A Natalie Observed

Tag: YoungWidow

  • 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.

     

     

  • 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.