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Grief and eating

Coming back to the circle after four months away

Started 18 June 2025 · 18 replies · 186 hearts · read 4k times

OsgarKillarney, IE · 18 June 2025
about a year ago

A question rather than an update: Coming back to the circle after four months away

This is a difficult one to write and I have deleted it twice.

I have read a great deal about the physical side of this and almost nothing about the part I am actually struggling with.

I am aware this may be about something older than any of this, and that is part of what I am trying to work out by writing it down.

I keep records precisely so that I do not have to estimate, and the record says four months, which is what the title says too.

No advice needed. Company would be welcome and anything else is a bonus.

62

TiborBratislava, SK
#1

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.

11

NerysRhyl, UK
#2

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 8

WrenFacilitatorLeeds, UK
#3

Facilitator note: this is a circle for saying things out loud, and there is no obligation on anybody to act on what they say here.

17

MaudGhent, BE
#4

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

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.

14

BibiRabat, MA
#5

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.

9

BronwenBarry, UK
#6

Bibi, thank you for that. It gives me somewhere to start from.

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

5

NoraDublin, IE
#7

Bronwen 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.

9

OsgarKillarney, IE
#8

Just marking that I read this properly rather than skimming it.

7

TiborBratislava, SK
#9

Gently disagreeing with Nora, or rather adding the other half of it.

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

7

NerysRhyl, UK
#10

My appetite came back before my interest in food did, and those turned out to be two different things arriving separately.

12

NúriaBarcelona, ES
#11

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.

8

MaudGhent, BE
#12

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.

13me too 9

BibiRabat, MA
#13

Same here, and I am glad you said it first.

7

BronwenBarry, UK
#14

The kindest thing said to me here was that I did not have to be doing anything about it. Just describing it was enough.

11

NoraDublin, IE
#15

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

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

9me too 4

OsgarKillarney, IE
#16

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

7

WrenFacilitatorLeeds, UK
#17

Closing note: this stays linked from the circle landing. If you have arrived late and want to say something, there is no such thing as too late here.

16

NerysRhyl, UK
#18

Picking up Osgar’s point rather than starting a new one.

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

11