On knowing somebody that was starving herself to death

I know somebody who was starving herself to death. Literally. Not dieting or staying off sugar or claiming that she was starving because there was no food in sight. This girl was literally starving herself to the point where her body refused to accept the IV that was infused in her arm. Because she had gone without nourishment for so long that her body did not know how to make use of it any longer. She was 11. And I was her appointed guardian at school and at the hospital where she was being kept, suspended between life and death.

I had known this girl since I was 2 years old. She lived on my street and we had played at each other’s houses. We went to the same day care, walked the same street to school, breathed the same air and ate the same food. Until we no longer ate the same food. Or rather, she stopped eating most of the food.

Looking back at it now, it seems strange to the point of sick. It was sick. Sick on so many levels. Sick because no grownup saw it coming or called the shots. And sick because the person that stopped eating was reacting to so many things that were sick on so many other levels than the amount of food that she was or was not ingesting into her body. And sick because we were so young. We had not yet gotten our periods, but we were forced to understand that one of us might die. Before ever getting our period. Which is a sign of life, after all.

When I think of shame I think of this girl. Shame on us for not seeing it coming. Shame on her family for letting it happen. And shame on the immediate surrounding for allowing me to take care of her. I was so young and so naïve that I never questioned what was going on but took on the job of caring for a patient that was a copy of the horrific images we have all seen from the concentration camps. Yet this one was self-imposed. Or was it?

She moved into our neighborhood when we were toddlers. That neighborhood was my world and she made it brighter. They were foreigners and probably weird to everybody else. But to me they were colorful and fun! Their food looked different and tasted delicious. And when her mother showed up inside of the daycare with large sunglasses on, I thought, wow, she is so cool and sophisticated and gorgeous. My mom hushed me and said, let’s not talk about it. The not talking about it was her having large bruises under those sunglasses.

I didn’t get it right away but once I did, I questioned how come nobody did anything about this thing, this horrible thing that was going on right down the street and spilling over to my daycare experience? And the answer was always some sort of consensus: They are different, they are from another country, it’s not our job to judge. So, I, a child, should understand that they behaved differently than the rest of us in many ways, including how and when the father beats the mother. And we were supposed to stay silent and ignore the fact that the mother wore sunglasses inside of a daycare in the dead of winter that day.

This girl and this mother and this father moved abroad after our second grade of school and the neighborhood breathed a sigh of relief. They were too different to exist in our posh neighborhood. They knew it. And we knew it.

So, when they moved back in fifth grade, they took us by surprise. Out of sight and out of mind. My mom and I bumped into the mom at our local grocery store. We hugged and chatted and then she said, “you remember my daughter, right?” My mom and I looked at each other in shock because we did not remember a deathly ill, emaciated skeleton-like human being living on our street, way back when this woman lived there.

Things were different back then. Nobody spoke about anorexia (or domestic abuse or any other ailment that eventually came my way) so this woman simply said this is my daughter, your childhood friend Jenny, remember? We are back and she will join your class and I need you to take care of her.

And just like that, I became the appointed guardian of a very sick human being. So sick, in fact, that she was mean, nasty, delusional, manipulating and then dying on top of it all. She joined our class because I was her childhood friend, and I was asked to take care of her. As if I, at 11 years of age, had any idea of how to take care of a deathly ill patient that had long ago given up any intention of nourishing her body.

She ended up being admitted to the hospital and I was asked to take care of her there too. When I went there, she had metal rings holding up her head because her spine was not strong enough to support her head. She could not lay down because her body hurt when laying down because she had no body weight left to support her. And she could not sit down either because there was no human fat to support that body sitting down. So, she could only stand up. And she didn’t have enough energy to stand up for too long. There was an IV infused into her arm to give her the vital nourishment needed to stay alive, but her body was consistently rejecting it as it had subsisted on an apple a day for so long that it had forgotten what nourishment was truly like. The Doctor told me that there were no guarantees that this specific patient would survive. That she, like many anorexic patients, may live or die but for the grace of God.

I heard what he said but kept thinking she (and I) are 11. I don’t remember thinking about shame at that specific moment. I just remember thinking that this is up to the soul of my friend. Not the person I am visiting because she is long gone, in a sense. But her soul who has been crying for help. That soul wants a different life where she is free and happy to live without fear. To breath. And to eat.

My friend ended up surviving. Her body chose life. And she eventually left the hospital. She then left our school. And our neighborhood. They stayed in our country but chose to leave the society that had witnessed a girl diminished to a point of a stick figure needing metal rings to hold up the head.

They moved somewhere else. They disappeared from our world. I would go see her in her new world where she lived without metal rings holding up her head or IVs in her arm. She was ‘healed’ yet the shame lingered. She would show me photos of her doing ballet while living abroad a long time ago and tell me how fat she looked. I looked at those pictures and saw a child with clear signs of withering away back then too. But then I compared it to the human carnage I saw at the hospital three years later and the disease set in for me.  No longer a guardian on a daily basis but a spectator of a disease that takes hold of a mind so strongly that the body refuses the medicine. The food eventually moved in, but the shame never moved out. I saw her many many years later and it was still there, the thought that I must think she looks fat or awkward or not right when I saw her. But all that I saw was the young friend that I had loved in my childhood who was foreign, fun and exciting! We will continue to see each other and hold on to each other for life, but our thoughts on what we see will differ immensely. Which is one of my biggest lessons in life, that you can never understand somebody else’s point of view until you walk in their shoes, which I never did.

I started a new school in seventh grade. That school had a girl who was really big. Which was unusual in Sweden at the time where nobody stood out. But this girl did. We would ask why she was so much bigger than anybody else we had seen. And people would say, she used to be an anorectic. But now she eats a lot to make up for it. We’d look at her and be so confused as we’d known normal intake of food. And then no intake of food. But not yet excess intake of food. We all felt horrible because food was supposed to be part of our daily lives. Not part of our daily thoughts. But for this girl, it seemed it had taken over her world. And then we’d think about our friend who had starved herself close to death. Not eating had taken over her world. And then she’d moved away from our neighborhood in order to survive. And then we’d wonder if we’d be ok or if some crazy demon would grasp us and take a hold of our childhood and our youth and starve us to death or possibly allow us to eat as much as our lonely hearts needed and then vomit it all up. Or simply get fat. These were major thoughts back then. Probably still are if we’re honest. It’s just that we were kids back then. Who still waited for our period to come and for life to begin.