A Natalie Observed

2024 Really was a Horrible Year

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Natalie Wood

in

I keep seeing posts shared by people I know (or follow) about how horrible their 2024 has been. Every time I see them, I feel a sense of relief and think “Oh, wow! Someone else who also had a horrible year.” I have this brief moment of allyship with a person online who also feels about 2024 the way I do. It has been a horrible year. 

Then, in the same instant of recognizing the feeling of relief that anyone knows my pain, I remember the people I know (or follow) are no longer in the same universe as me. These posts about Horrible 2024 are from people still in a world of “Before the Worst Possilble Moment” in their life. I am 42 days into the underworld of “After the Worst Moment” of my life. I trust they definitely did have a horrible year, but mine has not been just horrible, it has been the worst. I used to think I knew the worst possible thing that could happen to me, and then I found Jeffrey not breathing on my dining room floor.

Every time these moments transpire, I catch myself taking a deep inhale because I stopped breathing. The realization of my otherness literally takes my breath away. I have read about this in so many stories and I have so much training in trauma’s impact on the body. Yet this experience is surreal and out of body in a way I have never known. I feel like a scratched CD repeating myself as I attempt to understand what the fuck is happening to me. There are so few words that can explain the confrontation of loss and I desperately want to find them. I wish I could scream into an abyss so I could feel the echo of this pain reverberate throughout my body. Maybe a sound bath of my pain could give me a sense of the dimension and scale of it. Instead, I am laying here buried by grief, many feet under a mountain I cannot see around or across, searching for a wisdom I never wanted to know. 

Comments

One response to “2024 Really was a Horrible Year”

  1. Kristen Bowman Avatar
    Kristen Bowman

    I don’t think anyone is prepared for grief, I think it’s literally impossible.

    My volunteer work in high school was in the King County Morgue (due to my interest in a science/pathology major). I checked in families to identify bodies of their loved ones and was the last person they saw exiting them. Every weekend for months I watched people having their worst days.

    Which I thought prepared me for real life- it 100% didn’t.

    When I was 24, my grandfather who raised me passed away unexpectedly after an accident. I was in shock and managed to hold it together, then two weeks later I got the call that shattered the life I built until then- my (immunocompromised) best friend laid down for a nap when she didn’t feel well and died from the chicken pox. Her 5 year old son had to call medics when he couldn’t wake up his mom.

    I instantly went into “helper” mode telling myself that her family needed all help they could get. So I went and cleaned her apt, I made calls to the funeral home, arranged her obit, etc just never stopped moving while there was stuff to be done.

    then the day of the funeral arrived and for a lot of my longtime friends acquaintences, this was their very first funeral. My mom helped her elderly customer for years so I couldn’t even count the funeral id been to in 20 years.

    the one place I should have been able to help people, the moment I should have been over-prepared for… after a lull in visitors I finally went down the aísle to the open casket and when I looked inside something inside my head *broke*. I had seen hundreds of bodies in my life at this point, but to see my young, healthy friend gone and brain able to register that everything that made her vibrant was absolutely gone and I lost it like I never have.

    in front of her entire family and friends, most of whom had known me for over a decade at this point, I started to scream… like blood-curdling screaming that I could not control. It resulted in jason and my ex’s new husband (a whole other low point for me) had to physically restrain me and remove me from the building. I missed the entire ceremony crying and screaming.

    When I stopped screaming, I shut down completely. I barely talked, I didn’t eat and sat silently in my apt doing nothing.

    Two weeks later, I tried to return to work (the week before Thanksgiving) and Mindy Lewis (the absolute irony) took one look at me after id just clocked in, and told me I was taking the next month off and to go home where I needed to be and offered to find me a grief therapist covered in our insurance.

    To this day I still wonder what she saw that day that was enough to send a team member home from Thanksgiving until New Years.

    Spent my birthday sitting in the corner of a restaurant while everyone else drank and celebrated, when they had me blow out my birthday candle and to ‘make a wish’ I started crying hard and made everyone else uncomfortable and they went to a different part of the bar. [Pretty sure Randy was there and can testify to the human black hole I was even weeks later]

    But thanks to trained professionals, I slowly dug my way out. Am I the same person I was before those two loses? Not even close. It forever changed me and almost 20 years later I can say I’m a more compassionate and empathetic person because of the experience and when those moments have happened later for others, I could help that much better understanding their limits like I couldn’t before.

    Sorry for my neurodivergent ‘shared experience’ info dump.

    I just put up our xmas tree and at the bottom of the box in the tiny box of xmas decorations Danielle made for my first xmas tree when I could only afford $20 to decorate my first apt. Every year I look at those ornaments and wonder what she’d be like at age 42 now. In my head she’ll always be 24 in that casket and the “what if”s are crippling if I allow them to be.

    Im sorry this time of year is particularly devastating when it comes to loss. I’m not sure what I believe happens when we’re gone, but I like to think that the energy that made the people we love travels around us and love us still in their own way. Energy is never lost or gained, so we borrow energy to be created, born, and live, but then we return it and feel that our energy would surround those who loved us. So I believe Jeffrey’s energy is still surrounding you and is in everything you touch and see. He’s part of the flowers, the wind, the sun warming your skin, he lives actively in your heart and your memories.

    be kind to yourself. Let others provide you with strength when you can’t summon your own and recognize your limits. Somedays you won’t be able to get out of bed, and that’s okay. Somedays talking to others will feel like razor blades on your skin- and that’s okay.

    Love you. This won’t feel *better* anytime soon, but over time it will feel *different*, which I guess is something.

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