The kindness of somebody sitting with me while I ate toast

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

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

No wisdom, just: I am sorry. That sounds genuinely hard.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

I would have written the same thing a year ago, word for word.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

My grief made everything else harder to judge. I could not tell what was a symptom and what was simply what March was like that year.

What I would say is that this is not the time to be strict with yourself about anything. Mine was, for two months, and it cost me.

The thing nobody warned me about was that it comes back. Not steadily. In waves, months later, over nothing in particular.