A Natalie Observed

Tag: TraumaticLoss

  • 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.