Food escape

In the 90’s my father was diagnosed with lung cancer and given 2-6 months to live.   It was too late to do much about it, having already developed into massive tumors crowding his brain. It was a short four months before he was gone.

I was in my 20’s, single, living alone, newly promoted, and a smoker of many years. Within days of hearing the news I bought the patch and quit. It seemed disrespectful to do anything but. The first month was a blur of hospital visits and hard challenges at work, where I told few people about what was going on.  Soon, exhaustion added to the press of overwhelming feelings: heartache, grief, love, pity, emptiness and fear.

Early on, I made a promise to myself. I would stay present throughout the whole process of his dying. It was a bit of an odd promise for me to make. I wasn’t really a drinker, though I did smoke some pot. I had never in my life taken up a bottle to drink away some kind of pain, and had no attraction to harder drugs. As daughters go, I was a pretty dutiful one, and I was known for my work ethic. Most people wouldn’t have thought I’d need to make that promise to myself.

But I had to. Right from the beginning, I had palpable, terrible desire to flee, to avoid, to get out of myself and the situation I was in. I thought to myself in the face of my feeling: “This is how people become alcoholics. This is how people lose who they are.” I knew it as sure as I knew my father was dying; I was in a danger zone.

For the next four months I wouldn’t touch a drink, take a hit off a joint, or even have the momentary respite of a cigarette. I didn’t really watch TV, I got off the computer, I stopped playing fantasy games. I didn’t do much in those four months but work, hospital, home. I attended my father in his last days. I attended my mother in her terrible, terrible grief. I cried my heart out that my father, who I loved so well, was changing, was losing his faculties, was soon not to be.

When I look back on myself during that time I’m impressed with that me. With her strength, and her focus, with her willingness to experience the pain and live through it, rather than around it. But in my recent soul searching I’ve realized that successful as I was, I did find one way to self-medicate. I ate.

I can’t tell you what I ate. I don’t remember.  I can tell you that I didn’t cook. I spent most of my time and focus drifting from one stress to another pain and in the face of that pain, the quality and quantity of what I was eating was a small, insignificant nothing thing.  I ate what was easy, what felt good, what was there, what I was given. In this period of my life, where I had long since given up on dieting anyway what I ate just didn’t matter one iota.

Except, of course, it did. As unhealthy as the actual food might have been, that’s not why it matters. Whatever physical damage I might have done to myself in those four months could have easily been have been undone in a matter of months. What does matter is that it’s clear to me now that in the years to follow my level of emotional eating dramatically increased.

While my father lay dying, I cut everything out of my life that I could use to escape what was happening, everything that would get in the way of authentically experiencing that time in my life. But you don’t get to cut out eating.  Within six years of my father’s death I’d gained probably eighty pounds and went from being active,  relatively healthy obese to unhealthy, unlivable superobese.  There were a lot of other events that contributed to that, but this is one of those jenga bricks way down at the bottom of the teetering tower. It’s one of those things that other things rest on.

This is a good realization for me at this time because I’ve been reading and thinking and working a lot on how I can stop defeating myself through negative self-talk. I want to get better at get my brain and my body working together to get me healthier. While many times when I identify something in my past that led me to the state my body is in now, the voice in the back of my head kicks in to beat myself up about the failure of it.

But how can I be anything but compassionate to the person I was then? I loved my father dearly, and watching him die was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I was amazingly self-aware to recognize the avoidance pull and strong to be so pro-active about it. I was so smart to know that if I missed even a moment, checked out for any part of it that I would feel later that I had dishonored my father, and myself.

My mind today, my heart, even my inner voice wants nothing but to give the me back then a big, long hug to soothe the hurt. How could I beat that me up? I can’t. I can’t at all.

And so this is a good place to start from in trying to find compassion for myself. Rather than dwelling on what I should have done then… because I know that doing better at that time may not have been in my capacity, my attention turns to “now that I know, now that I see it, how can I undo it?” rather than getting stuck in a cycle of criticality and self-loathing that just turns into more self-destructive behaviour.

I don’t have all the answers yet, but this moment of compassion is a really nice start.