container. How do you select the container that fits all of you in it? What color represents the things you no longer need because you died?

    Before Saturday, you were scattered all over where I live now. I would open my bedroom closet to grab a sweater and see the Panda bear with your heartbeat recorded on it be the ICU nurse. The panda sat atop the quilt the organ donation family coordinator stamped your hand onto. I had a container in the hall closet of random artifacts we found while mom and Phil packed to move me from Washington to California in January. Your shirts were in a moving box in the office closet. I needed to organize these things so i can choose when I look at the remnants of you. I also wanted to see what I had been avoiding looking at. What does all of you fitting into a box look like? I do not know what to do with everything I have left. Your wallet? You do not need those credit cards anymore, but I am not ready to let go of it all. What if I regret giving them away? So all of you lives in an unattractive gray box all together in my office.

    After consolidation, you are now in the photo of us on my dresser from when we sailed on your dad’s boat over 4th of July. We listened to fireworks echo across the islands and felt the power of the explosions in our bodies. You are in your deodorant I still cannot throw away in the bathroom cabinet above the toilet. You are in the urn your father made for me, the one with wood from your cane and remnants of the tree in front of the family home you grew up in. The urn has circular cuts on the sides. Your father explained them as portholes, as if you are looking out from inside a ship. We cried as he talked me through what your urn is, cried as I scooped your ashes into the jar that sits within the urn. Ashes got onto the kitchen counter and I wiped them up with a Clorox wipe. You are in the photo-booth pictures from your fortieth birthday celebration that sits next to the tiny pocket-sized penguin Jena gave me when you died on my desk. You are in the half of the neon MuirWood sign that I still have in the office closet. And you now you are in the unattractive gray box.

    It occurs to me that someday all of these things, these remnants of you, will all be and only be in the unattractive gray box. The shirts I am keeping might not ever become a quilt because I am stuck on finding someone who I can trust to help me make it. I am scared of your shirts getting ruined and not having them anymore. I smelled them as I refolded them and put them in the box. They smell like Downy and dust. Your smell is not there anymore. How many times will I move the shirts before I do not want to move them anymore? If I ever date, how do I explain your photo on the dresser? I suspect that eventually the photo on the dresser will not feel appropriate there anymore. I want to believe whoever is next will understand the remnants of you I have in my home, but it feels extraordinary to imagine such a person could exist.

    On the day I consolidated all of your things into the unattractive gray box, I also reorganized my entire office, removed the trash, worked out, and took a bath. I did not eat until 5pm. It was not until 8pm when I was surprised by a panic attack while walking Dottie that I realized I had not been in my body all day. I journeyed to another place in my mind to organize your things, to touch all the memories of my life. I am scared I will always flip between feeling everything and feeling nothing. I walked outside in the cold for thirty minutes, audibly crying. Your welcome, Meriam Park, I hope it was a good show.

    I gave up on New Years Resolutions a long time ago. I do not like the pressure of failing at something when my life has thrown so many curves that limited the execution of a goal. I do like settling into a Word if it appears to me, although, I do not put pressure on myself to find it. In 2025, my word was “surrender”. I knew I needed to surrender to the experience I am having of grieving you. I knew I did not need to resist my feelings of losing you, of having lost myself in my relationship with you. I sit here today trying to grapple with what it means to have made it through this year, but I do not have the words. I think I am still too in it to see what it all means. As I considered what my word should be for 2026, the only one that comes to mind is “acceptance”, but even that does not feel quite right. Maybe I am still in the hangover of surrender. Maybe I keep surrendering until a better idea appears.

    One of my new favorite podcasts is called Shameless, “the pop culture podcast for smart people who love dumb stuff.” In 2025, one of the hosts, Michelle, had her first child and also lost her mother to brain cancer. In Shameless’s New Years episode released today (recorded in the future of Melbourne time), Michelle reflected on her difficult year, on losing her mother, and on not trusting setting intention for the 2026 because loss had changed her view on predictable safety. Michelle’s 2025 word was Presence and two weeks later she learned her mother had brain cancer. I really, really related to Michelle’s fear. I am scared to set any intention that goes beyond meeting myself where I am because any other expectation feels wrought with potential heartbreak. If there is any lesson in 2025, it is that I can get myself through anything, I am a good advocate for my survival, and nothing will every hurt as much as losing someone you love. Sometimes meeting yourself where you are is all you can muster. And that’s okay.

  • A Wishing Flower

    In the past two weeks, I spent dozens of hours switching between old episodes of Housewives of Potomac and podcasts which analyze each episode. I would rather immerse myself in the carefully constructed drama of wealthy narcissists than examine whatever it is I feel whenever I remember the new layers of grief I felt this week. I am in a feeling that takes my breath away and the familiarity worries me because I know where it leads. I do not like this pathway. How was I just in a reality where this was not present? I had the giggles on Thanksgiving for the first time since I can remember and now I am here? It feels like it will always be this way, grief showing up like a nosy neighbor, a confrontation by all the weight of losing you.

    On Tuesday, a colleague brought a case involving a young widow client to our consultation group. As she processed, I could feel all Parts of me show up at once. The Widow. The Therapist. The Griever. The Colleague. The Trauma Survivor. The One who wants to feel anything but all of this. As The Widow began discussing what this client might be feeling based on my own experience, The Therapist saw looks on my colleagues faces, looks of people who got a peak into the enormous complexity of my grief. The Colleague realized parts of this last year people do not know, the parts The Griever has not written. The Widow spent a lot of time this year wondering if you tried to die, if you completed suicide. The Widow, The Griever, and the Therapist saw a look on one colleague’s face that made me question if my peers realized the hole The Griever keeps trying to crawl out of. The client is in month two of their new hell. In my January of this year. Without knowing them, The Widower knows where this client is and it is very dark there. It is unfeeling and numb. It is one hour at a time. It is surviving.

    While I can make space for the parts of the client story that were so different, for the unique ways different bodies process traumatic loss, The Young Widow knows a version of a story most people, including my colleagues, will hopefully never know. This complexity is alone. The Therapist, the Trauma Survivor, and the Widow know clinical intervention for this client is only to make space until the client’s body shows signs it needs more support. Their body will know because the body always knows. It will panic, become depressed, anxious, and show signs of distress. Until then, the therapist should create safe attachment, make space, and validate. There is no therapy in the first year of traumatic loss. There is only containment and, as needed, education on why the body is reacting the way it does with interventions to help support the reaction. The Colleague and Therapist felt deeply aware of how triggered I must have looked to my peers. I cannot do anything about what they saw. What they saw was raw and honest. This is who I am now, the amalgamation of all these fucked up Parts. They are wounded and they have knowledge. The One who wants to feel anything but all of this cannot process it all. It is too much. I am kaleidoscopic.

    When I close my eyes, I see trying to heal from this grief as attempting to reconstruct a wishing flower. I can feel the texture of the dandelion seed, that soft, delicate prickle. The breeze is Time taking each seed away from me. I will never have all the seeds back. If grief has a timeline, I feel like I am in the few seconds after opening my eyes having made the wish. I did not wish for this. The panic of the task at hand and how long it will take overwhelms me. It is a nightmare. It took me a year to get here and every seed I manage to capture is another painful piece. There is still so much work to do. I am surviving.

    After that consultation group where all my Parts came, I had seven client sessions. By the end of Tuesday, I was exhausted, inhuman. As I ate dinner on the couch, I let my mind wander and began to sink into the reality the consultation group even happened. I am a person with all these parts. I opened my phone and another clip from When Harry Met Sally came up, the infamous diner scene. We watched When Harry Met Sally on our New Years Eves together. You were shocked when I told you I had not seen it. My memory tells me you loved the movie because of your mother, because it was her favorite. I feel apprehensive about my remembering around this detail and worry I am dishonoring your mother and your loved ones by disclosing it. For me, the movie is you. It is surreal to have the tragic death of a Hollywood celebrity trigger the capturing of a new seed of my loss of you. I put my phone down. I watched more adult women fight with each other. I went to bed. Tomorrow we will start again.

  • Touching Time

    I found your Christmas stocking. It rests on our coffee table mocking me, comforting Carla who sits on it throughout the day. Cats believe anything remaining in a space it should not be is theirs for the taking. Blankets, post-it’s, purses, stockings. Your Christmas stocking has a “J” on it. I bought us new stockings the second holiday we had together. I thought we deserved something nice, our own traditions. You put a lavender essential oil and a lavender face mist in my stocking. I got you a new orange pen and a small notebook from Lucca. You felt so thoughtful to me. What do I do with this stocking? When I pulled it out of the box of holiday decor, I pondered if I knew anyone whose name started with a “J” who might want it but could not think of anyone. I imagined driving to Goodwill and dropping it off, but that does not seem right. Randy suggested donating it to a free little library for someone else to have but giving it away at all feels wrong. I can put it in the box I purchased but have yet to organize for all of your things. Something is stopping me from sorting my memories of you. So here I am, nine days later, wondering what to do with the parts of you I do not feel ready to lose or let go of. Grief defined.

    I am in a space of saying “yes” to social gatherings although still have little mental bandwidth to make the gatherings happen on my own. I spent the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend reconnecting with a friend and meeting his wife for the first time so our combined three Boston Terriers could play together. It was lovely and hilarious. Dottie humped their dogs despite my discouragement and it was so nice to remember the presence of this person I cared about so long ago. After departing, I wondered what it would be like to come across a herd of Boston Terriers in the wild and determined it would be comically noisy and frenetic. Can you imagine hiking in the wilderness and coming across a gaggle of these tuxedoed creatures? Afterwards, I attended a friend’s child’s fourth birthday. I had a nice time and left at that point where I could keep drinking or drive myself home.

    Both social interactions back-to-back awoke the Part of me that is lonely since you died. Most everyone I met was my age or around it. All of them were partnered and/or married. Several had children. We were not ready for kids and now I face a life where I may never have them. I do not want to be a single parent and am comfortable with this decision when I revisit the position I am in. But still. I sobbed when I got my first period after you died and realized no part of you would be living in my life anymore. I was devastated. Being around people my age is a stark reminder things did not happen the way I hoped they would. That you died.

    Part of me feels like I massively failed at this thing everyone else seems to figure out. I can say the things one says to remind themselves their worst fears are not reality, and I do say those things. I did not plan for this. This is not my fault. I cannot predict the future and some of these fears may not happen. Saying these things does not temper this Part’s fear that I will always feel lonely. What if I am too broken to have the things I still want for myself? Gulp. There is no comfort to assuage this fear. It is primal, rooted, and obstinate. The next person who comes into my life has to be able to help me hold the large amount of heartbreak I experienced in my life. And there is just so so so much of it. It feels impossible to expect this kind of person to exist when I can barely contain the devastation myself. I am looking at your stocking as I write this. It is laughing at me.

    When I got home from this child’s birthday party, I decided to watch Train Dreams. I am reaching for more grief content. I crave camaraderie in what I am experiencing, a validation that I am lonely in a profound way and other people know this feeling. If other people know this feeling, then I am seeable. I exist.

    I read a review that described Train Dreams as a movie you do not watch, but drink in. I could not agree more. The film exquisitely captures the simple and extraordinary experience of living when faced with profound loss. What does it mean to live when ths much devastation exists in you all at once? Watching Train Dreams felt like watching what I feel like when I explain to my dad that I touched Time when you died. Because I feel like I touched Time when you died. I do not have another way to explain what it feels like to lose you. I feel like the trauma of losing you is not so much in the integration of a world with you in it (before) to a world without you in it (after). Although this is clearly a massive piece of it. The trauma of losing you is somewhere in the murk of having a new and profound understanding of how tenuous all of this living-stuff really is. I feel like I gained an overpowering knowledge of all the universe’s truths.  I have an image of Father Time touching my forehead and giving me a data transfer of everything there is to know about everything. Train Dreams showed me this feeling, the feeling of touching Time in a way I can barely articulate in writing. I worry I sound delusional to people as I try to describe it, but then I remember anyone who thinks I am delusional has not experienced this kind of loss. This kind of loss is delusional.

    Reading about Robin Lovesong’s near death experience in her memoir Loving Bravely is the closest I have come to understanding this new knowledge articulated with words. But I did not die and come back to life the way she did. You died and you did not come back. Sometimes I wonder at what exact point did I received this knowledge. When did Time touch Me? I suspect it happened when I used my entire body to move you from your side to your back and began pressing into your chest at a count the first responder talked me through while on the phone. “I need you to slow down and go to my beat, Natalie” the first responder directed. I followed their instruction. I touched you when you were dead, attempting to bring you back for more than 8 minutes before the paramedics came. I touched what it means to be living when you were not. My life will never be the same. If that is not Touching Time, what is?

    After my last session today, I checked something on Facebook and the memory I posted on the one-month anniversary of you dying popped up. I forgot today marks thirteen months since I found you on our floor. I feel relieved and devastated to have forgotten. I am no longer counting down and tracking this timeline which means I am making progress in healing. But, what does it mean that I am not? On r/Widows, what I read is correct: the second year is harder than the first. So far, the second year is full of realizations contextualizing the meaning of your loss. I opened the box of Christmas ornaments and realized it had been two years since I had seen them. Last year I was living with my mother and stepdad in the haze of having lost you, counting the hours and days as they passed, looking for any milestone to anchor me to Earth. I was in my mother’s Christmas, a familiar place during an unfamiliar time. Time passes more quickly now than it did one year ago. I have had a year to fine-tune my skills. And, including healing, I am more skilled at looking for the signs that you lived at all. Your stocking is on my table because I do not want to forget. Because, alongside the fear that my life will always be lonely, is a fear that I will forget what it feels like to love and be loved by you. What happens to the things I put in your box? Touching time, indeed.

    Note to self: Touching Time will be the title of whatever memoir this blog becomes.

  • Wicked Dread

    I touched it again, that feeling between the space where I am now and the reality of your death. I touched it and had a panic attack. I am learning the panic attacks are the result of a confrontation in my body as what it feels like to lose you meets the space where I am, wherever this is. I sat next to my dad while Glinda’s heart broke and tears poured down my face in succession, one hot glob after another. How did I get here to this moment? I was watching a movie, completely rooted to the ground. Embodied. And then I remembered what it felt like to lose you and had to talk myself out of following my thoughts down the pathway toward panic. You were just grounded, and now you are not. The flash of lightening is so fast I cannot see it, let alone catch it. It feels tenuous, the elusive bubble every child tries to hold in their tiny, inept hands. I sat next to my dad negotiating with myself. Am I breathing? Yes, but not consistently. Count your breaths, Natalie. Focus on the box. What is becoming so difficult is that these moments feel like feeling you, and, aside from the panic, I do not want them to end. I want to feel what it feels like to miss you. And I still cannot. I have a panic attack. It is a new layer to the grief. A new room.

    The anniversary of your Hero Walk was the 17th. The Sunday after Grammy’s funeral. I retreated to my apartment from mom’s early so I could sit in the space of trying to remember what it was like to watch medical staff line the hallway to escort you to your final surgery. That day, like so many the week you died, is so difficult to remember. I have flash images of seeing Randy and Adam, of your father and sister, of your close family friends whose names I cannot remember.  My parents were on either side of me. I was wearing your orange shirt we splurged on at Bloomingdales the month before you died because I wanted us to have one nice thing we felt confident in. The family representative invited me to say goodbye to you, but I was not ready. I did not expect to be given space in front of so many people to say my last words to you. I lost my legs and learned that when people do that in movies, it is real. My body stopped working and I would have fallen if not for my parents on either side of me to hold me up. I walked up to you and stared, sobbing, unable to speak. I think I said that I could not do this, but I do not remember. I do not remember my last words to you. It haunts me.

    I had a brain-spotting session tonight and focused on the feeling of dread I have when I have to do anything new since you died. I dread meeting with prospective clients for the first time. I dread their first sessions. I dread going to outings where I do not know everyone or have not been to the venue. I dread going to a child’s birthday party. I dread leaving my house. I dreaded having guests in my home and having to be “on” for so many people at my Grammy’s funeral. I logically want to do all of these things and know I will be okay doing them, but the dread lives in a gnarled, mangled mess in my stomach, anchoring me to the past.

    The therapist took me through the dread and wove it into the feeling of my safe space. My safe space is Rockaway Beach sitting next to you. My therapist does not know you are there, but I do. We were so happy there in room 27 with Beamer and Dottie, Beamer in his cone because Dottie scratched his eye. I imagined the sun on my face, and the cold breeze reminding me of the wide spectrum of things that can be true all at once. I noticed the glitter on the sand and the sherbert of the sun saturating the clouds as it sank below the horizon. We thought it was so beautiful, this life we created with our gremlin dogs. And it was.

    As I processed the dread and revisited the beach with you, I smelled the way the sea released against the shore and heard the waves as seagulls skipped around the surf. And somewhere in that process, the feeling of dread emancipated not out of my body completely, but out of my soul. The thought of sitting with my entire family during Thanksgiving felt less overwhelming as my brain married the idea that I can get through a year of losing you, therefore I can do anything.