256: What if you prepared your boyfriend's body?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. What the fuck do I do after this? How do I even begin to process this? This was so beyond anything that I had experienced up to this point in my life that I was completely at a loss. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening.

Episode 256 What If You Prepared Your Boyfriend's Body?

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I was born in suburban New Jersey to two very loving parents. They were always very loving and affectionate towards one another and very much like a solid team who really, for my early childhood, gave me everything that a kid could want. And I really enjoyed my childhood. My dad was disabled. He had a disease called CRPS, which stands for Chronic Regional Pain Syndrome.

He was in this horrible, crippling pain all the time. My dad wasn't able to work, so my mom did. And I do remember my dad struggling and being in pain, but more than that, I remember him just being a very loving, doting parent. On a rare day that he felt really good, he was able to go outside with me and we played catch. And I just remember having so much fun and being so happy that I was spending time with him because he wasn't able to do that very often.

So, it was Easter morning. My mom was setting all the Easter baskets out in the living room, and I could tell something was wrong. And my dad wasn't there, which was odd because he was always there in the morning, especially on a day like Easter. I remember my mom asking my sister and I to open our Easter baskets and her silently crying but making us go through the motions.

And once we were done, she took us into her bedroom and said, I have some very bad news. And with all the tact of a seven-year-old, I asked her, did daddy die? And I just remember my mom completely losing it when I said that and just bawling her eyes out. And she couldn't even get the word yes out of her mouth. She just nodded her head and pulled my sister and I into probably the tightest hug that I have ever experienced.

And her and my sister just sobbing. I'm sure I was too. The night before, he had gone to his brother's house, my uncle, to watch hockey and spend the night. And he was on so many painkillers and prescriptions that he actually took some sleeping medications too close to the time that he had taken his pain medications and it stopped his breathing.

It never occurred to me as a child that my dad would die. My memory is just being like, "What does that mean that my dad is dead?" And naively thinking that, "Oh, well, it's Easter, so that means he's gonna come back in three days, right?" My mom, within a few months, started dating somebody else.

It really sent me as like a seven or eight year old into more of a tailspin because it's like, okay, my dad's dead. Who is this new guy? Who is this person that is suddenly around all the time? And it was very confusing. I wasn't angry about it until my mom's boyfriend started becoming abusive towards her.

Which at that point, I became very angry because it was such a difference between how my dad treated her to how this new man was treating her. I knew it wasn't right and I knew it wasn't healthy, but I didn't know how to communicate that to anybody around me, especially not my mom.

After we moved to Florida, that's really when it took off because we were now separated from my mom's support system that she had, my mom's friends, anybody that she knew that she could reach out to. And I think he really took advantage of that. And that's when it started escalating a lot.

There were many, many, many nights where I would just sit in my closet and read or play with my toys and just attempt to drown out all the screaming and all of the verbal insults that he was throwing at my mom, calling her an ugly bitch, a fat bitch, anything that he could to get under her skin and make her feel less than. I've come to an understanding of that came from necessity rather than desire.

I just lost my husband and I'm trying to make it on my own with a 15-year-old and a 7-year-old. My mom didn't want to be in that relationship. She had to be. So I understand why she did that, but still feeling a little bit resentful that it was allowed to happen and that I was allowed to experience all those things during a part of my life that was very significant developmentally. Growing up prior to my dad passing, I was definitely a very happy-go-lucky, outgoing kid.

I have plenty of pictures of me acting like a wild child and stories from my sister and her friends about me being rambunctious and energetic.

After my dad died, I became a lot more subdued and quiet, which was only exacerbated by this abusive relationship that my mom was now in, where every part of me just wanted to become as small as possible so that I could avoid attention and avoid setting off fights, just becoming small and reserved to the point where if I wasn't seen or heard, maybe it would make things a little bit easier to deal with.

That part of my personality definitely persisted until that relationship ended. I met my best friend in seventh grade, right in the middle of when things were starting to get really bad in my house. As much as possible, she would either be at my house or I would be at her house because we knew that if our parents saw that we had company, they would be less likely to end up in a nuclear screening match.

And also during this time in high school, while I'm living in this tumultuous house, I remember that being the first time that I ever considered committing suicide myself. I wasn't dealing with it. I didn't have a therapist or somebody trusted that I could confide in in that time. So I turned all those negative feelings towards myself. I went immediately from my father dying to all of a sudden having to navigate this tumultuous, abusive household.

So I didn't have room to grieve my father. There would be times like during my graduation where it would hit me like, my dad's not here. He's not going to see me graduate. So things like that would happen where it would be more of an acute sense of grief. But I never went through the grieving process completely until well after I became an adult and well after my mom left that relationship.

I was in survival mode basically for 10 years. I wasn't there when she first told him that she was leaving, but I do remember her saying that he did not take it well. After we moved, he somehow found out where we were living and would drive by the house and knock on the door and call my mom incessantly trying to get her to come back.

He loved to tell us he had been diagnosed with lung cancer and how could you do this to somebody who's dying and is going through cancer? Didn't you ever care about me? Very emotionally manipulative, trying whatever he could to get back. And it did work for a little bit. My mom did invite him back into the house after he had promised that he would change and he would be better and all of these empty promises. And that was during the time where I was getting ready to go to college.

My school of choice at that time was the University of Florida, about four hours away from where we lived. I decided not to apply to that school because I didn't want to be away from my mom because I was afraid that if I wasn't there, things would escalate even further and he would end up seriously hurting her. I really held it against her and was angry and upset that I had to be the caretaker and I had to be the strong one for so long.

Eventually, she finally kicked him out for good. But I didn't want to be in the house anymore because I was mad at my mom for making me deal with that shit for 10 years. I ended up meeting somebody at work who I moved in with very quickly within a couple of months.

He was 28 and I was 19, so there was quite a bit of an age gap. And he came in and swept me off my feet and was very nice and very charming. And now as an adult, I recognize that he was love bombing me, which is a manipulation tactic. But being still a kid myself and only being 19 and not having much experience, I thought it was great. This is amazing. And I can finally get out and I can start making my own life.

Shortly after I moved in with him, he also became verbally and emotionally abusive and did a lot of the same things that my stepdad had done to my mom where he made me feel like nobody else would ever love me. And I can't leave him because I'll never find anybody else and that I'll never be good enough for him.

Whenever I would go to class at the community college I was attending, he would beg me to stay home and just tell me that he would take care of me and I didn't need to be serious about the degree that I was pursuing. So I ended up dropping out of college. As I was home more and was experiencing this escalation of his abuse and manipulation towards me is when I started making my own exit plan.

There was one day we were driving through the apartment complex and there were some landscapers working and one of them was crossing the road in front of his car and randomly out of the blue, he throws a racial slur at them. They were Latino and talks about how lazy they are. And something inside me just snapped. And I was like, I can't be with a person who talks to other people like this. That night when he left for work, I packed up all my stuff and I called my mom.

my mother being the amazing woman that she is said i'll help you come get your stuff you know you always have a room and a home here i beat myself up a lot for a long time for allowing myself to fall into that same pattern that i hated so much i felt so stupid throughout my entire life i have always been incredibly interested in medical science and anatomy and physiology

When I was probably 16 or 17, when I started thinking about college, I knew that I couldn't afford to go to medical school, even if I wanted to, because we were not very well off. So I started researching what I could do if I was interested in anatomy and physiology without going to medical school. And I stumbled upon a college in St. Petersburg, Florida, that offered mortuary sciences as a degree.

I started looking at it and researching and I was like, wow, this is amazing. I can be a funeral director and I can help people go through the grieving process while at the same time being able to do something that's heavily involved with anatomy and physiology, which I love so much. And it felt very natural because I'm a caretaker at heart. I love caring for those around me. And that's what I did for so long with my mom. I think I can do this.

I had mentioned to the abusive partner that I was seeing that I was circling back around to thinking about going to mortuary school because originally after high school, I went to a nursing program. And he looked at me dead in the eyes and laughed and said, that's disgusting. I don't know why anybody would want to do that. And I'm definitely not going to let you be a funeral director.

So once he said that, I kind of closed the books on it for a little bit. But once I got out of that relationship, kind of out of spite, I was like, fuck this guy. I'm going to go to mortuary school and be a funeral director. And that's exactly what I did. I loved mortuary school. I thought it was the coolest thing. I was having a great time, so much so that I decided I should try to see if I could get a jumpstart on my internship while I'm still going through school.

So I started working as an intern at the funeral home while I was going through school. The majority of my work was directly with the decedents in our care center, preparing bodies for cremation. I did a lot of observational learning and shadowing.

And the thing that I really clung to and became very good at was doing restorative arts and cosmetics on the deceased. So if anybody had ever come in with any visible wounds on their face, hands, arms, anything like that, I would go in and I would use wax and different materials to kind of rebuild those services and make them presentable for viewings. And I really, really, really enjoyed that because not only was it a test of my skill,

I knew that I was allowing the families of the decedents to see them one last time. I took a lot of pride in my work, and I really enjoyed being able to give those families a last look at their loved ones, where they don't have to see the pain that they went through before dying, and they just get to see them as they are and say goodbye. Outside of the care center, when I wasn't working with the decedents,

I would shadow my mentor, who really became like a dad to me and still is a dad to me. He really taught me what it means to create a meaningful goodbye for a family and how to be compassionate to those families that are going through the grieving process. It seemed very natural to me. I was never afraid of any of the decedents. I never felt spooked or anything like that.

I very much felt like when I was with the deceased, I was their caretaker. I have seen peaceful deaths and I have seen incredibly violent deaths. I've seen a lot of tragedy. I've taken care of a lot of young people who are my age who passed and children. I wouldn't say death is my friend. I would say it's an acquaintance and I have a working relationship with it.

Every time I was with a decedent, I would find myself thinking about their lives and thinking about how they died. Death is kind to some, and death can be incredibly violent to others. I have seen deaths that a lot of people would label completely unfair and unwarranted.

And I've also seen people come through my care who I know were not amazing people in life. And no matter if you're a good person or if you're a bad person, death doesn't care about that. Death treats them the same and I treated them the same. I really tried to do the best that I could to always be respectful and always do the absolute best that I could to take care of those people.

Working with so many decedents and people who have passed has made me more conscious and more aware of what I do with my own life. It has made me, I think, kinder and more accepting of a lot of things. I try not to take small things seriously anymore because in the grand scheme of things, we're all gonna die and it's not gonna matter. And working at the funeral home really did open up the doors for me to start grieving my own father.

It gave me a lot of comfort to know that or hope that the people that took care of his body would do the same thing that I was doing for others. So working with death and being around death so often really gave me a chance to start accepting the passing of my father and to be able to start working towards some kind of resolution with my grief.

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This Is Actually Happening is sponsored by ADT. ADT knows a lot can happen in a second. One second, you're happily single. And the next second, you catch a glimpse of someone and you don't want to be. Maybe one second, you have a business idea that seems like a pipe dream. And the next, you have an LLC and a dream come true. And when it comes to your home, one second, you feel safe,

and the next something goes wrong but with ADT's 24/7 professional monitoring you still feel safe because when every second counts count on ADT visit ADT.com today so i was 21 i had been single for for a while mostly focusing on working at the funeral home

I had decided to download a dating app just kind of for the fun of it. I didn't really expect much to come out of it. But after a couple of weeks, I met my boyfriend. Sometimes you, you know, you just feel a spark with someone and that's very much what happened with him. So we go on our first date and proceeded to go into like a normal relationship.

A couple more weeks went by and during this time, I know him, I feel like, but at the same time, I feel like I don't really know him. So I look him up on Facebook and I find his profile and I see that he has a daughter, which he hasn't mentioned to me. So of course, I bring that up and come to find out he didn't want to tell me that he had a daughter because he thought it would change my opinion of him or the relationship. I was accepting of that.

You know, a little time goes by. We're dating for a few months at this point. And what he had told me was that he was living with some roommates who were married but going through a separation and things weren't great at his house. So I never went over there. We would either go out on dates or we would hang out at my house where I was living with my mom and my sister.

As things become more serious, he tells me that he's trying to move out of where he lives and he's having trouble finding somewhere else. You know, essentially just he's down on his luck. So I talked to my mom and my mom loved him. My sister loved him. I loved him. So we had kind of come to the determination that we would invite him to move in with us temporarily and then he and I could save up and move out on our own.

And after he moves in, I find out that he wasn't living with roommates who were getting separated. He was the roommate that was getting separated and he was living with his wife, which I didn't know about. He hadn't told me anything about. In the span of a few months, I'm finding out that he has a daughter and then he's also married but getting separated.

He had assured me that he was no longer with his wife romantically. They were living in separate rooms, which I believed because he would FaceTime me every night and his wife never came in. So I forgave him for hiding that from me. And he continued to live at my house. And over the next several months, things kind of deteriorated between us. He started acting pretty erratically. And I noticed some behavioral changes there.

At the time, I had the sides of my head shaved and I would go to a barber like once a month just to get the sides trimmed up. And there was one time where I had told my boyfriend, hey, I'm going to go to the barber after work and then I'll be home. And I went to a male barber and he completely flipped about the fact that I was going to go see a male barber, even though I had before and he had never seemed to have a problem with it.

So I started noticing these behavioral changes in him and wasn't really happy about that because I didn't want to go back to being in a relationship that was controlling, but was kind of struggling internally because he's living with us. He is going through all of this stuff with his wife that he is separating from. So I decided to stick it out.

He truly was, at his heart, an amazing person. He was kind and caring and always happy-go-lucky. And then there was another side of him that was jealous and impulsive and angry about a lot of things.

It was almost as if there were two people. And more often, he was expressing that other side of him where he didn't seem like himself. He was spending money very impulsively. He was acting a little bit reckless. He was lashing out at me.

I tried to get him to see a psychologist and kind of asked him how he was feeling about it and he said he was looking forward to seeing a psychiatrist because he agreed that he hadn't been feeling like himself and he hadn't been acting like himself. At the time I was doing what I thought was right and what I thought would help him most. Until one day, I'm at my second job

In addition to working at a funeral home, I'm also managing a tattoo shop in the evenings and on the weekends. And I am trying to text him and he's not answering. All of a sudden, my mom calls me. She is crying. She can barely speak. And finally, she tells me my boyfriend has passed away. So I remember in that moment being absolutely shell-shocked.

I hung up with my mom and I went up to my boss and I told her, "My boyfriend is dead and I need somebody to drive me home because I don't think I can drive." I see that there already is a medical examiner's van outside of my house. I saw my mom outside and I ran up to her and I just said, "What happened?" And she told me that she started getting worried about him because it was getting close to the time when he would need to leave her work.

He was a chef, so he worked a lot of late nights. She tried texting him and he didn't answer, so she just assumed that he was asleep. So she knocks on our bedroom door. He doesn't answer, so she just went in to check on him. She didn't realize what she was seeing at first. She saw him standing up by the closet, and she thought that he was so tired that he had fallen asleep standing up.

But as she looked closer and, you know, in a few moments realized that he had actually hung himself. My mom is a small woman and she tried to pick him up and help him, but she wasn't able to. So she called my sister and my sister is the one who opened the closet door and released the rope that was holding him up. And my sister tried to do CPR on him.

I remember my mom telling me that she thought he was still alive because he had made a noise when my sister started doing CPR. But with what I know, I know that that was just air escaping out of his lungs when he was released from the rope and going through his vocal cords. But my mom and my sister genuinely believed that he was going to be okay and that he hadn't died.

As my sister is trying to do CPR, my mom calls 911 and they're able to determine pretty quickly that he had been there for a while and he was completely gone. I was in crisis management mode. I was not allowing myself to feel any emotions towards what was happening. This horrible thing has just happened. I don't have time to sit here and cry. Things need to be done and things need to happen.

And that time right after his death, I really blamed myself a lot for not being able to see the signs and not doing more. And I felt like the least that I could do for him was take care of him in death and see him through to the other side, just as I had done with so many people before.

After his autopsy was completed and his body was released from the medical examiner's office, my mentor and I drove together to the medical examiner's office to pick him up. I did the typical opening up the body bag and looking at the identification tags and signing off on all the paperwork.

It was at that moment where I opened the bag and I saw his foot with a tag on it that it really hit me. There was no chance ever that he would walk back in through the front door at the end of his shift. Everything kind of became very real in that moment when I saw his foot with the medical examiner's tag on it. He was dead.

I log him in. I put him in the cooler. I sit with my mentor and he is obviously very concerned for me. I was very steadfast in that I wanted to help take care of him and I wanted to be there for him. And I wanted this to be my last act for him.

We meet with the rest of his family and his wife, who is still the legal next of kin at that point because they hadn't officially gotten a divorce or separated legally. You know, she decides that she wants him cremated, but they want to do a viewing for his family to say one last goodbye because it was so sudden.

So when you're autopsied, obviously you have the typical Y-shaped incision that needs to be re-sewn after embalming. But in my boyfriend's case, he was also a tissue and organ and bone donor.

So in addition to the typical autopsy sutures, he also had sutures that went from his shoulder down to his wrists where the long bones in his arm had been removed. And then he had incisions on both legs where the long bones in his legs had been removed. A lot of the skin on his back had been harvested for donation.

On top of seeing the ligature marks around his neck, which at this point are very dark purple and mottled due to the time that had passed, I also saw the rest of his body completely ripped up and torn up. So it was very difficult for me to do all of those sutures.

I did as much as I could. I sutured everything. But while I was trying to set his features, like his mouth and his eyes, it just became a little bit too much for me. And at that point, my embalming mentor stepped in and finished it up. But I did bathe him after everything was said and done. I dressed him. I did his cosmetics and his restorative arts. I wheeled him into the chapel for viewing.

And I remember looking at him before anybody else came into the room, and it's really hammering home that I'm looking at my boyfriend, but at this point, it's not my boyfriend anymore, it's, he's a corpse. So I typically don't use the word corpse to describe people that have passed on. To me, corpse is a very dehumanizing word.

but I find it fitting to use it in that instance because as I'm looking at my boyfriend, I'm getting a sense of being almost in the uncanny valley where it looks like my boyfriend and I know it's my boyfriend, but at the same time he looks so drastically different than he did when he was alive that I almost can't believe that it's the same person.

I see the glue that's used to hold his mouth and his eyes shut. I see the slight misalignment in his forehead where the top of his skull isn't perfectly aligned with the rest of his facial bones. I see all of the drastic swelling that has occurred because of the tissue and bone donation and the embalming.

It's finally hitting me that I'm not looking at my boyfriend as I remember him and as I know him, but I'm looking at the corpse of my boyfriend, where all animation has left, all semblance of humanity is gone, and it's just the shell of who he was.

He looks like any other decedent that I would see in the care center. But no, this is my boyfriend. This is somebody that I love and I care about and up until recently have had an amazing relationship with him. And now he's dead and he's laying on a table in my funeral home. And I just sewed up all of his limbs and dressed his dead body. And fuck, what do I do now? Where do I go from here after this?

During the private viewing that we did with his family, not only am I dealing with seeing my dead boyfriend, but this is the first time that I'm meeting his wife, who understandably has some very negative feelings towards me because even though I had no idea that she existed until I found out about it, she's under the impression that I stole her husband away.

So I'm dealing with such a cacophony of emotions and crazy events that I'm trying to navigate. It's at this point when I am in the viewing room that it's really starting to hit me that this is almost over and what the fuck do I do after this? How do I even begin to process this? This was so beyond anything that I had experienced up to this point in my life that I was completely at a loss.

Immediately after he died, I had found his cell phone. I saw on there a lot of texts from this female's name that I didn't recognize. I saw lots of texts and explicit pictures from this woman. He had been cheating on me for a couple of weeks prior to his death.

Having to deal with that realization and finding out that he had lied to me even more than I thought, I kind of, I think, decided in my head that this is too much to deal with. So I'm just going to keep going like nothing happened and I will deal with it later. For that first year after he died, I poured myself into working both at the tattoo shop and at the funeral home, even though I was really in no place to be doing so mentally.

I tried to block it out as much as I could for that first year because I did not feel like I could deal with it. That year after he died was the first time that I had explored self-harm. I also started dealing with my own suicidal thoughts and ideations and just this crushing feeling of, I don't think I want to kill myself, but I wouldn't be mad if I got hit by a car and died tomorrow either.

After I struggled with suicidal ideation in high school and went through the abusive relationship that I did and finally got out of that, it was like I was finally really happy and enjoying what I was doing. And I found a lot of meaning and value in what I was doing. And now all of a sudden, not only am I back at square one, I'm worse off than I was in high school because now in

Instead of just having these intrusive thoughts about dying, it feels more tangible to me because I had just seen somebody that I loved go through it. I realized if I die, I don't have to deal with any of this. I don't have to go through the motions every day and pretend that I'm okay. And I don't have to deal with these nightmares that I'm now experiencing almost on a nightly basis.

It became almost comforting to me to know that at any time I could just die. At the same time, knowing that I didn't want to put my immediate family, my mom and my sister, through what I had just witnessed my boyfriend's family go through.

You know, I saw his mom and his dad wailing when he was on the table during the viewing, completely losing their minds with grief. And I didn't want to do that to my own family. But knowing that it was an option kind of prevented me from doing it in a way because now it's a backup plan.

was really hard for me because I thought my life was finally going in a direction that I was happy with, that I could enjoy, that I could find value and meaning in. And then all of a sudden, I'm dealing with grief and loss and PTSD, especially for that first year after he died. I would have a lot of nightmares of seeing him on the embalming table

There were some nightmares that I would have where I saw him in front of me hanging from the rope and he was trying to get me to help him, but I couldn't. That was a large part of what I dealt with with the post-traumatic stress disorder and also just not helping myself any by continuing to work at the funeral home and continuing to see that embalming table every day that he was on.

continuing to have decedents who would come in who had died in the same manner. Both my embalming and my funeral director mentors tried to shield me from that. But of course, in going about my normal day-to-day job, they couldn't shield me from it completely. I did see a lot of the people that came in who had died by hanging and things like that.

It would trigger a lot of flashbacks and visuals in my mind of things and then trigger a lot of nightmares. Even now, I struggle to see nooses and things like that. I don't like anything being near my neck because it brings a lot of those feelings back. It felt like, to me, battling my own mind for a long time.

My own mind is stabbing me in the back and keeps bringing this to the forefront and keeps replaying all of these things constantly. So I'm angry at the situation that brought me there, and I'm angry at myself almost and angry at my brain for not allowing me a moment to rest.

When does this get better? At what point do I stop having nightmares every single night? At what point can I go to work and look at that embalming table and not see my boyfriend on it? Just feeling very helpless and afraid that this was going to be my new everyday normal for the rest of my life.

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He didn't leave a note at all. There was nothing that he left behind. I really tried to come up with a reason why he would have done that, knowing that he had a daughter, a very young daughter, and there were people around him that loved him. And I just placed all of that blame on myself for a long time and what I could have done better or what I should have done. My survivor's guilt was very, very bad.

As time went on and my PTSD and my depression got worse, I started thinking, "Why did he decide to do this in my bedroom? What was the logic? There must have been none. There must have been no consideration for me or my family for him to have done this in the way that he did." I would still be comfortable in my own home and in my bedroom if he hadn't done this.

And I became very, very angry at him for leaving behind this mess that I now had to deal with and his family had to deal with. And I didn't have a healthy way to express that anger. So a lot of the grief that I hadn't addressed in childhood from my dad passing came up during this time as well.

It almost felt like a slap in the face to me because he knew that I felt very abandoned when my dad died. And now he has done the same thing to me. I'm feeling very much like every man that I have cared about in my life in some way or another has abandoned me or left me. It is making me so angry and making me feel like why even bother becoming close to somebody if they're just going to leave?

Why bother? Why should I make steps towards getting my life back on an upward track when it's just all going to come crashing down again, just like it has before? I felt almost like a wild animal who doesn't know when they're going to get their next meal and doesn't know if they're going to find shelter. Am I going to have to deal with some other horribly traumatizing event as soon as I start being happy again?

I was hell-bent on finishing my program and becoming licensed and working full-time as a funeral director.

I thought that I was still performing well in both of my jobs, both at the funeral home and at the tattoo shop. But it was becoming more and more apparent as time passed by to those around me that I was not handling it. I was not doing well. My performance was dropping. I was making careless mistakes at the funeral home. You know, I was half-assing my work at the tattoo shop. And eventually, about a year after my boyfriend had died,

My boss at the funeral home, who is the closest thing that I've had to a real father since my dad passed, sat me down and looked me in the eyes and told me, I know you're not okay. I know you're not handling this. I love you and I care about you. And I don't think you can be here anymore without it negatively impacting your mental health. As much as I would love to keep you here, I don't think you should do this job anymore.

And that was a very sobering moment for me because it was the first time anybody had directly confronted me about not being okay. And it took somebody sitting me down and telling me that they knew I wasn't okay for me to realize that I can't do this anymore.

And I started trying to make moves to find another job and not be in the funeral home every single day, which was not helping my mental health and was probably holding me back from fully healing. But it's also the realization that I'm going to be giving up the best job that I have ever had, the most fulfilling job that I've ever had, and the only job that I have truly enjoyed doing ever.

I was now having to grieve the loss of something that I held very dear to me, that I loved doing, and that brought me a lot of personal fulfillment and satisfaction. I was just so angry at nothing in particular, angry at the world, the universe, whatever you want to call it. I was just like, fuck, I'm already down and I'm still being kicked. At what point have I been beaten down enough where the universe says, all right, she's had enough, let her be.

You know, I'm grieving my father who passed as a child. I'm grieving my childhood almost in a way because I felt like that was taken from me with my dad's death and with the abusive relationship that my mom was in for so long. I'm grieving my boyfriend who has just killed himself. And now I'm grieving the career that I want so badly, that I'm so good at, that I enjoy so much and trying to figure out how I was going to support myself moving forward if I didn't have this job.

Because now the survival mode is not only just how am I going to get through this, it was an endless question of how. How do I make this transition that feels so monumental to me right now? I started seeing the psychiatrist who treats my mom and my sister. So he gave me crisis counseling. And then I began seeing my current therapist who has been very helpful in helping me navigate the grieving process.

I still love my boyfriend and I have a lot of good memories of him. But therapy has also taught me that it's okay to still be angry because at the end of the day, he caused me a lot of pain. So my therapist has really opened the door for me to allow myself to feel both sides of that.

Whereas when I was trying to deal with it on my own, anytime I would have those feelings, afterward I would be like, how could you be so angry and resentful to somebody who was obviously feeling so badly that they thought they had no other choice? It was difficult for me to come to terms with the fact that both of those emotions and feelings can exist at the same time and both are valuable in their own way.

He did do something that hurt me very, very, very much that has left a lot of fallout for me to deal with. And it's okay to kind of feel shitty about it. And it's okay to be angry at all of the lies he told me while also still recognizing that he was very thoughtful and kind to me. And he, for the most part, treated me very, very well up until he started experiencing those behavior changes. And I...

And realizing that me speaking about my experience and what those actions did to me is not shit talking the dead or speaking negatively of the dead. It's telling the truth.

I really wanted to use this experience as a way to maybe not bond with his wife, but at least form some kind of a connection because just as much as I'm going through this terrible thing, she is also going through it with somebody that she obviously loved and maybe find something positive or healthy to come out of this experience that we're both going through now. As much as I wish that we could have formed some kind of a bond, we didn't.

I desperately wanted her to know that I didn't intentionally act as a homewrecker and that I didn't intentionally hurt her. But I understand her point of view completely. She understandably, again, doesn't want anything to do with me.

And abandonment, in my mind, manifested as knowing that eventually everyone is going to disappear and I'm going to be on my own. So the only person that I can rely on and the only person that I can trust is myself because I'm the only one who will never leave.

It made it difficult for a while to form meaningful relationships with people because in the back of my mind, I would always think you're not going to be here anymore. So I'm not going to get too invested. It took me a while and it took me being in therapy to be able to open up more and let people in. And it took a while to dismantle those walls that I built up and took me a long time to realize that I was just afraid that everybody would leave me.

I am so very thankful to the person that I dated after what I experienced with my boyfriend because he really gave me a safe space to open up about everything that had happened to me and how it deeply impacted me and my relationships with others. Although we have since broken up, he is still my best friend. I can talk to him about anything.

And I contribute a lot of my willingness now to trust people to him. I think the thing that will always remain unresolved to me is why. And I think that is what most people who experience the suicide of a loved one struggle with the most. I don't think you can explain why someone makes that decision unless you're the person making it. And of course, that's the one person that you can't ask why.

I will always wonder if you're going to kill yourself, if you're going to make that decision, why would you do it in a place that you know I sleep in, that you know my family is going to find you? So that's still something that I'm trying to work out and come to terms with in therapy that I probably will have questions about for the rest of my life. Another thing that I believe will be unresolved for a long time is just feeling so terrible for his daughter,

Even though she was a baby when he died, I know what that kid is going through. And I know what that kid is going to go through as she gets older. Because I was that kid who had to grow up without a dad. I so badly wish that I could connect with his child, even if it's just to say, hey, I know what it's like and you're going to be okay. But I know that's not something that will happen. So I struggle with that a lot.

Just feeling so badly that I know that another little innocent girl who didn't ask for this is going to have to deal with the same things that I have had to deal with.

Now I have taken the skills that I learned as a funeral director, as an apprentice, and I have turned that into what I would say is a pretty successful career as an operations consultant. So I do personal and executive assisting, as well as project management and event planning. And all of those skills that I have now are directly correlated to what I did as a funeral director.

But part of me would love to eventually go back into funeral service, although at this point I don't think it's in the cards for me as a career. I would love to get to a place where I can volunteer. When you've been through so much for such a long period of time, and really the majority of your life has been spent in grieving or in survival mode, that kind of permeates down to every part of you.

I recognize that I have been through a lot and that it has made me a more somber person. But on the same hand, I am more appreciative of everything that I have and the time that I have. I think a lot of people say this, but not a lot of people know what it means. Life changes instantly, irrevocably, when you least expect it.

And even in all of the chaos and all of the loss and grief, I've tried to take these experiences that I've gone through and at least find something positive in everything. Today's episode featured Kelsey. You can find out more about her on Instagram and Twitch at Human Pterodactyl. That's at Human P-T-E-R-O-D-A-C-T-Y-L.

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Welcome to the offensive line. You guys, on this podcast, we're going to make some picks, talk some s**t, and hopefully make you some money in the process. I'm your host, Annie Agarne.

So here's how this show is going to work, okay? We're going to run through the weekly slate of NFL and college football matchups, breaking them down into very serious categories like No offense. No offense, Travis Kelsey, but you got to step up your game if Pat Mahomes is saying the Chiefs need to have more fun this year. We're also handing out a series of awards and making picks for the top storylines surrounding the world of football. Awards like the He May Have a Point Award for the wide receiver that's most justifiably bitter.

Is it Brandon Ayuk, Tee Higgins, or Devontae Adams? Plus, on Thursdays, we're doing an exclusive bonus episode on Wondery Plus, where I share my fantasy football picks ahead of Thursday night football and the weekend's matchups. Your fantasy league is as good as locked in. Follow the offensive line on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can access bonus episodes and listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus.