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Grief and eating

Losing a pet and being embarrassed about how hard it hit

Started 19 June 2025 · 18 replies · 186 hearts · read 3.2k times

NoraDublin, IE · 19 June 2025
about a year ago

Losing a pet and being embarrassed about how hard it hit — putting it in its own thread so it does not get lost in the check-in.

I have been sitting on this for a month.

This is the third time I have started this post and the first time I have got to the end of it, so I am going to press the button before I lose my nerve.

What I would find useful is knowing whether anybody else has felt this way about it, because from inside my own head it seems like an unreasonable reaction.

Thanks. Saying it here first has made the idea of saying it to somebody else considerably less impossible.

62

BibiRabat, MA
#1

Something I did not expect was guilt about the ordinary days. The first afternoon I forgot for two hours was very hard.

11

WrenFacilitatorLeeds, UK
#2

Noting for anybody reading later: if the person who opened this has come back, their own words are worth more than any reply to them. It is easy to read the top of a page and stop there.

13

BronwenBarry, UK
#3

This is the post I wish had existed when I was looking for it.

8

OsgarKillarney, IE
#4

I paused everything and my prescriber was completely supportive and said the timing of a restart was entirely mine.

4

MaudGhent, BE
#5

Bronwen — yes, and the bit that took me longest to accept was the next part.

What I would say is do not make big decisions in the first three months. I nearly did and I am very glad I did not.

12me too 5

NerysRhyl, UK
#6

Reading old threads in this circle at four in the morning was, for a while, the only thing that helped, and I never posted once.

13

NúriaBarcelona, ES
#7

My family all handled it differently and food was where our differences showed up, which I had not anticipated at all.

8

NoraDublin, IE
#8

Reading Nerys, I recognised more of that than I expected to.

Nothing here is advice. This is a circle for company, and if you need more than company, the support resources page lists what to look for.

10

BibiRabat, MA
#9

Coming back a year on to say that eating is ordinary again, that the grief is not gone, and that both of those things can be true.

7

TiborBratislava, SK
#10

What Núria described happened to me too, in a slightly different order.

People bring food. That is what happens, and for the first month I could not eat any of it and I felt terrible about the waste and the kindness.

13me too 1

BronwenBarry, UK
#11

Toast. For about a month it was toast, and somebody here told me that was fine and it genuinely helped to be told.

4

OsgarKillarney, IE
#12

What I found was that grief and appetite are tangled in a way nobody had ever mentioned to me, and separating them was not possible.

8

MaudGhent, BE
#13

I had to tell my prescriber what had happened, and I nearly did not, and it changed the whole conversation for the better.

6

NerysRhyl, UK
#14

Bronwen — yes, and the bit that took me longest to accept was the next part.

Anniversaries are their own thing and I now put them in the calendar deliberately so they do not ambush me.

11me too 8

NúriaBarcelona, ES
#15

Maud has already said most of this and I want to add the one part that was different for me.

Six weeks in was harder than the first week for me. Everybody had gone back to their lives and I was still in mine.

10me too 4

NoraDublin, IE
#16

Eating went completely for about a fortnight and my GP was more concerned about that than I was, and she was right to be.

10

WrenFacilitatorLeeds, UK
#17

Gently: you have apologised twice in a post where you have done nothing that requires an apology.

26

TiborBratislava, SK
#18

Something practical that helped: somebody else deciding what I ate. I could manage food that arrived; I could not manage choosing it.

12