Is there any way to retrieve what was on my old word?

Upgrading to Catalina has no affect on your saved documents. The impact is that your old Office app which is 32 bit will not run on the 64 bit only Catalina. Just upgrade Office to a 64 bit version or open your Word docs using Pages or the free LibreOffice.

Hello, sudy256.

If done properly, your upgrade to Catalina should have included you making a backup of your data prior to installing the upgrade. Now is when time Machine would normally be used to recover any data that might have been lost.

Another way to recover your data would be to download them from your iCloud backup if you are using that feature.

If your real question is "How can I get MS Word to run in Catalina?", then you will have to visit Microsoft.com and purchase either a subscription or make the one time purchase of their current product.

Catalina ended macOS ability to run 32-bit programs which likely is what the version of Word that you were using was.