A Natalie Observed

Tag: Widow

  • 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.

  • 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.