Anorexia Mirabilis
Gwyneth Henke
In 1395, a woman in the Netherlands, Lidwina, became ill with a horrible fever. Lidwina had been born into a wealthy family and had suffered a series of illnesses as a teenager. When she was fifteen, she slipped on ice and became paralyzed. The fever appeared after this, as well as convulsive vomiting and the putrification of her flesh. She bled from every orifice, and then she stopped eating. Documents record how, in starvation, her body began to shed itself; pieces of bone, skin, and intestines fell away and emitted a sweet scent.1
Lidwina was not alone. When it came to pain, medieval women were experts: stigmata, elongation of the body, hair shirts, thorn girdles, waist cords. One in six women performed selfflagellation—a rate two times that of men. Most cases of self-injury appeared among women. In particular, self-starvation became so widespread that more nuns practiced it than didn’t; from the 13th to the 17th centuries, between 37 and 61 percent of female saints were starving themselves.2
Eventually, a new name developed for them: the fasting saints. Most monastic orders at the time practiced fasts, but tightly controlled: smaller meals, a lack of meat. The fasting nuns rejected
1. Bynum, Caroline Walker. “Fast, Feast, and Flesh: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women.” Representations 11 (Summer, 1985): pp. 1-25.
2. Polinska, Wioleta. “Bodies under Siege: Eating Disorders and Self-Mutilation among Women.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 68, no. 3, 2000, pp. 569–89. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1465890. Accessed 19 Apr. 2023.
such terms. Many of them claimed to live only on the Eucharist and water. Some ate the scabs of healing wounds, or drank their own tears, as penitence. On several occasions, superiors afraid for the nuns’ lives ordered them to eat, and the nuns refused, breaking their vows of obedience.
Later, the phenomenon received a diagnosis: anorexia mirabilis, or “holy anorexia.”
*
When I first started avoiding food, there was a little while when I thought I was doing it to lose weight. But within a few months that concern had gone away from me completely. I didn’t care what I looked like; I didn’t think about being “attractive” or shedding pounds. If anything, I disliked my shrinking body, and missed the old one, but that was not important. There was just the hunger itself that seemed important to me now. It was as though I had stepped into another world, and now that I was there, I had to do everything I could to survive in that world—only, surviving meant something else than it had before I’d arrived there. I could see faintly that the terms of my survival looked, from the outside, like the terms of suicide, but that seeing happened unevenly, as in a dream.
When I went to treatment—and then, later, when I went back, and back again—I met other starving women, and the more I met, the more I recognized this phenomenon. We were all living in that other world. We had left our bodies somewhere far behind us, and though it was only in terms of our bodies that the real world seemed able to understand us—women obsessed with thinness, with attractiveness, with beauty—the truth is that we were dealing in something else entirely.
*
ANOREXIA MIRABILIS
Columba of Rieti, in fifteenth-century Italy, was born Angellela, but she went by the nickname Columba, meaning dove, because during her baptism a dove flew into the baptismal font. When a marriage was arranged for her, she cut off her hair and sent it through a courier to her fiancé to demonstrate her protest. After she joined a convent, she wore a hairshirt regularly and slept on thorns. She died at thirty-four, from starvation.
In death, a saint’s body is said to become immaculate, refusing to degrade or decompose, but in life, it was usually the opposite. Their bodies, by the end, were often too horrible to look at. After all, they were the ones who, like Columba and Lidwina, starved themselves to death, or if not starved, then scourged themselves, or were whipped, tortured, beheaded, buried alive.
St. Lucy, a martyr from the third century Roman Empire, was perhaps the saint most famous for her body’s mutilation. A secretly devout young woman who had promised herself to Jesus, she was very beautiful, and her mother betrothed her to a wealthy duke who had become enamored with her blue eyes. When she confessed to her mother that she was already engaged to God, her mother conceded to her plans to join a convent, but her lover wasn’t so understanding. No one else could be his wife, he said, after he’d seen those eyes. Lucy, according to the story, came up with a solution. She gouged out her eyes with a knife and handed them to him. Here, she said, have them.
Her betrothed, of course, ordered her death. Two men appeared to take her away, but she would not move, even when dragged with a team of oxen. Then they tried to burn her, but she would not catch fire. Then they stabbed her, through the throat, and only then did she die.
In most portrayals of Lucy, she’s holding her eyes. Sometimes she has them plucked out and arranged on a silver platter, offered sweetly to the viewer like two peeled grapes. In one, my favorite,
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they grow out of the stem of a plant: two unlikely flowers, pinched between her fingers.
It was during my second stay in treatment that I met the woman I’ll call Sarah.
We were on our way to lunch when we passed her doing paperwork in the living room. She was so weak that she couldn’t sit up without slumping over, so the whole time she sat in her husband’s lap, taking slow, shallow breaths. Her hair had been red once, but she was almost bald now; there were just a few thin strands combed back over her scalp, ending above the nape of her neck. A few years before I would have guessed that she was in her eighties, but by then I knew enough to estimate that she was around forty. We all glanced at each other as we walked by. When we came back from lunch, her husband had left, and the door to the examination room was closed.
Marie of Oignies was born in 1176 in Belgium and forced to marry at fourteen despite her protest. Unlike most women of her time, however, she managed to convince her husband to take a vow of chastity with her, and the two spent years tending to people with leprosy. In 1207, she left her husband and dedicated her life entirely to prayer. Soon, she began to practice an extreme asceticism marked by long periods of starvation. At the height of her hunger, she described seeing hands reaching up to her from purgatory, the hands of souls she believed her suffering was saving. She died in 1213, at thirty-seven, from starvation.
I didn’t know about Marie on that afternoon when I met Sarah, but years later, when I read about her and her husband—about how they lived together for years, each pretending not to see the thing that was always with them, that was threatening not only
their marriage or their livelihoods but Marie’s own life—I thought about Sarah and her husband. I thought about the way he held her, like she was his child, and the way he nodded along to everything the nurse said—how it was clear, just from a glance, that he had done this many times before.
A few hours after he left, I was on my way back from an appointment with one of the doctors. She told me to go straight through the house to the porch, where the other patients were sitting in the yard. When I’d almost reached the front door, a shape startled me.
There was Sarah, slumped in a wheelchair, all alone. Her chair wasn’t angled towards anything in particular, just facing out vaguely to the empty center of the room, like someone had rolled her in and left her. For a moment I had no idea what to do. She seemed not to have noticed me, and I put my hand on the doorknob, then removed it.
“Are you alone in here?” I said.
She looked up at me. She moved very slowly, and I wanted to tell her that she didn’t need to waste the energy responding.
“There was a nurse, but . . .” she trailed off. “I don’t think they know what to do with me.”
I looked towards the nurse’s room, as though that could summon them, but no one came.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
She considered the question. Then the tip of her pale tongue slipped out, wetting her lips.
“It’s Sarah.”
When Columba first began starving herself, she asked her mother to make her dishes of herbs and vegetables. To keep
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herself from enjoying them, she mixed in ashes and soil or soaked them in water. The Acta Sanctorum, a 17th-century text written in Latin and chronicling the lives of the saints, notes that her mother, witnessing this, exclaimed, O filia: quare te vis interficere? Oh, daughter: why do you want to kill yourself?3
In treatment, I once overheard a nurse ask a patient what she wanted. The woman had been demanding that they let her leave the facility at once. And then what? the nurse hissed—impatient, fed up. What do you want?
The woman was very calm. I want everyone to leave me alone, she said. And then I want to starve myself to death.
Unlike Columba’s mother, the nurse didn’t ask her why she wanted to kill herself. She didn’t seem to want to know.
At one point, Columba entered a five-day trance in which her parents and doctors feared she was dead. When she awoke, her family, terrified, begged her to eat. She refused. They handed her two eggs; she accepted only one, which she gave to her father to open for her. When he broke apart the shell, he saw that it was empty. The family looked at her, shocked, and Columba smiled. “Non expedit tentare Deum,” she said: It is not expedient to tempt God. Then a voice rang out around them. Don’t worry about her, the voice chided. She’s mine.
Columba never told her family what had happened during the trance in which they believed her dead, but she did tell her confessor. Her soul had been on a pilgrimage in the Holy Land, traveling through sacred places she had longed to visit. The geographic details of her spiritual trip were shockingly accurate. Whatever her body had been doing, Columba’s soul, at least, seemed to have made the journey.4
3. Caput III, p. 157, B. Columba Reatine, Acta Sanctorum, May 20. https://archive.org/ details/actasanctorum18unse/page/n173/mode/2up?view=theater.
4. Acta Sanctorum, (Paragraph 35, 163).
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That woman who I overheard saying she wanted to starve herself to death did die eventually. When I got the news, I kept thinking that, as with Columba, there had been a misunderstanding. When the woman had said I want to starve myself to death, I didn’t think she was saying that she wanted to die, to be dead. It was a destination she was talking about, a trip she imagined taking. She wanted to take her body, through starvation, to another place. Like Columba, she really believed that she could get there.
Now that she was dead, I wondered, had her travels been interrupted, or were they finally complete? And if not complete, were I and the women like me meant to pick up where she had left off? Were we all just pilgrims, on our way to another country?
That afternoon, when I found Sarah alone in the dark, in the moment just after she had told me her name, I thought about leaving her there.
I thought about opening the door and walking out into the sunshine, where everyone was waiting. We were always cold, no matter how hot it got, and those rare moments when they let us into the sun were the only times I could remember being warm. Even then, standing in the dark and staring back at Sarah, I was cold, and I could feel the heat just on the other side of the door. I could feel her suffering, too, radiating off of her, and part of me didn’t want to touch it. Part of me didn’t want to know.
Instead, I sat on the edge of the couch and tried to think of something to say.
“Is this a good place?” Sarah asked before I could come up with anything.
I was surprised by the question. I assumed she had been in many facilities before, and that she’d therefore have the callous
disinterest typical of the people who had been through this again and again, a disinterest laced by hopelessness and violation and dreadful loss. Her sincerity disarmed me, and I considered how to reply. It seemed pointless to say no. Where could she go, if it was bad? I was sure someone else had medical custody of her by now, sick as she was; even if she had wanted to leave, she would have needed their permission.
“Yes,” I said. “They’re kind here.”
“That’s good,” she murmured. “I’m glad.”
I picked at a hangnail and studied the books on the shelf behind her, the flowers dying on the table.
“How long have you had an eating disorder?” she said abruptly. I blushed. “Two years. Maybe three.”
“That’s not so long. You’ll probably still get better.” I nodded.
“I’ve had mine since I was a little girl,” she went on. She was speaking so quietly it was almost as if she were talking to herself. “My mother had it too. She taught me how. I’m forty-four now, and I’ve had it since I was eleven. That’s thirty-three years. I can’t imagine life without it. I won’t get better.”
She wasn’t resolute so much as resigned. Outside, a plane went by overhead, and then it was silent again, more silent than I’d ever heard the house be. Where was the nurse, the psychiatrist, the staff? Why wouldn’t anyone come and help her?
“Can I ask you a question?” she said.
I forced myself to look at her.
“Do you believe in God?”
*
One of the first cases of anorexia mirabilis was St. Wilgefortis, a Galician princess. Legend goes that her father arranged for
his beautiful daughter to marry a king. To avoid the wedding, Wilgefortis asked God to make her ugly. Overnight, she grew a beard, and the outraged king ended the engagement. Wilgefortis escaped the death most common to the fasting saints, death by starvation, because her father, furious, had her crucified instead.
Although Wilgefortis was never canonized by the church, the details of her existence being too shoddy for institutional approval, she continues to be quite popular in many regions, especially with women trying to escape abusive husbands.5
After her death, Wilgefortis went by many names: in Poland, Frasobliwa, “sorrowful”; in German areas, Kümmernis, “grief”6; in England, Uncumber, as in “un-encumber”—someone who relieves or avoids something. What she avoided was marriage, yes, but also suffering, the suffering inevitable, perhaps, to a woman’s life.7
In the 14th century, English women experiencing bouts of insomnia often went to St. Uncumber with an offering of oats. One church in Worstead, England still features a decorative screen depicting Uncumber with a poem scrawled beneath her. “If ye cannot slepe, but slumber,” the poem reads, “Geve otes unto Saynte Uncumber.” The rhyme is attributed to John Bale, a bishop, and is widely considered a satire meant to mock the women who believed such tales.8
Five hundred years after the legend of Wilgefortis first arose, an English doctor, William Gull, coined the term anorexia
5. Ott, Michael. “Wilgefortis.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 15. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15622a.htm. Accessed 19 April 2023.
6. Levin, Carole (2000). “St. Frideswide and St. Uncumber: Changing images of female saints in Renaissance England.” In Mary Burke (ed.). Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. pp. 223–237.
7. Friesen, Ilse F. The Female Crucifix: Images of St. Wilgefortis Since the Middle Ages. Waterloo, Ontario, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001, p: 61.
8. Friesen, St. Wilgefortis, 61.
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nervosa to describe another malady—“a peculiar form of disease occurring mostly in young women, and characterized by extreme emaciation.” Other symptoms, he noted, included “a depression of all the vital functions; viz., amenorrhoea, slow pulse, slow breathing.” The disease, he theorized, was likely due to an “ego perversion,” although “[i]n the stage of greatest emaciation one might have been pardoned for assuming that there was some organic lesion.”9
After Gull brought the word into being and, in doing so, demarcated modern anorexics from their medieval predecessors, scholars hurried to insist that the two shared no commonalities. The difference, many argued, was in the name: mirabilis denotes the unique intent of medieval starvation. It was developed as a way of communicating with the divine, of participating in Jesus’s passions and sorrows. Modern anorexics, they argued, have no such purpose. Their condition is a nervous one, a disorder focused on their bodies and aesthetics. Victims of the West’s preoccupation with thinness, they do not care about God or purity or sanctifying themselves; they are uninterested in the “collective concerns” which affected medieval communities.10 Theirs is an individualistic obsession, a myopic one: beauty, thinness, vanity, pride. Although eating disorders don’t only affect women—and those who aren’t women often face steeper barriers to treatment—the collective idea of the anorexic patient is almost always a woman, and one who should know better.
Most of the anorexics I met shared this picture of themselves, and yet in each of them, I encountered not the unhealthy pride for which they were famous, but a deep and abiding shame, one which
9. Gull, William. “Anorexia Nervosa (Apepsia Hysterica, Anorexia Hysterica.” Transactions of the Clinical Society of London. 1873.
10. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
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burned so hot it was almost impossible to touch. I say “them,” but I mean myself, too: after all, didn’t I once, when a friend referred in passing to my “eating disorder,” interrupt her and tell her not to call it that, because it was “mortifying”? Later, I looked up that word, mortifying. The first definition, of course, was the one I had intended: “to subject to severe and vexing embarrassment.” But mortify can also mean to “subdue or deaden the body . . . especially by abstinence or self-inflicted pain or discomfort.”11
Both, I realized, were accurate. It mortified me to hear my friend associate me with the name of that malady, the malady I had always understood to be superficial, melodramatic, and strictly for the weak in mind or spirit. It subdued me, it deadened me, it cut me to pieces.
The most famous fasting nun is St. Catherine of Siena, an Italian mystic from the fourteenth century known for her visions and correspondences with prominent theologians, including the pope. Catherine practiced increasingly severe fasting throughout her life; if forced to eat by superiors, she purged, inducing vomiting by pushing a small twig down her throat.
In a letter to another nun, St. Catherine asks her to pray to Jesus “to take away . . . the burden of my body.” She writes, “For my life is of very little use to anyone else; rather is it painful and oppressive to every person, far and near, by reason of my sins.”12
11. “mortify.” Merriam-Webster.com. 2023. https://www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/mortify. (19 April 2023).
12. Saint Catherine, “Letter to Monna Alessa Clothed with the Habit of Saint Dominic, When She Was at Rocca.” Saint Catherine of Siena as Seen In Her Letters. Translated and edited by Vida Dutton Scudder. Published online at http://www.domcentral.org/trad/ cathletters.htm.
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When Catherine realized that she was going to die of hunger, she tried to start eating again, but it was too late; her body could not come back from the place she had taken it. She died when she was thirty-three.
One of the most common visions experienced by the fasting saints were “mystical marriages” in which women saw themselves being wedded to Christ. Long before she died, Catherine underwent one such trance, in which Christ placed a ring on her finger. It remained there for the rest of her life. No one else could see Catherine’s ring, but she always could. When she looked at it, she felt a wave of comfort and certainty, a reminder of the charge she believed had been given to her, and which she would follow to its bitter end.
For years, I used to burn my body. I still remember the first time. It was late at night, and I was standing in that other world where hunger had taken me. Looking at myself, I understood that I was different: that, by nature of my presence here, I no longer deserved to experience pleasure the way other people did, or to simply live a life.
I felt suddenly desperate with this belief, this clarity. I was afraid I would go to sleep and wake up having forgotten it. I wanted to do something to remind myself that I wasn’t allowed to forget: to signal to myself, every time I looked in the mirror, that mine was a body deserving much punishment, much penitence, much mortification. I wanted, I suppose, to take my body to a place from which it couldn’t come back.
Like my anorexia, I am mortified by this memory, these acts of self-harm. They seem humiliating to me, embarrassing, the kind of thing a little girl would do. I have told almost no one about them; I would like to pretend they did not happen. The scars have helped me in this desire. They haven’t lasted the way I hoped they would in the moment of infliction, but faded considerably.
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Even outside of treatment, most of the women I know have gone through some period of self-harm—restriction, bingeing, purging, laxatives, diet pills, over-exercise. For some it proves to be a kind of fever, a phase they enter and exit relatively unscathed. I cut for a while in high school, they say. I had a little spell of purging in my twenties. For others, it proves more chronic than acute. They do not get better. It does not go away.
Both options strike me as unbearably sad. In the second case, the long years of a woman’s life disappear into that world of perfect loneliness and suffering. In the first, they hurt themselves casually; they do it as an afterthought and laugh about it as though it means nothing. Then, having done it, they move on with their day. For these women, hunger and harm rarely leave marks the rest of us can see. But sometimes I think that I can see them, or, if not, that it’s at least my job to try, since, like Catherine’s ring— seen or not—they are always there.
When I was thirteen, I took Lucy’s name as my own during confirmation, the coming-of-age ceremony in the Catholic Church. I chose her because she was the patron saint of light and blindness, which, at the time, seemed to me to be a perfect paradox. I liked the idea of someone who had mastered two contrary qualities.
More than that, though, I liked her stubbornness. I liked that you couldn’t do anything to her she couldn’t take. That she wouldn’t budge, no matter how much you hurt her; that she wouldn’t bleed, wouldn’t burn. I wanted Lucy to give me that strength: the strength to gouge out my eyes, to sacrifice my body in the name of my convictions. I wanted her to make me unseeing, unfeeling, so that every scorch mark, every hunger pain, every bruise and cut wouldn’t be able to touch me. I wanted her to make
me invisible, to make me as constant and unchanging as a pillar of light. I was young and terrified of everything; everything wounded me, everything hurt, and I didn’t want to be like that any longer. I didn’t want to live like that ever again.
Some scholars have argued that mortification was more popular among religious women than their male counterparts because it was the only form of renunciation available to them. While men could give up their money, their property, or their marriages, women had no such control. The only thing they could refuse was food; the only thing they could break, themselves.13 Others have begun to protest the distinction between anorexia mirabilis and anorexia nervosa, pointing out the commonalities between the two. Although eating disorders are astronomically higher in Western and Westernized countries, where a cult of thinness (one rooted in racism14) prevails, manipulation of the body occurs throughout history and across cultures, even in areas without thin body ideals. The idea of anorexia as a disease reserved for white women erases the countless people of color who suffer from it while also asserting its superficiality—as something so frivolous only the most privileged class might entertain it. The reality is far more complex: women, scholars are finding, have long turned to hunger and self-mutilation to protest arranged marriages, constricted lives, and a lack of opportunities for expression or autonomy.15
I visited St. Catherine’s tomb once, in my mid-twenties, at Basilica Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome. I went late at night, after dark, when the basilica was lit only by candlelight. It took
13. Polinska, Wioleta. “Bodies under Siege: Eating Disorders and Self-Mutilation among Women.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 68, no. 3, 2000, pp. 569–89. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1465890. Accessed 19 Apr. 2023.
14. To read more on this history, see: Strings, Sabrina. Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fatphobia. New York: NYU Press, 2019.
15. Polinska, “Bodies under Siege,” 575.
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me a long time to find it, in part because the doorway is hidden down several alleys, and in part because at this point I was months into my worst relapse and very weak. I stood in front of her and cried. After a while, people started to show up for mass. I sat in the back row. They didn’t offer communion. If they had, I probably wouldn’t have taken it.
“Do you believe in God?”
Sarah’s eyes were fixed on mine. She looked so determined, as though she had been waiting for me to show up just so she could ask me this.
“Because I do. I have to believe,” she continued, taking a breath between every few words. “I have to believe that God exists, because otherwise I don’t think I’d still be alive. After everything I’ve put my body through, it makes no sense to me that I’m still here. I have to believe that it was a miracle that saved me. I don’t know why, but it must have been a miracle.”
As Sarah spoke, I was so aware of her body. Her bulbous knees, the gaps between each bone on the back of her hand, the translucent skin and brown teeth. I didn’t want to look at her; her body terrified me. But I had to. I felt like it was my duty to look, because I might be one of the last people to see her alive.
I tried to retract this thought as soon as it came to me, it seemed so cruel, but I couldn’t dismiss it. It was impossible for me to imagine that she would survive the month. And if I didn’t look at her directly now, if I didn’t record, in my own memory, every part of her, seeing all the sickness, the suffering, the pain—who would?
The Catholic Church does not allow those who have died by suicide to be buried in hallowed ground. There are plenty of ways to interpret this fact critically—most, in my opinion, merited.
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However, more generous readings do exist. It’s possible that the prohibition was originally intended to signal to living humans how precious their lives were, even lives thought to be worthless, ones it seems God couldn’t care about at all. To end your life, specifically, means something; it goes against what God wants. No matter how complicated things have gotten for you—when you think that God is ashamed of you, that they made a mistake with you, that you are a blight on their creatures, repulsive, grotesque—the prohibition against suicide says you’re wrong. It is enough just to live a life. Even a life full of mistakes is desired, somehow, by God.
Before I could reply to Sarah, the door opened, and the nurse burst in, patients trailing behind her. When she saw me and Sarah together, she frowned.
“You shouldn’t be in here alone!” she barked.
“She shouldn’t have been left alone,” I objected, though it was unlike me to argue.
The nurse huffed, striding over to Sarah’s wheelchair and rolling her roughly down the hall. Sarah’s eyes flickered to mine as she passed me, and her face twitched slightly, as though she were trying to form an expression but didn’t have the strength.
By that evening, Sarah had been moved to a hospital, and I never saw her again. I don’t know what happened to her, not exactly, but I think I know. I think it would be naïve of me, really, to say I didn’t. And not just naïve; if I were to say here that Sarah might have lived, that she might be living even now, I think that I would be refusing something, something that Sarah herself tried to give me.
*
There are more forgotten fasting saints than remembered ones. In their lives, so many of them died ignominious deaths,
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buried in the unmarked graves of convents, rejected by their families, forgotten by history. And in treatment, too, just as many women are in the process of disappearing.
The longer I’ve gone since leaving treatment, the more it seems to me that those women I spent months living alongside are only legends I once heard of, saints for whom I am always keeping vigil. I don’t know what to do with them. Part of me still wants to turn away, to deny how much we have in common. Every few months, I get a text from one of them. When they discharged, they were always hopeful, always doing well, but now they write to me with the same message every time. I don’t think I’m going to make it.
When I get those messages, I remember Marie of Oignies, and the hands she saw reaching up to her from purgatory. I never thought my hunger was saving anyone—though I did believe that to refuse it might cause inexplicable pain—but now, in recovery, I think I can see the hands Marie did. I see them reaching out to me, asking me for help. I want so badly to pull them up, but I’m scared that reaching out will only pull me down—that remembering is just another way of going back.
Other times, I think that Sarah, so close to death, must have left something of herself with me—or if not that, then broken off a piece of my body and carried it with her to wherever she went. I wish I could ask her what it looked like, the part of me she took, and if it smelled sweet, like Lidwina’s body, which floated away from her like falling leaves.
It’s been eight years since that afternoon in the living room, but sometimes I still dream of Sarah. In the dreams she asks me again if I believe in God, but this time, unlike then, I come up with an answer. It’s a real answer, a perfect one, and I give it to her like a benediction. She breaks out into a smile as soon as I say it, and for a while we just sit like that, beaming, radiating light towards one another. It’s brighter and warmer than the outside world could
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ever be, this light that seems to come from the two of us together, and as we look through it, we both realize, at the same moment, that we recognize each other perfectly.