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Grief and eating

Anniversaries and what they do to my week

Started 23 January 2025 · 18 replies · 213 hearts · read 4k times

NoraDublin, IE · 23 January 2025
1.5 years ago

Something I have been sitting with: Anniversaries and what they do to my week Not looking for advice so much as other people's experience.

Not asking anyone to fix this. Mostly saying it out loud somewhere it will be read kindly.

What I want is company rather than an answer, and I have learned that this circle is one of the few places where asking for that is not strange.

I am not in crisis and I do not want anybody worried. I am flat, and I have been flat for longer than I would like, and I am naming it here first.

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

71

NúriaBarcelona, ES
#1

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

8

TiborBratislava, SK
#2

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

WrenFacilitatorLeeds, UK
#3

Facilitator note: nothing in this circle is treatment and nothing here is advice. The people who know your history are the ones to speak to.

17me too 3

BronwenBarry, UK
#4

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

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.

12

NerysRhyl, UK
#5

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

8

BibiRabat, MA
#6

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

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

11

MaudGhent, BE
#7

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

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

NoraDublin, IE
#8

Read, understood, and glad you are here.

13me too 7

NúriaBarcelona, ES
#9

Coming back to what Maud wrote further up, because it is the bit I keep thinking about.

What helped was somebody saying that grief does not have a schedule and that mine was not going too slowly.

11

TiborBratislava, SK
#10

I found the physical exhaustion of it startling. Nobody had told me grief was tiring in that specific bodily way.

11me too 3

OsgarKillarney, IE
#11

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.

10

BronwenBarry, UK
#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.

15

NerysRhyl, UK
#13

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

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

9

BibiRabat, MA
#14

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.

14me too 6

MaudGhent, BE
#15

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

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

12

NoraDublin, IE
#16

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

9

WrenFacilitatorLeeds, UK
#17

I want to name what it costs to meet something frightening calmly rather than rushing at it. It takes practice, this circle has it, and none of us had it at the start.

18me too 1

TiborBratislava, SK
#18

Wren said something I want to sit with for a second.

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

14