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Grief and eating

Six weeks of not managing anything and my nurse noticing

Started 6 January 2025 · 18 replies · 213 hearts · read 3.9k times

NúriaBarcelona, ES · 6 January 2025
1.5 years ago

A question rather than an update: Six weeks of not managing anything and my nurse noticing

I have been sitting on this for a month.

Not asking anyone to fix this. Mostly saying it out loud somewhere it will be read kindly, which I have not managed anywhere else.

I do not have a question exactly. I have a thing I have noticed about myself and no idea whether it is worth mentioning to anybody.

I have told nobody in my life about this part of it, which after two years is starting to seem like the problem rather than a way of managing it.

To be precise about it, since I have put it in the title: six weeks. I counted rather than guessed, because a guess would have been kinder to me.

I do not know how to end this properly, so I am just going to stop here and press the button.

71

TiborBratislava, SK
#1

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.

7

WrenFacilitatorLeeds, UK
#2

I am pleased with the pace of this thread. Nobody has rushed to fix anything and that restraint is the skill this circle asks for.

24

NerysRhyl, UK
#3

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.

9

NoraDublin, IE
#4

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
#5

Read, understood, and glad you are here.

14

BronwenBarry, UK
#6

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

12

BibiRabat, MA
#7

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.

12me too 1

NúriaBarcelona, ES
#8

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

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.

10

TiborBratislava, SK
#9

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

11

OsgarKillarney, IE
#10

Núria — 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.

7me too 5

NerysRhyl, UK
#11

My experience is that routine helped more than anything anybody said. Small, repeated, unremarkable things, done at the same times.

8

NoraDublin, IE
#12

What I found hardest was people asking how I was in a way that required a manageable answer.

13

MaudGhent, BE
#13

The eating came back slowly and unevenly and I stopped monitoring it, which was the thing that let it come back.

10me too 2

BronwenBarry, UK
#14

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

I would gently say that if you have not eaten properly for days, that is worth a phone call rather than waiting for it to pass.

12

BibiRabat, MA
#15

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

March is still difficult and it is now the third March and it is less difficult than the first two. That is the whole of what I can offer.

16

NúriaBarcelona, ES
#16

Bereavement support was available where I am and I did not know for eight months. Worth asking about early rather than late.

12

WrenFacilitatorLeeds, UK
#17

Stepping in to say that stepping back from this circle for a while is always allowed and nobody will ask where you went.

13

OsgarKillarney, IE
#18

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

9me too 5