Aug. 29, 2002, Columbus, Ohio

By Lauren Morgan

On Aug. 29, 2002, my heart stopped.

Let me explain. I’ll start from the beginning, the day after my grandfather’s wake, when I stood sobbing over the kitchen sink as I stuffed a bundle of funerary flowers in the sputtering garbage disposal’s grinding metal maw and watched them disappear, stem to petal tugged under, churned up and shredded to bits.

At supper that night, I picked at my chicken in silence. You have to eat, my mother said, but it was her father who had died, and she was too weary to notice me forking the meat off the delicate, avian bones, strangely compelled to tuck it stealthily into my napkin, which I concealed under puffs of toilet paper in the bathroom trash bin. I went to bed hungry that night – and the next night, and the night after that. I stopped eating.

It wasn’t, at first, a conscious decision. I’d learn later that, in many cases, trauma is thought to trigger anorexia, this pathological dread and avoidance of food I had acquired, especially in girls with a genetic underpinning or a certain psychological makeup.

It isn’t always, as most people might imagine, a case of vanity gone awry, some warped, extreme desire to be fashionably thin or to look a certain way. It was, for me, an act of self-flagellation driven by guilt, by grief, by an uncontrollable compulsion not much different, I imagined, than the kind that induces people to walk upon searing coals or slice up their own arms with rusty razors. And it was a drug like any other, the first I happened to come across.

It occurred to me that, shortly before my grandfather’s death, I’d been fascinated by a book I’d found at a train station kiosk, a book about the fasting girl, Mollie Fancher, a young Victorian woman who became a media sensation after claiming to have “lived on air” for 12 years, surviving all that time on nothing more than four teaspoons of milk, two teaspoons of wine, one small banana, and a halved cracker. Some had considered her a fraud, but in other circles she had been regarded as a miracle, a sign of God’s presence on Earth.

I’d studied the sepia photograph of her for hours. It had been taken in her bedroom and, bedridden, she sat with her dark braids draped over her proper white bedclothes, propped up against a row of florid boudoir pillows. Her black eyes gave nothing away. I, too, would live on air.

For weeks, all I ate each day was a small green apple, ritualistically cubed, and three leaves of lettuce. And for weeks, I dreamed of food.

That’s the curious thing about anorexia. The more I shunned food, the more obsessed with it I became. Like a weak woman brooding over a scornful lover, I was consumed by it. All I thought of was food. I spent hours arranging and rearranging boxes and cans on the pantry shelves, rapaciously devouring each item with my eyes. Even the sight of a Crown Prince tin of sardines – which, under normal circumstances, would have inspired disgust – made my mouth water.

I fell asleep to visions of commercials, American food, the trashiest and tastiest kind. In my dreams, life-sized Whoppers oozing cheese and Twinkies as big as school buses floated slumberously before me, monstrously delectable. I sandwiched myself between mountainous slabs of mayonnaise-coated Wonder bread or wandered through hedge mazes of Little Debbie snack cakes, grazing as I strolled.

Mine was a slow deterioration. My body struggled angrily against its unjust punishment, against me, its billion-year-old biological instinct for survival fighting my will. It adapted. My long hair brittled and began streaming out in wispy clumps – hair was a luxury, and my body could now only afford to attend to its most vital bodily functions.

Strange and fine white hairs appeared. Lanugo, a kind of peach fuzz, sprouted up all over me, even on the pale undersides of my arms - my body’s way of trying to insulate itself. I looked awful. My thinned skin bruised at the slightest touch, and my bones appeared as if they would break through my skin, jutting out so far that you could almost see their whiteness, the gray glow.

Pared down to bone though I was, my belly bloated, taut and shiny, as though I were pregnant, a signal that my organs were failing. In one sweeping motion, I hid this whole horrid sight by pulling over a baggy sweatshirt, as indifferently as if I were just burying a secret object in the corner of my sock drawer.

But people stared. I could not cover my face, which was sunken, gaunt. I slurred my words. I slept all day. My mother watched this all terrified, but could do nothing. I stormed out of counseling sessions, left empty fast food bags crinkled up around the house to make it appear as though I was eating.

Then, one starless, fall night, I lurched awake in the darkness, soaked in sweat, my nightgown clinging to my wet body. Though it was muggy and warm, I was shivering, a dizzyingly throbbing sensation in my head, an utterly foreign feeling. I’d experienced heart flutters before, but now my taxed heart was pounding so hard and fast, I could literally hear it thrumming in my ears.

I pressed my hand against my chest and felt it thumping, laboring wildly to keep me going. “I’m sorry, faithful little heart,” I whispered. And then – and this will seem strange - I let out a half-hearted laugh. It was, after all, a ridiculous thing to say. I suddenly realized I’d finally done myself in, and these were my final words, my last thoughts, preceded, no doubt, by an absurd dream of a jumbo sprinkled doughnut.

I didn’t want to die like this. I stumbled out of bed and down the hallway, falling at my mother’s bedroom door.

I remember leaning into her, inhaling the changeless odor of her skin, my melon-heavy head tucked under her chin and my frail knees nearly buckling as we shuffled out to the cool, leaf-strewn garage, a small, saggy-roofed shed separated from the house. The heavy wood door, with its cracking talc-blue coat of paint, was not electric, and she cursed as she tugged it open, still cradling me with one arm.

She ripped open the dented passenger door of our 1986 maroon Omega and nudged me in. She’d had time to throw on only a bathrobe and a pair of red pumps, and I could hear her click-clicking around to the driver’s side. The last thought I had was that I could recognize my mother by the sound of her heels alone, the way others might recognize by voice. The thought was so salient – and I was so grateful to have even just a single thought about something other than food - I suddenly and deliriously imagined this sound was as distinct and as wincingly beautiful as a trumpeter swan’s call. Then my heart stopped.

I do not remember her gathering up my crumpled body and wailing as she carried me into the ER, or the paramedics shocking my heart back to life. I woke in a small Catholic hospital, gowned and swathed in white blankets, like a newborn baby. I was hooked to an IV that pumped salt and sugar through my body. Even then, all I could think of was that fat, hanging sac of murky liquid siphoning calories into my body. I stared in horror, plotted to yank it out.

A nurse came often to tend to me, a middle-aged woman with a Southern drawl, leathery skin, and kind eyes. She was nice to me; I could tell she felt sorry for me. A doctor came, too. He had a reproachful gaze, a look that hinted at disgust, utter revulsion, even, that someone could do this to herself.

“You’re very fortunate,” he admonished. “We’re going to have to run a battery of tests. There will probably be complications. You’re never going to be like you were … before.”

And it was true. My hair only grew back in patches, my bones are weak and fracture easily, and I have a bad kidney. Eventually, I’ll need a transplant.

Though I wish I could tell you otherwise, I wasn’t resurrected that day. As though trapped in a deep cave beneath a wall of rocks, I’ve had to claw my way out, stone by stone, heaving myself toward the light. The process is arduous and slow. Sometimes, the darkness seems easier. Sometimes, I look in the mirror and see the fasting girl’s ghost.

Lauren Morgan lives in Winthrop, Massachusetts, with her beloved Pekingese, Meatball.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Friday, August 10th, 2007 | Email This Post

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