Since She's Been Gone by Sagit Schwartz

Author:Sagit Schwartz [Schwartz, Sagit]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

36

April 1998

RETURNING HOME AFTER Better Horizons was hard. Mom’s absence in our home was profound. Unlike before, when ED had given me a way out of feeling my grief by obsessing over my weight and food, I wasn’t running away from my sadness anymore.

Returning to restricting my food was tempting, but I knew the path it would lead me down—Emily’s. Still, eating was difficult at home.

Rascal was a marvel to me, how he ate with so much ease. How he’d lick the inside of his bowl dry and the outside too, making sure he hadn’t left a morsel of dog food behind.

Every time Dad and I were in the kitchen, he’d run up to us, bending his head sideways, lifting one of his paws, trying to look as cute as possible, hoping to score another crumb.

Sometimes when I struggled to eat, I tried channeling him, imagining him licking every last bite without a care in the world.

Dad did his best to serve me different kinds of food. I no longer screamed, hit him, or threw plates on the ground. Instead, I shared with him how I felt.

“I’m scared I’m going to gain weight from this pasta,” I told him one night.

“It’s okay to be scared,” he said. “But you need to eat it so you can grow.”

The week I returned home, I began an outpatient program. It was at a recovery center in West Hollywood perched above the Sunset Strip and its legendary landmarks, including Whisky a Go Go, the Viper Room, and The Comedy Store. It was the one closest to where we lived, and Dad drove me there.

In a no-frills, cramped office with one tiny window, I ate dinner with a group of fellow ED patients three times a week. The main difference from Better Horizons, apart from it not being inpatient, was that the group didn’t include any girls my age. The youngest woman was nineteen years old, and the rest were well into their twenties.

Because they were older than me, the magnitude of what ED had stolen from them—college degrees, jobs, marriages—was beyond anything I could have imagined as a teenager in high school. What these women had lost due to this disease was even more pronounced in the backdrop of their contemporaries flourishing in their careers and relationships.

Ginny, a twenty-six-year-old woman, was crying as she spoke about her fiancé, who had just broken up with her because of ED. “He said I keep choosing the eating disorder over our life together, and he’s lost hope that I’ll ever make a different choice. I don’t blame him,” she said. “I’m losing hope too.”

Another woman, Carmen, had just been put on leave from her law firm after passing out at a meeting with opposing counsel. “The partners told me that I can’t return until I have medical clearance from my doctor. But my rent doesn’t stop. My bills don’t either. And unemployment doesn’t cover everything. If they don’t take me back, I’m worried they won’t give me a reference to get a job somewhere else.

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