A Natalie Observed

Tag: Death

  • 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.

  • 100 Days

    This past weekend, I bailed on social plans which was and still is a conundrum. I moved back to my hometown, but I have not lived here in almost 20 years. My social connections to this place are pale shadows of an adolescence riddled with anxiety, family of origin trauma, and a lack of confidence. I did not move out of Chico, I ran away from it. I am scared moving back here was a mistake I made in the shock of your death. I am scared I will wake up amidst this time stollen by Grief and not only not know myself, not have my life with you, but lack the social foundation to help me find who I am. This all touches into the deeper fears that I am a person who has had too much pain, that no one can help me hold it, and I will be alone forever. I digress.

    Part of bailing on social plans this past weekend was my failure to gain the momentum necessary to shower and get ready for the public consumption of my presence. I feel embarrassed to admit how hard it is to leave my home, to pretend like I care about what I look like, to prepare for the small talk that happens when people dance around knowing I am barely holding it together. So much of my life is spent in the chokehold of avoiding and then confronting Grief that I feel like I lost the ability to create small talk. The idea of pulling myself together on top of having to find parking on a Saturday night was too much. Instead, I planned to have an edible, take a bath, and watch the SNL 50th Anniversary Concert. As I told Heather, I did not go to the in-person show (Sorry, Deep Cuts and Lishbills), but I was attending a show in my living room… and in my heart. [insert winking emoji and laughing emoji here:_________].

    I really cannot digest how much delight watching that program brought me. I even watched it sober the next day with my dad to get a sense of “was it that good or was it the edible?”. Conclusion: it really was that good. I knew the words to every song. I have core memories associated to my parents teaching me via osmosis every artist. Dad listening to Nirvana and David Bowie. Mom exposing me to Lauren Hill, Devo and Cher. I can still see the endless piles of cds in and out of their cases (and sometimes in the wrong cases entirely) as they rotated in and out of the 6-cd changer in our living room. I made you listen to Tchaikovsky’s Peter and the Wolfe once, do you remember? That cd was a consistent rotation for me.

    It is through music that I learned the complexity of living, of a shared language that articulates culture, history, politics, and art. It is also through music that I found you. One of our first conversations was about how beautiful Matt Berninger’s voice was. Music ties all of our happy memories together. Memories of you and I dancing to Robyn in your living room when we first met. Of listening to the Classic Road Trip Playlist on our way to the beach. Of me teaching you about David Bowie, Prince, Broken Social Scene, and Beyonce while you taught me about The Boss, Billy Joel, Bon Iver, and where you were when you first heard Ghostland Observatory. Of you walking out to greet me in the morning with a pump-up song as if making some grand entrance, just to see me laugh. Of the moment the week before you died when I faked indignation when you could not name Bonnie Raitt as she prompted us to give them something to talk about.

    Music created shared space for us in a life that really only seemed to narrow for you. I soaked in the bath on Saturday night while Snoop lit joints on the stage at Radio City Music Hall. I felt a sense of awe that this particular group of artists was performing the music that punctuated my life, but I never experienced live in person. I had a moment of feeling deeply relaxed and connected with a part of myself I have not seen in so long: Joy. I started crying not because I was sad, but because I was relieved to know Joy was still in this shell of a human somewhere. Then Bonnie Raitt sang about making people love her when they do not, and I felt a little too Bridget Jones to stay in the bath. Joy is fleeting.

    This weekend marked 100 days since you died. All I want to do is talk to you about what I thought of this anniversary special, of realizing Joy was missing all this time. But you are not here. I have an event in my calendar for this coming weekend called Nacho Bowl. You accepted the invite. I suggested last year that we make the anniversary of your suicide attempt and resultant spinal cord injury have a different meaning, one steeped in something more joyful than all the pain it really represented. You liked the suggestion and, as we pulled apart some nachos made in our air fryer, Nacho Bowl was born. I cannot believe you are not here to do this with me, but I guess that is what my life is now. Shock that you are not here and my feeble attempts to continue trying to leave my house anyway.

    This picture popped up on my phone today. Your hair looks WILD and I think that must be why I took it. Taken on 2/17/23.

  • Death is Death

    I noticed my brain is not functioning well. Multiple times a day I ask myself if I ate a meal or drank water. Did I actually take out the trash? I called to cancel my medical insurance twice. I keep forgetting I already asked and answered these questions. I feel scattered. I ordered a habit tracker because I am worried about functioning. I feel like I forgot how. I did not consider how hard it would be to live alone. I have somehow managed to eat three meals every day, shower, make my bed, work, and walk Dottie enough there are no accidents in the house. I feel accomplished and barely able to do anything else.

    I downloaded a cleaning checklist that organizes various tasks over the course of a month to keep your home clean. I need things to help me stay organized. Tuesdays are for vacuuming the sofa, although I do not think I need to do that weekly as it seems excessive. I was too tired on Tuesday to complete this task, so I did it yesterday. As I vacuumed, I watched strands of your coarse, dirty-blonde hair succumb to the Dyson pull. I cannot stop thinking about it. Your hair. Should I have kept some? How do I live in a world where I will never touch it again? At the hospital, I kept running my fingers through it, feeling the spaces between curls, identifying all the grey you pretended was not there. As I find fragments of you in my new life here, I feel like I am getting rid of you and I feel guilty. There will be a time where I never vacuum your hair again and I do not understand how to fit that into this version of my world. I feel ridiculous for crying about it, but here I am. Crying about something as silly as your hair.

    I used to equate my divorce and all the events that created the divorce to feeling like a death. I hate myself for so naively writing about something I thought I understood. I look back at that person and feel sorry for how much she will learn about the true meaning of loss and pain. I wish I could tell her it only gets worse and that she really cannot imagine or prepare for it. That it will be hard to remember that she ate, drank water, and walked her dog. That she will cry over vacuuming hair. That she will wake up tomorrow and continue trying to do this all again despite a lot of evidence suggesting not to. The person I was had no idea about what she was talking. Divorce is not death, it is life. It is a beginning, a cleansing, a reason to vacuum. Death is death. It is forever. It is wondering if you should have vacuumed at all. It is not a new beginning and it totally fucking sucks.

  • 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.

  • Bend

    When I cry, Dottie jumps into my lap and lays her chest on mine, her paws at the exact points where I imagine my lungs process oxygen and release carbon dioxide. This causes me to catch my breath, the pressure of her paws activating my Vagus nerve as tears fall on her tongue. It is never very long before my sobs stop. Dottie then moves off of me to sit guarding me diligently from a different angle of the room. I wish I could convey to Dottie how much it means to me that she is here dealing with me. Let this stand as an official note of my gratitude, not that she will ever know it.

    I canceled my workday on Tuesday because I could not stop crying. Before logging in for my own therapy, tears fell down my face. I knew at some point I would need to cancel work to cry, so I guess I have done that now. I described to my therapist how it felt to pack up mine and our life in five days. I explained how the sun was out for the entire trip until the last day. I expressed an incredible and inadequate amount of gratitude for my mom and Phil helping me. Then I sobbed as I described how stupid I felt finding the first, the second, the fifth, and the tenth bottle of vodka hidden in my home. Ten found in my home since the day you died. Ten. As I sit writing this in a new apartment in a new state, I still feel like I will find them and noticed I brace for impact when I open a drawer. I hope that stops.

    Yesterday, I had a massage with the masseuse who also does Reiki. She described feeling a lot of confusion as she focused on my heart chakra. “Yes, that’s about right” I muttered choking back tears. I am so confused. I feel like our relationship was not real. I can tell myself all the logic of why you hid so much alcohol in our home, of why you concealed it from me, from yourself, but I still feel like an idiot. While you lay unconscious in the hospital room, I told your family I thought things were getting better, but now I know just how much they were not. A bottle of vodka hit me in the face as your father and I pulled your clothes out of the closet to sort them. A bottle was hidden behind the recipe books. In a backpack. In a jacket. Under the bed. In a hat. In another hat. In the sock drawer. Your bedside table. Between couch cushions. I feel crazy. When was all of this happening while I lived and worked from our home?

    I am jealous of those who lose their loved ones, and they get to be angry because they died. Because the illness won. Because… insert any reason not related to killing yourself through alcohol overdose into the blank space here: _________________________. I hate myself for feeling jealous or admitting it. Loss is profound, unique, devastating, and breathtaking for everyone. I know that. I keep wondering if you even loved me or was I the gullible optimist who provided somewhere safe to stay? Would we ever have created our own family? Gotten married? Found happily ever after? I do not see how any of that would be possible with the secrets you kept and my senseless naivety. You died, and now I wonder these things. What would it be like to not have to wonder? I will never know. You will never ever be here to again reassure me the way you used to. Instead, I sit here with Dottie on my chest, trying to remember how to breath so I can mitigate another panic attack.

    I set aside your clothes I thought would make an interesting quilt. Your dad helped me go through your closet and told me stories about the memories he had with you in the clothes he knew. The bike race here. The camping trip there. A shirt from your mom’s race. A New Orleans Saints t-shirt. A Loyola sweatshirt. Shirts with bright bold patterns like you liked. Shirts I bought you. Shirts you kept that did not fit. They are sitting in a box marked “KLEENEX, SHEETS, ETC”. I am too angry and devastated to consider making something in your honor yet. I trust that this feeling will evolve, but right now, it is smothering me and I hate you for it.

    To quote Middle Kids song “Bend”:

    I am one bend away from a break

    I am one step away from the precipice of crazy

    I am holding all the pieces in place

    But maybe you’ve got to break me to see what I’m made of

  • 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?

  • Uncanny Familiarity

    The Lions World Vision Institute let your dad know they donated your eyes. Your eyes. Your eyes, the color of Puget Sound no matter the weather, grey on dark days and vibrant on sunny ones. Your eyes color-coordinated with nature and now someone is dissecting them to understand how to prevent corneal degeneration. I want to tell myself that you would have been excited to know your eyes were helping others. It feels like that story, the story of your glee at being part of medical science, would be simpler and more hopeful. But to think your joy at the idea is to also marinate in the fact that you died before you were supposed to. Those two things cannot exist at the same time. I know you wanted to donate your body to do whatever good it was certainly not doing for you, but I also know you should still be here. You would not have knowingly left me here wondering what you think about the removal of your eyes from your body. You were proud of your eyes. It was consistently the one feature you felt was beautiful.

    When I read the text notification about your eyes, I just ended a massage. Massage is the only place I receive touch in a meaningful way since you died. I never realized how much touch was a part of my life until it was gone. I threw my purse over my shoulder, checked my phone and upon seeing the update from your dad, the image of you in a cremation chamber without your aquamarine eyes popped into my brain. I cannot unsee it. Just like the image of your body in the hospital bed, expressionless, your eyes half open and tears pooling to hydrate them, all sparkle blotted out. Like dirty paint water. There are moments of your death I do not go a day without remembering. I guess now your eyeless body is one of them. I cannot even get a massage without confrontation by your death. I resent you for it. I resent everyone else who is not experiencing this.

    Today, I zoomed in on a picture of your face to validate I do remember the color of your eyes. I am scared I will forget, so I am glad there are pictures to remind me. I zoomed too quickly and suddenly your face was as wide as the computer screen. We were face to face in an uncanny familiarity. Yet another reminder of how much I miss you.