Healthy Food...or the Alternative

Eat to Live

A melancholy day, and the ache that keeps me up at night.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to teach a Health and Wellness class to a group of women, and I have never sat with a room carrying so much. One after another, they shared what they were living with:

Diabetes — there is almost always someone managing diabetes

A husband with Parkinson's, who wouldn't eat the way his wife was learning to eat

Myasthenia Gravis

Celiac disease

One woman who had lost her sight to a side effect of a medication she had been prescribed

Tumors

Infertility

Bone-deep fatigue — and isn't that becoming the norm?

And one woman who had had her stomach removed, with all the difficulty digesting food that comes with it due to the side effect of a certain medication.

Another had gone blind due to a side effect of her medication. She said she "couldn't sue, because it was listed as a possible side-effect". 

I could hardly take it in. So much, in one small room.

A couple of days before, I had driven back to my home town for the funeral of a doctor who had died of cancer. Afterward I stopped at the store to find something to eat for the drive home, and it troubled me how little there was that I actually wanted to buy — no organic produce, nothing that felt truly nourishing.

While I searched, I ran into a woman I knew, and my heart sank. She was showing signs of dementia. Our conversation didn't quite connect; she was confused, reaching for something she couldn't quite hold onto. It felt like the twilight zone, standing there looking at this beautiful woman I loved so much as she struggled through an ordinary conversation. We said an awkward goodbye, and I walked away aching for her.

At the checkout, there was a woman ahead of me in line. Her legs and hands were badly deformed and she seemed to be in real pain — thin, fragile, bracing herself. And then my heart dropped, because I realized I was looking into the face of my childhood friend's dear mother. I had to fight back tears. She seemed nervous, a little embarrassed, and I tried hard not to look alarmed as we talked. Even her speech had become difficult. I watched her make her slow way to the car with her granddaughter beside her — and then I paid, walked to my own car, and wept. I wanted so badly to take her pain away, to somehow smooth out every knot and ache in her body. I just cried and cried.

Before I left town, I went by to say hello to a woman whose husband passed away a year ago after a stroke. I knew she was home, but no one came to the door. I wanted to call out, "It's ME — Steffanie!" There was no window in the door. And even if there had been, I'm not sure she would have opened it — not even for a friend she loved so much. This dear woman, who taught me so much as a child and stood by me through all my growing-up years, was now closing herself away from the world under the weight of anxiety and depression. What a melancholy day it was becoming.

I stopped at one more store on my way out. The young man at the register was clearly unwell and struggling — every small motion seemed to cost him, and a simple order took a long, hard while to ring up. A coworker came over to help him. I didn't feel impatience; I felt a wave of tenderness and worry, the same ache I had been carrying all day. So many people, so young, already carrying so much. My heart just hurt.

The hardest moment of the class came when I talked about how much the food we eat can support our health, and someone answered, "but it's so hard to change the way we eat." And I understood — truly, change is hard. But that day I couldn't stop thinking: living without a stomach is hard. Losing your sight is hard. I would give almost anything to spare the people I love from that kind of hard.

I've been sad ever since. I can't sleep for thinking of these women. Food isn't magic, and it is never a substitute for the doctors and the care people need — but it is one of the gentlest, most faithful ways we can honor the bodies God gave us. My prayers go out to everyone carrying a heavy diagnosis, in body or in mind. May God give you strength — and may we learn, a little at a time, to eat to live.

With much love,

Steffanie