Category: Handling loss without eating
-
There’s always a death at Christmas
Of course, death is always with us in vast quantities that we can only imagine when we can’t sleep at night. But the ones that have gobsmacked me at holiday time started with a Shakespeare seminar classmate in college. I didn’t know him well, but when he disappeared over Christmas break in a small plane…
-
Longing and weight gain; best purple cabbage ever
Years ago my best friend in the newsroom, the sunniest person I’ve ever known besides our younger grandson, asked if I’d ever been sad for something I’d never had. It’s taken me more than 40 years to figure out that’s all I was! Not knowing, of course, meant I was always trying to fill that hole…
-
My sister, my self
Jill is dead. My younger sister, 69, my sweet, funny, bright, troubled, generous, kind, sad sister died at the beginning of this first day of summer. I’ve been waiting, but not ready, for this day since she nearly starved herself to death as a high-schooler. We had no word for anorexia then or any tools…
-
One cigarette away; vegetables with oomph
So many addicts in recovery seem so affected by Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death. No way to tell if it’s more than usual at the passing of a talented young person with as many problems, or more, than talents, but everyone appears gobsmacked by the 20 years sobriety preceding his final tailspin. Those of us who slide…
-
A foggy day
A beautiful light in this world has dimmed. She was about the age of my oldest daughter, cared about the world — there are so many reasons why this is truly horrid. And I don’t really know what to do with my feelings if I can’t lie abed with books, food and drink. But I…
-
Addiction, the sequel (again)
“None of her actions was in the least inauthentic, but her degree of alienation from goals, actions, simple states of being — the acute, inescapable self-surveillance of the addict — resembles that rarefied ontological space of the depressive, the anxious, the ill, the poet.” (Joshua Cody’s [sic] — A Memoir, W.W. Norton & Co., 2011)…
-
Saying goodbye
You asked what it was like to put our youngest on the plane for 4 months in East Africa. Sad. Scary. Lonely, even though her father and I share this challenge. We’re both eating like bears getting ready for a Wyoming winter (I’ve put back on 9 of the pounds I lost for my high…
-
Calories, a loss of a different kind
Calories, said the country DJ whose wife evidently struggles with food as do I, are those magical little things that sneak into your closet at night and shrink your clothes. Yeah, so? Oh, all right, the number I eat is my responsibility — to keep track of and to keep under control. The action I…
youcanteaticecreamintheshower 