What the hell happened in 2023?

Lost year: Part I

It’s been two and a half years since Rob died, and I’ve only just started to process my time as a caregiver and the years that followed.

The caregiver element is something I don’t really talk about with others. It was the biggest honor of my life to do what I could to care for him when he was ill, but it was also incredibly traumatizing. When you’re in the middle of it all, you don’t have time to process how fucked up everything is, you just have to do what you have to do. So sometimes, usually after getting hit with some sort of trigger, I’ll just think about his last year and wonder how the fuck that was my life. Sorting out feeding tubes, drainage pouches, medications, emergency hospital visits, hospice nurses, vomit bags, gauze, gauze, and more gauze… I can only really talk about it with my friends who are also cancer widow/ers, like we’re wizened veterans swapping war stories over cheap beers at the VFW. Very little disgusts us. We’ve seen the full gamut of what the human body can produce, what it can do, what lies beneath the flesh and bone. But just one little thing—a smell, a visual, a sound—can put us right back in the trenches. IV poles. Fentanyl Patches. Horrors big and small.

But I have a better recollection of those days, when every day brought about some new terror, than I do of the days that followed.

I often joke that I have no idea what happened in 2023—the first full year without Rob. In reality, I remember three things: One, I remember going to Europe for three weeks in the summer. Two, I remember crashing an Arctic Monkeys after party where I jumped into a pool and talked to the guys in the band and their respective girlfriends soaking wet, wearing nothing but an oversized Fontaines DC shirt I bought at the show and American Apparel underwear that I bought many years prior. Three, I remember hooking up with a guy who lives on the other side of the world.

That’s fucking it. I didn’t see many movies. I watched a lot of reruns. I didn’t pick up a new hobby unless you count hoarding screenshots. I was 32, jobless, recently widowed, deeply traumatized, and trying to make sense of this new world.

But I thought it would be a fun (kinda) idea to jog my memory about what else happened in 2023. I take photos and videos (and screenshots, of which there are thousands) to a compulsive extent, and I knew the answer to one of my lost years could be found in the archives. I’m going to go through my phone three months at a time to try to make sense of that weird fucking year—my first as a widow, without Rob, trying to keep going.

Here’s a crash course on my 2023, Q1.