A Natalie Observed

Tag: addiction

  • Grief Palace Expansion Pack

    Six months have passed since I found you on our dining room floor. Six months without you. Six months of waking up at 2am to lay awake for a while, to eventually turn on Friends when I cannot fall asleep, to eventually switch it to How I Met Your Mother when I catch the episode of Friends I have not seen a while. I cannot believe it has only been six months and that it is already six months. It is six months since I found you on our floor, and so much of my life still does not feel real.

    I cannot believe you are not here. Everything I do, every single thing, reminds me that you are missing. I walk Dottie on roads you have never been on. I eat at restaurants you will never try the food at. I have days I cannot come to the living room and vent about. I go on walks through the canyon with my dad and I cannot show you the flowers or how picturesque Dottie looks in contrast to the scenery. I look for accessible entrances and parking spaces you do not need access to. I find books I want you to read. You are everywhere, a suffocating experience I cannot fathom when juxtaposed to what is the reality is: you are nowhere at all. I do not understand how you went from physical space to omnipresent, as ubiquitous as the air touching my skin.

    Last week, I ordered a coffee at Daycamp and your name popped up when my payment approved. Apparently, your name, not mine, is on the loyalty account attached to the particular card I use for treats. Thank you, Jeffrey. The words appeared on the screen. The Grief Goblin grabbed my stomach while punching me in the sternum. I lost my breath. Thank you, Jeffrey. I remember when I took you to DayCamp during your inaugural visit to Chico so we could celebrate your birthday. I wanted you to see where I grew up, to meet my family, and to get a sense of whether relocating here was a possibility for us. We needed a coffee to fuel. I told you that you would like the avocado toast. You did. I told you I could see us moving here. You responded with letting me know all the education programs you had found to potentially enroll in, the doctors that could support your care, and the neighborhood in which you would not mind living. You were excited. I have not been back to Daycamp since your name appeared on the screen. I cannot unsee your name at the place I treat myself to overpriced Chai Lattes made with delicious Chico chai in a perfectly balanced spice-to-oat milk ratio.  Thank you, Jeffrey.

    I talked about feeling you in the last post, that I felt the warmth and adoration of you, but then the feeling disappeared. I have not been the same since. I sense a vortex opening around me and I can feel that I am on the precipice of a new phase of this journey. Since I felt you, I feel a loneliness that was not palpable before, a new wing of the Grief Palace. I feel beholden to it, vigilantly examining the invader of my body. I also feel longing. Longing for joy, for reprieve, for anything to distract me from this. I do not remember the last time I laughed without abandon in the intimate companionship of the friends who really know me. I miss the intimacy of existing without explanation, of being in physical space with someone and not having to talk about anything intelligent while also being able to discuss everything important. Missing you reminds me of how much I miss my friends, of how much I miss my life, of how much I miss not feeling like this. And I never get a break from it.

    I even miss you in my dreams. Never during. Only when I wake up and I realize you were not in them. The elaborate world built by my brain during sleep did not include you in it. Another reminder you are not here. I do not get you in my dream life or my real life. Only in this mental prison while I am awake and aware and present in the suffering of it. I imagine I am a set of Matryoshka dolls attempting to organize themselves but continuously knocked onto the floor. I just want to put them in order again so I can see them all at once, but alas, this next wave is toppling me over. I am no stronger than untethered seaweed on the shore looking for anchor.

    I am going to sleep now. Six months without you and I want to wake up when this is over. Joke is on me. You’re not here tomorrow either.

    Dottie with her toungue out because the world needs more of Dottie:

  • Grief Goblins

    Tonight I finished the third season of Lincoln Lawyer. We started it when you were alive, finished the first episode but did not get further. I really enjoy this show and I so enjoyed hypothesizing the scenarios for the ending with you. I know the cases will all come together, that the cast of characters and a pug will figure out how to get the innocent person saved. But I never know how the saving will unfold and am always pleasantly surprised.

    As another intense cliff hanger ended the season, I felt the strongest urge to know what you thought about it. My brain imagined asking you. Tears started to form in my eyes as I felt the missing of you, the intense empty space where you used to sit on our couch. Then, at the exact moment I registered how much I missed you, I also felt a feeling that caused my heart to heat up and I knew immediately what it was. I felt the feeling of love and the glow of adoration for you. I have not felt that feeling in so long, I think I forgot about it. It was… everything. The brightest, softest and briefest light. I tried to sit in the feeling but as brilliant as it felt, it faded, the grief goblin taking his fill.

    Registering the warmth, I started crying in deep sobs disturbing enough for Dottie to come lay on my chest and start incessantly licking my face. She somehow knows the distraction will help me to catch my breath, to start focusing on breathing. I do what I do when she does this and start counting breaths in and out, keeping rhythm while I pet her so I can attempt to relax both of us. It works.

    Lately during my Peloton workouts, I start sobbing on the bike, mid-workout. I cannot really figure out why, although I know it makes sense that it is happening. The crying is never at the same time, during the same style workout, or triggered by something said. I’ll be climbing some hill, out of breath, sweaty, and trying to beat the fastest person even though I never do, and an overwhelming feeling of sadness consumes me. And, no, I am not describing a feeling that believes “this is so good I am crying”. My crying is a feeling whispering in a mothering voice, “this life has been so incredibly difficult for you. And that part, the part of it being so difficult is really, really sad.” I find this entire experience confusing. Why while working out, during my endorphins capture, is my body releasing the darkest of feelings? I cannot even work out without Grief saying hello? Really?

    I told my therapist today I have a very strong instinct to feel this experience I am having, that I do not want to biohack my grief. There are so many somatic therapies that could and probably eventually will help me heal the trauma living within me. But part of me just knows I need to feel all of this, to study its impact on me, to learn what my body can do to heal itself and help me through this. Sometimes I feel like that is positive side of losing you, even though that feels incredibly horrible to say. Is there a positive side of any of this? If there is, it is that I am getting to know myself in a way I never would have without you dying. It is humbling, to say the very least. I told my therapist it is ironically the least anxious I have ever felt. Go fucking figure.

  • Yet.

    I do not want to write still. I am depressed. Trying to maintain any sort of existence feels heavy and burdensome. I know writing, finding time to reflect on what I am going through, is the right thing to do. It would help me navigate this. But I am struggling to want to sit and touch what this feels like. I want it to go away, for the weighted blanket to dissolve into wispy, floaty air. The weather is warmer lately, high sixties, seventies and a hint of eighties. We are all shedding layers to allow our skin to absorb the warmth of the sun between wafts of the cool breeze. Spring and Autumn are when the residents of Sacramento Valley take advantage of pleasurable heat. Heat that you plant and harvest your gardens in. Heat that allows families to gather for brisket on the barrel in the backyard. Heat mostly absent from wildfire unless it is not. Not the heat of July and August, the heat that brings children out to experiment with cooking eggs on cement or a brownie in a coffee mug. And yet, with the warmth happening now, I do not feel the recharging of the sun. I feel rigidity in my entire body as I try to carry myself through every day without having a complete mental breakdown. I am tired. I am sleeping more. I do not feel creative. I am struggling to win the “why am I doing this?” battle. I am depressed.

    I cannot even recount with significant detail the number of events this past week that contributed to my inward spiral. I am not sure if it is the fact you were honored by Washington State for your organ donation and I was not there. If it was the Seattle apartment charging me $5,131.67 for breaking our lease because you died and I could not live there anymore? Or was it the lingering reality that this was not where I thought I would be in my life? Or it is very high odds I will not have a family the way I thought I would? Or is it that today marks five months without you?

    I miss you terribly and every single thing that happens in my life, good or bad, reminds me that you are not here. How do I capture that feeling? The weight of loss. The layers of this grief, a grief that has lived in my body for so many years before you died and has decided now is the time for me to deal with it. I am somewhere between concrete and the soil. How do you write about that? How do you explain it to people? I spend my days thinking about it, telling myself to write it down so I can work it out, but then ultimately not being able to do anything. To write about what is happening, is to confront losing you. And it still feels impossible to comprehend.

    Thinking about how to talk about this horrible, excruciating feeling makes my heart rate jump 128 beats per minute and gives me a stomachache. It makes being in my body feel dreadful. I started working out every day because I need to feel anything else in my body. I need to feel it do something else but feel this pain. It is the closest I think I have ever understood what you talked about when you described missing riding your bike before your spinal injury. It feels like a sadistic takeover that makes my clothes seem inside out and full of static. This feeling, the feeling of Anguish, is foreign. I hope no one ever has to feel it like this. If I could devise a world without it, right now I would. It certainly is not worth it. 

    Part of me, somewhere deep, deep down inside, chimes in when I get to this place, when I get to the place where it certainly is not worth it. This Part chimes in with a small, barely audible “yet”. Then, without hesitation, I restate the phrase with yet added in. “It certainly is not worth it… yet.”. I do not know what that Part is or how I got so lucky to have her. I am definitely waking up and going through this for her. She needs me to see what “yet” is. I am very anxious to know.

  • A Bird Without Song

    I wore your shirt today. The one I bought you before you died. We were in University Village and decided to treat ourselves to a nice article of clothing as part of our effort to look toward a different future. I received several compliments from strangers, from a client, and from my mother on this shirt, the shirt I bought you, the shirt that is yours. I cannot stop crying because you should be the one wearing it. But you are not here. You died. You will never wear any of your clothes again. I am not borrowing them. You do not get to see what I look like wearing them. They are remnants of you I claimed. I feel like I stole them but there is no one to steal them from. You died.

    You wore this shirt the weekend before you died. We went to Pacific Science Center on a date to celebrate our 4-year anniversary. We completely enjoyed ourselves, navigating from dinosaur fact to funhouse mirrors to science experiments to butterfly exhibit to the movie about blue whales. I agreed to go into the butterfly exhibit despite my strong aversion to the idea of bugs landing on me. I knew you would want to go inside and that you would hold my hand if I got anxious. You explained the different kinds of butterflies and where they were from. You told me how many days they spend in a cocoon and stood in awe next to me as we admired the largest butterfly in the world. At one point, something touched my head and I looked to you for reassurance that a butterfly had not landed. You assured me one had not, that it was the tree branch just above. I let out a sigh of relief and we quickly exited. Later in the evening when we were home you confessed that a butterfly did indeed land on my head, that you felt it best to lie to protect me from being scared. I kissed you. It was exactly the right thing to do. Four years of looking out for each other.

    Five days later, you died. A fact I still feel so stunned by 104 days later.

    In the month after you died, I dreamt about butterflies landing on me. I could not control it. They kept landing on me over and over and it was so stressful. I woke up in a panic, crying, not able to catch my breath. The following morning, when I went to get in the shower, a moth the size of my hand flew towards my face. I had to ask Phil to get rid of it because I could not.

    So I guess you are in the butterflies now. In the eery, uncomfortable feeling of wings against my skin. I am not sure it is cruel or poetic. Either way, you are not here to tell me the tiny lie that will make me feel safe enough to keep going. And I am trying so hard to hold on long enough to find a reason on my own.

  • Muscle Memory

    Last night, something funny and endearing happened on Big Bang Theory. I’m watching the series through because I have never seen it and I need dumb, low-stakes television. I turned to see if you also thought it was funny, my brain tricking me for a split second into thinking you were seated in your usual seat on the couch, but you were not there. You died. I lost language as I gasped for air between tears, attempting to recover from the impact of Grief Whiplash punching me in the gut. It took 93 days for me to look for you in the same room, a sadistic muscle memory and a refreshing reminder that I was not always devastated by you.

  • Message Sent to Both Heather and Randy Separately on Wednesday:

    When Jeffrey and I first started dating, we got into a debate about the word ‘irregardless’. Jeffrey insisted it was not a word, that its meaning is duplicative of ‘regardless’ and that it’s grammatically incorrect to say ‘irregardless’. I googled it and found ‘irregardless’ in the Oxford English dictionary, among others. It does look like the word was added to the dictionary more recently because people say it so much. It’s considered a word even though irregardless and regardless have the same meaning. I loved that conversation so much. It was debate and learning and everything I love so much about what would become our relationship.

    My therapist said ‘irregardless’ during our session yesterday and I immediately thought of that memory. I couldn’t tell them because you look like an asshole if you point out something like a grammar error to another person Jeffrey worried he looked like an asshole when he pointed it out to me. But he didn’t. I like learning and I want to do things correctly. I asked Jeffrey what words meant all the time because I knew he would know and I could validate “that word means what I think it means”.

    I really feel like I’m never going to have that ever again. And it is suffocating.

  • Grief Makes New Sounds

    Yesterday during therapy I sobbed so intensely I heard a sound I never heard come out of my body. It was somewhere between the pitch a hiccup and hyperventilating. I do not know how to describe it. 

    Mom said I need to talk in therapy about what is going to happen next week, about walking into the home we shared, the home where I found you not breathing on our dining room floor. “It’s too soon in the grief process for you to have to be doing this”. As if I did not know. I knew my mom was right because the thought I had the two times she brought it up was, “why are you focusing on this? I don’t have a choice but to go there and pack up our things and pointing out what’s hard about it isn’t going to get all this stuff done.” Defensiveness is always holding up a mirror. 

    I am overwhelmed. There really is so much to do. I need to sort through your shirts and select the ones I want to keep so someone can help me make a quilt. I need to donate your wheel chair and other medical supplies to the organization who helped you get a wheel chair at no cost after your injury. I need to donate your Trike to the organization that helps folks with disabilities get outside, that helped you test ride different bikes to figure out which one was best for your accessibility needs. I could sell the Trike, it’s worth a lot of money, but that feels wrong when a grant helped you buy it. I need to give your dad space and time to identify what he wants from your things. I need to figure out what I can sell or give away as quickly as possible so I do not have to pack more than necessary. I need to coordinate for a junk person to take the things we cannot haul or donate ourselves. I need to clean and remove my existence from the home I lived in for 8 years, 1 spouse’s gender transition, 1 divorce, 1 pandemic, 1 graduate school degree, 1 engagement, 1 career ending and another starting, and 1 fiancé death. I need to decide what of your things I am not sure I will regret giving away. I plan to box them and write your name on the boxes with a Sharpie. Do I store those boxes in the new apartment or a storage unit? Do I want reminders of this confronting me daily or do I need to put them somewhere? 

    These questions feel impossible to answer. My mom is right, it is too soon. But I am not getting a choice in making decisions about my timeline for grief. I have to do all of this next week. I did not ask to or sign up for it, but this is happening. When I let in what I feel about being in our home, new noises reverberate through and out of my body. You died when I was not ready and now I have to participate in the next chapter of the trauma triggered by the worst day of my life, the day you died. I am not ready. It is too soon.

    I cannot decide if I want to sleep in the apartment or even be in there alone. My parents got a hotel room because eventually there will not be a bed in the place I am trying to remove my existence from. I cannot decide if I will regret not giving myself the time to be in our home, my home, the home the holds so much of my life, of who I am. The apartment holds every painful moment of my life and there are so many of them. It holds my survival and my accomplishments. How do I decide if I can handle being in there? How do I look at your jackets, fold them, and give them away? Will I miss the dumb dice you bought too many of? The coffee mug with yours and your uncle’s name on it? The duvets and bedding we picked out together. You used to sit in the green chair in the office and read a book while I worked. But I do not need the chair. The blankets hold your smell. They hold us. All of these things hold us. Hold a lifetime no longer happening. A dream that is a nightmare I cannot and will not ever wake up from.

    I told Heather I keep waiting for my life to get bigger than this grief, but that is not happening. The grief is everywhere I go. It is reflected on the face of everyone who sees me. Everything I do, I’m doing while Grief is sitting on my chest, punching me in the throat, mocking me.

    We leave on Friday morning. An 11 hour drive to the guillotine. I feel like I am preparing to stare down the sun. I know I will lose eyesight, but there is nothing I can do to stop it. I need to get used to looking at this duller version of the world, but its sepia tones are so muted and dystopian.

    What the fuck?

  • A Real Pain

    Last night I had my first night alone since you died. I walked all three dogs and did not trip on or lose any of them. I readied their dinner. I reheated leftovers for myself and watched the latest episode Traitors. I ate a small white chocolate cheesecake from Savor Ice Cream. I can confirm it is dangerous those tiny cakes are walking distance from my new apartment. I will be back. 

    I watched A Real Pain and felt like I was watching a movie about you. To be clear, it was not a movie about you at all. You are not Jewish, nor have Jewish family history in Poland. You also do not have a male cousin you would travel with in order to participate in a Polish Holocaust Tour because a grandmother left you money to visit her family home. But Kieran Culkin’s character felt like you, loving and suffering and entertaining and loathing. Caring for everyone and no one. Looking for meaning and finding a loss for words. Feeling everything and feeling numb to feeling at all. Having feelings so big, people turned away in discomfort. The film was brilliant in its complexity and artistry, in the acting and the writing. I wish you could see it to dissect it with me although I know it would be hard for you to watch. It was, true to its title, a real pain.

    Once again, I am struck by how close you feel and how far away you are. You are nowhere and everywhere. I did a Sound Bath on Friday and the image of you laying on the floor next to me resonated through my body. I imagined your breath on my neck, you were so close. Tears poured onto the weighted eye mask I borrowed from the studio. To prevent panic, my brain switched gears into wondering what instruments and tools created the sounds. How does thunder emanate from a bowl and rain fall from a stick? One moment we were surrounded by the lapping of waves on the shore which transitioned into the twinkling whimsy of chimes. What makes all of that happen? I miss our endless conversation about whatever we were curious about.

    I wish you could taste the cheesecake. It was airy and not too sweet. You always talked about a cheesecake you used to make and promised to make it for me one day. I wonder how this one compared. I guess that is another thing I can file into my mysteries folder. That and the circumstances that allowed someone to discover how to trap the sound of thunder in a bowl.

     

     

  • Cause of Death

    It cost $5.00 to have the United States Postal Service add you to the Deceased Do Not Contact List. There is a Deceased Do Not Contact List. I never knew that. Apparently, it is managed by a third-party company called the Data Marketing Association. I tried to figure out what the Data Marketing Association does, but I got lost in too much information on their About Us page. I am going to liken my attempt to understand their purpose to the moments where I explain I used to work for a human resources company managing large Fortune 500 company’s contractor data. The responding looks on people’s faces almost always glossed to a show a “where do I start in my lack of understanding of that?” and quickly morphed to a verbal “Oh nice!” with a prompt change in subject.

    Your dad mailed me copies of your death certificate and they delivered yesterday. I need proof you died to close the Xfinity and the Seattle City Light accounts because you were the account holder. I spent 2 hours on the phone with Xfinity last Friday trying to understand what to do. I was transferred 6 times before someone finally understood what I was asking. You owe a balance for your phone bill I cannot afford to pay. Each person kept asking me if I wanted to assume ownership of the account (and therefore the balance). I do not. I cannot sell your brand-new iPhone because the time for adding AppleCare expired. I do not know what to do with an unopened device I do not need and retails for $1500. I could use the money. $5.00 for the postal service to stop sending me your updates from the Social Security Administration is the least of my financial concerns.

    Your death certificate confirms death due to the “Toxic Effects of Alcohol”. I had to look up the contributing factors because you are not here to tell me what they mean. The first cause listed, Anoxic Brain Injury, means your brain went without oxygen and caused brain cell death. The second cause, Hypoxic respiratory failure, means your blood also did not have enough oxygen. The third cause, Acute Ethanol Intoxication (or alcohol poisoning), occurs when someone consumes more alcohol than their body can process. You drowned yourself by drinking.

    I opened the envelope with the death certificate while my mom made dinner. She hugged me knowing opening it would be hard. I think I was too in shock to even register what I was reading. Charlie, the Bichon Frisé who looks like a stuffed animal, rang the bells on the door indicating he needed to go out. I opened the sliding door and stepped into the crisp, winter evening. As I looked for the Big Dipper and Orion’s Belt, Charlie took off for a jaunt around the house. I followed him despite everything I know about pursuer-distancer relationship patterns. Tears formed in my eyes. You would have laughed at this little tyrant controlling all of our ability to complete anything without interruption. But you died because you drank so much alcohol your brain and your blood did not have oxygen. Toxic Effects of Alcohol. You saw my last message at 2:19 pm and I called 9-1-1 at 2:42pm. 23 minutes. 23 minutes to go from alive to drowning yourself.

    What the fuck?