A Natalie Observed

Tag: Death

  • MuirWood

    Jeffrey’s last name is Muir, and mine is Wood. We were MuirWood. I loved and still love that. For his birthday in 2022, I bought Jeffrey a custom blue neon sign that said Muir Wood. It hangs now in our living room on a gallery wall of artwork we both collected. We talked about eloping in Muir Woods as a way to commemorate our pairing in a space that, while we had never been there together, would feel so natural to who we both were. Redwoods, clean air, warm spring. A beginning marked with the hope of a season blossoming and the wisdom of nature. I do not know what I will do with the MuirWood sign at the end of this month when I make it back to my apartment to pack and move. Where does one put a sign that represents all your dreams disappearing? Under a bed? In the back of a closet? The trash? Hanging it feels impossible, a painful reminder of what will never be. Not keeping it feels like a betrayal.

    When Jeffrey entered the hospital, I started a group text with his sister, his brother, and his father. I called it “MuirsWood” because there are three of them and only one of me. It felt poetic and honoring while also being accurate. Today, Jeffrey’s father reminded us it has been two months since we handed Jeffrey over to the organ retrieval team. With the reminder, I wanted to remember what happened in those few days. I do this a lot since I have been back in Chico – I go read every post I made from that week so I can revisit what I experienced. Every time I go back to remember or attempt to document the timeline of what happened in the hours and days after finding Jeffrey, I get stuck as I uncover a new piece to process. Today is no different. As I read the Facebook posts now, I am struck by the time lapse of what was happening before Jeffrey died.

    For context, if you were to look at my Facebook timeline (which is private), you would see the two updates below, one after the other.

    I do not understand how I could go from such a relief for surviving Election week as a therapist, to finding Jeffrey on the floor and everything I am dealing with since. The juxtaposition of those two experiences existing in the same 20 hours, let alone the same universe feels astonishing.

    It also strikes me as I look at these posts that I thought on Saturday, November 9th, I would potentially have weeks with Jeffrey. The news I last had is there is going to be a lot of waiting in the weeks ahead. I know that is because the neurologist team told me on Saturday morning we had to keep waiting to see, that miracles happen, that we do not know enough about what the brain is capable of. I also know I could not believe what my instinct knew was true because it was too inconceivable. His last words flash in my brain again. I love you cutie.

    I have talked about knowing in my body Jeffrey was gone when I found him, and I do still trust I knew that. But I could not listen to my instinct in the aftermath of finding Jeffrey. Experts were the 9-1-1 operators talking me through CPR for the 8 minutes it took the first responders to arrive. Experts were the paramedics who spent 5 minutes alternating between CPR and defibrillation in an attempt to bring back a asystole pulse. Experts were the ER nurses who pumped him full of medicines to stabilize his body. Experts were the ER doctors who cooled his body down to 91 degrees (or was it 89?) to minimize the stress as Jeffrey’s brain tried to stop swelling and connect to his heart. What do my instincts know about what science and medicine can do for our bodies? Absolutely nothing.

    I do not know how it has been two months since we gave Jeffrey to the organ donation team. I just spent two hours trying to explain in this post that I do not understand how on a Thursday night, I was a therapist who survived Election Week and 20 hours later I was a fiancé performing CPR on her partner. 20 hours separate before and after as documented on social media. I will end this post as I suspect I will be ending many posts:

    What the fuck?

  • A Bike Ride

    Somewhere in the twilight where awake meets sleep, I dreamt of planning a bike ride with you. I imagined talking to you about it being 70 degrees on Thursday and how we should take advantage of that and go for a bike ride to the park. We could bring Dottie in the backpack and some snacks from PCC. As quickly as I envisioned the warmth of the sun and the cool feeling of the earth beneath us, I realized you were not here to actually go on the ride. That it will be 70 degrees in Chico, not in Seattle. That I am now in a totally different world than I was. The sense memory of crisp air on my face as we rode bikes down the Burke and the look of serenity in your smile as you pedaled down the path faded. My eyes jolted open, and I immediately pulled Dottie closer. Tears did not fall as I lay contemplating how silly it felt to plan a day with you when you are not here anymore. I checked the time. 12:23am. Great – it was going to be a long night if this was how it started.

    As I reflect on this now, I find it interesting tears did not and are not falling. Why is that? Tears shed from my body with any sort of focus on how much I miss you, a river forcing itself through the damn. But not now with the sense-memory of planning a day with you? I think I feel relief to still know you are there somewhere. That I can feel you even though you left me. Whether planned or not, a detail I can never know, you did leave me. That part, the leaving, feels so clear.

    This is the first time I have felt like writing to you or telling you how I feel about what is happening in my life. I wish you were here, and I am furious that you are not. I am so angry you could not manage your life more effectively, that trauma, neurodivergence, mental illness and a society that closes doors to discomfort prevented you from learning to manage your life. You, the smartest man I will ever know, could not see a pathway out. I am devastated I cannot talk to you about it. That you cannot reassure me yourself you did not drink as much as you did on purpose. I cannot live in the story where you killed yourself because that story is too fucking sad. You promised me you would not leave me in that way, that you would not end your life and, even if you had to break that promise, I just do not think you would have drunk yourself to death on purpose. That feels too messy and sloppy. I do not think you would have let me find you in that position, aspirated on your vomit and not breathing. You would not want to burden me that way. I know if love were enough, you would still be here. I know this is not my fault. Yet, knowing this does not change the shape of my anger and that you are not here. The only person I want reassurance from cannot provide it. Sitting in that reality is what causes tears to fall. They are falling now in hot globs down my face. I need your hug, your hands on my face, your words. Your beautiful words.

    I found you on our dining room floor 61 days ago. My body knew when I found you that the text you sent that morning was the last time you would speak to me. “I love you cutie.” For the past few weeks, my entire body aches all the time. I am storing grief in my hips and the pain leads to restless sleep. I wake up a lot and wish I could reach across the expanse of our bed and grab your hand as I used to. Instead, I hit play on another round of Gilmore Girls or How I Met Your Mother and avoid wondering about when I will sleep again. As if there is any way to know.

  • The Grief Palace

    I am really scared of how much this loss is fucking me up and that I’m not going to be the same person anymore. I have no way of knowing just how much this is changing who I am. This is Big “T” trauma, and I cannot believe I’m in it. 

    In response to feeling disconnected from any reality, I have started imagining a building where all of my grief lives. Right now, its shape is unknown, but I can feel the immense shadow of a structure built with the oldest and grayest stone. I can smell the damp air, and it is the kind of cold only January can bring. Fog shrouds the Grief Palace, making understanding its scale and shape impossible, although I keep trying to see it. 

    Despite the lack of detail on what the building looks like, there is a stately wooden door that is heavy and hot. When I touch the door, the energy of the grief pours into my body like a fire. My chest tightens and I stop breathing. Tears pour out of my eyes attempting to tamper the blaze, but the fire rages through my torso, spreading into my limbs. Eventually I remember to breathe and begin gently and rhythmically tapping my chest to activate my parasympathetic nervous system just as I have taught clients to do. 

    To get through Christmas, I added a moat around the Grief Palace. Before leaving my bedroom yesterday morning, I imagined raising the drawbridge so I could not walk across to touch the palace. While still visible in the distance, Grief was not something to feel until I had time to attend to the panic it causes. 

    The moat proved structurally sound as planned. At home last night while watching Elf I allowed myself to approach the Grief Palace. I inventoried the thoughts I had throughout the day of Jeffrey. I wanted to show Jeffrey my gifts, to ask him a question about religion, validate he heard so-and-so say what I just heard, and listen to him explain all the facts about the hummingbirds at the feeder. Tears poured out.  As I cried, I saw an image of the moat flooding the land, keeping me from the safety of stable ground. Then I realized I stopped breathing and once again began tapping my chest. 

    In the panic, several thoughts happen: The grief is too much. Even my attempts to visualize containment are futile. I can’t hold it all. This is never going to get better. How am I going to survive this? Then I remembered this is Bjg “T” trauma and I am not supposed to hold it all. Big “T” trauma is an event that challenges the concept of Self because the emotional pain is SO much, the brain short circuits. Our amygdala (the fear center) becomes hypersensitive to signals of danger. To compensate for the misfire, the brain activates your nervous system and takes offline any systems it does not need to keep you alive/safe. These offline systems include the hippocampus (memory sequencing) and prefrontal cortex (emotional processing). We do not need these functions to run from a wild animal. Our brain in split seconds can decide what we are experiencing is too traumatic to keep all systems going. In short, during a big “T” trauma our brain splits reality to help us survive. After the trauma, we have to make meaning of what happened as our brains continue to misfire in its attempts to sequence the event and integrate the story with the emotions. This process sometimes forms post-traumatic stress disorder.

    In my case, losing Jeffrey was so traumatic, my brain has not integrated the emotions with the memory. I cannot see the Grief Palace and when I try to, my body becomes so overwhelmed I have a panic attack. 

    Nothing and everything makes sense about this loss. I feel grateful to understand what is happening to me and so confused by everything I do not know about it. I want to see the Grief Palace, but the fog is too thick. I climb all that way for no view. A dissatisfying hike where you have to tell yourself “at least the snacks were good and I got some exercise”. What a crock of bullshit.

  • 2024 Really was a Horrible Year

    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. 

  • A Grief Observed

    Yesterday, I found myself with hours of free time and did not have the attention span for watching Housewives drama. I picked up the book my therapist suggested. I started it a week ago and put it down when I realized my thoughts were wandering and whole pages were turning without my knowing what was on them. A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis is an inside view of how he experienced his wife dying and his internal narrative that came with negotiating loss. I am not someone who finds comfort in the concept of God and it does not take a skilled analyst to see the religious undertones of Chronicles of Narnia. I started reading the book with skepticism as to how I can find kinship in this author’s experience. Kinship is what I’m hungry for. I need stories of other people examining their experience of loss, of grief, and of life after death.

    As I sat to read, the following passage literally took my breath away. Lewis is describing the inaccuracy of memory, and how our brains efficiently eliminate details of our loved ones because we grow so acclimated to their presence, we do not need to remember every line, color and shape of their physical being. We know our loved ones in our bodies, in our souls. Then Death begs the questions of what is real in our memory, and where do our loved ones go when they are gone from what we remember?

    “Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes – like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night – little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape will be quite hidden in the end. Ten minutes – ten seconds – of the real H. would correct all this. And yet, even if those ten seconds were allowed me, one second later the little flakes would begin to fall again.” – C.S. Lewis

    For a moment I imagined what it would be like to have 10 seconds with Jeffrey. 30 days after his death and the idea of having more time had not crossed my mind. He died. He is gone. That’s it. I started crying on the great expanse of my mother’s living room sofa. How had I not thought of this, of what it would be like to see him again? The comfort of his hug and hearing his voice feels so overwhelming. He was always so warm. I miss his presence and his love enveloping me. The closest I have come to feeling him is standing in the sun on these crisp Winter days. As I cried on the sofa, I felt embarrassed for not having thought of bargaining for time earlier in the 30 days since he died. Then I remembered that there is nothing to bargain for. Jeffrey died. He is not coming back. I will never ever receive a hug from him again.

    I am not sure how to make meaning of the feeling in my body that I can only describe as longing, emptiness, and weight. I feel heaviness in my bones and muscles. Loss is a stomachache, a panic attack, and the swelling under my eyelashes documenting the tears freshly leaked from my eyes.

    I wonder if Jeffrey read A Grief Observed or not. I wonder if he would have liked it. What would his critiques have been? So far, losing Jeffrey has meant having to come to terms with the fact that I will never ever know the answers to these questions.

    Fuck.