As most of you know, I love to read. Sometimes, moments, lines, or images from a novel linger in my mind long after I have read the final chapter. I read The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides when my mother was sick with brain cancer and I was sick with my eating disorder. A line resonated: "A half-eaten sandwich sat atop the landing where someone had felt too sad to finish it."
I could see the sandwich, and the image burned a hole in my throat, in the place where grief and loss lives. Sometimes, I imagine sadness as the sand in an hourglass. Your body can only hold so much, and when you are filled, it is impossible to fit in anything else. There is no room for anger, hope, love, or care. There is no room for food. I wonder now if my refusal of food was also a desperate attempt to shrink my body into a smaller vessel, where there would be less room for the sand of sadness to fill.
Yesterday, I tried to eat a Resees Peanut Butter Cup Congo Bar from a bakery in the North End. Should have tasted amazing, right? But it didn't. I told Marci it didn't taste good. She asked what it tasted like, and the first thing that came to my mind was a favorite children's book of mine, Kate DiCamillo's Because of Winn-Dixie. In it, there is a candy called a Littmus Lozenge:
"She unwrapped the Littmus Lozenge and put it in her mouth and nodded her head.
'Do you like it?' I asked her.
'Mmmm-hmmm." She nodded her head slowly. 'It taste sweet. But it also taste like people leaving.'
'You mean sad?' I asked. 'Does it taste like sorrow to you?'
'That's right,' she said. 'It taste sorrowful but sweet.'"
When Marci asked what that decadent brownie tasted like to me, all I could think of was Opal and Gloria and the Littmus Lozenge. I told her it tasted like sadness.
But what does sadness taste like? Sadness is that fullness that starts in your stomach and creeps into your throat and makes it impossible to let goodness in. Sadness tastes like a memory that you can't have back. It tastes like a taunt that you will never have happiness again. It tastes like feeling unworthy of that which is rightfully yours. It tastes like a fear of forgetting, a fear of abandoning, a fear of betraying.
Sadness tastes like not being able to enjoy something now, because you know that eventually it will be gone.
Those images, that of the neglected sandwich and the sorrowful candy, remain burned into my memory long after I closed each book. The sandwich, symbolizing a sadness so complete that people are unmotivated to take in that which sustains life; the Littmus Lozenge, tasting the great sorrow that lives buried in even something sweet.
I believe that eating disorders aren't caused by one factor. They are so complex and intricate that I think it is nearly impossible to pinpoint the "reason" an individual might develop one. I spent years telling myself that I didn't "deserve" to have an eating disorder, because my reasons for developing one weren't "good enough". Sounds crazy, right? But it gives you a little bit of insight into the distortions that the ED mind tells the sufferer. Looking back, I still don't think one thing caused me to develop my eating disorder. However, I do think that grief played a major role. Not just the enormous, life-shattering grief of losing a mother at a relatively young age, but also the more ambiguous developmental losses: the loss of childhood, the loss of relationships, the loss of identity.
Unfortunately, for me, grief and food are inextricably linked. Which might be the reason why my delicious Congo Bar tasted like sadness.
I would like to imagine a day when food tastes like hope. When it tastes nourishing and delicious and nurturing and life-affirming and... just yummy. Maybe someday. The message in Because of Winn-Dixie is ultimately that yes, there is sadness in the world, and that sadness is reflected in the particular taste of sorrow in the Littmus Lozenge, but that the sorrow coexists with sweetness and joy.
One day, in the future, I will take a bite of a dessert from a special Italian bakery and it will taste like sweetness -- the pleasure of taking it in; and sorrow -- the strength in remembering.
