Author’s Note

This is a new category. This category and some of the bogs that fit here will appear both in the grief and eldercare side of the community. Some things just seem to fit both places.

She said it in a conference last week. “I used to love to cook but, after my husband died, I don’t even want to eat, much less cook.” One of the real issues single senior citizens face is proper nutrition. Far too many men just live on fast food they can pick up and bring home to eat in lonely silence. Women may be a little more prone to find meals at senior centers or other groups, but that is usually only a noon meal a few times per week. 

A mortician told me he could tell whether a person lived alone by looking at the body in his mortuary. He said most folks who live alone come to my place malnourished. It is hard to cook for one person and it is hard to get motivated to even try. 

It is hard to maintain proper nutrition while eating in restaurants. My wife and I stopped cooking when the children left home. We ate breakfast at home, lunch in some restaurant and a light snack at night. As we grew older, we found that we slept better if we ate our heavy meal at noon and not much at night. This went on for several years until we finally realized how long it had been since we had eaten any vegetables. Restaurants are a meat and potatoes kind of world. The only vegetable they recognize is broccoli or squash. Whoever decided squash was a vegetable? Anytime the menu says “Vegetable medley” get ready for squash cut different lengths. I finally got so hungry for green beans, peas, carrots, and lima beans that I learned to cook. I now enjoy it very much and even watch TV shows to learn how to cook more things. 

But, if my wife dies, I will have a hard time cooking and eating. That is part of the grieving process. When we are in grief, food no longer tastes good nor even sounds good. Sometimes the very thought of eating makes the stomach squirm. A great deal of this comes from the depression caused by grieving.

There is a form of depression that exemplifies itself not just by feeling blue, but by no feelings. We feel numb, detached, like we are outside our own bodies watching ourselves go through the motions of life but with no emotional attachment from us. Our ability to care is greatly impaired. Noting seems to matter except the pain we feel. 

This numbness impacts women in different ways than it does men. The woman in the conference for example, cooked as an act of love for her husband. Cooking and caring for the needs of a mate is how women express love. If it were not an act of love they would not be able to do it day after day after day. The work is boring but the giving of love makes one not notice just how boring it is to wash the same dish again and again. Then the mate is gone, the numbness hits, and there is no motivation left. 

The male’s response may be a little bit different. He feels lost with no one to take care or guide. Most of us don’t know how to cook or clean and even though we can overhaul a carburetor, we have no idea how to run the dishwasher. The numbness makes it even harder and there is a drive through down the street. Some of us have done some cooking but our efforts usually were confined to the back yard grill, and cooking hamburgers for one is far too much trouble on a grill. 

I can promise that the numbness will pass in time. You will have feelings again, but until then it is a process of putting one foot in front of the other and forcing yourself to do what you do not feel like doing. If we do not do so, a pattern of eating may become so ingrained that we never think of changing it even when the numbness has been replaced by feelings. There are far too many people still eating at the drive through trough or the frozen dinner stuff even though their loss happened years ago and they have made great strides in their grief journey. 

Is it second childhood? Writing this reminds me of my mother telling me to eat my dinner or I couldn’t have dessert. I don’t know whether this is a blog or a nag.