MOURNING
ALM No.95, November 2026
ESSAYS
Looking at me, normal weight, moderately shapely even at eighty, no one would suspect that each time I finish a meal, I feel as if my husband is being wound in a shroud again. That’s how deep the mourning is. I begin to plan what I can eat next. Let’s see. A bag of popcorn is only one hundred calories. A serving of low-carb fettuccini is only five calories, never mind that it looks like strips of jellyfish and tastes like wallpaper paste, even with tomato sauce and a shake of rosemary and shredded parmesan. I figure I can add a can of mushrooms, only thirty-five calories more, and so it goes until my belly is as swollen as a starving child’s. The fix for working it off might be walking 10,000 steps and taking a fiber gummy. I also jeopardize my dental bridges with chewing gum. Nights, I pace, my intestines roiling with gas. The next day, I eat and eat because I’m overtired.
This mourning for food didn’t begin with my husband’s death. No, Bernie, a lanky guy, ate as if to make up for his uncle’s starvation in Auschwitz. Usually a sociable guy, I was embarrassed by his transformation at a wedding buffet. He eyed the food, hawk-like, and reached over other people to get to it. He walked miles after putting in twelve-hour days to keep thin.
We were in this together. Whenever we had a celebratory cake at home, after the company left, and after the kids were in bed, we’d wolf the frosting off and throw the rest of the cake in the garbage, not wanting to consume calories that weren’t thick with buttercream.
When our daughter, Heather, was a tween, she said, “Whenever I go to Jodi’s house, there’s a cake stand covered with a plastic dome. It’s either a whole cake or a whole cake with a slice or two missing. And when I go back, her mother offers me another piece of cake. How is it possible that their cakes aren’t gone overnight?”
Shame like hot borscht rose in me. “I’ll buy a cake server,” I said. I did. It was real china with a rosette rim and a glass, not a plastic dome. I bought a cake to put in it, but by the next day, the cake stand stood empty.
At the table of my childhood, my father watched the plates of my two sisters and me. If our eating slowed, if we stopped to say a word, take a breath, he speared a roast potato or a chicken wing off our plate, and put it in his own mouth. In Russia, he had known starvation.
“Ess, ess, children are starving,” my father insisted.
For dessert, my mother served his favorite—canned peaches dolloped with sour cream. Peaches in one dish, sour cream in another I could have eaten. But together they looked like some oozing internal organ. My father wouldn’t let me leave the table until I emptied my bowl.
One would think that I would not eat in rebellion, but there was no stopping me from what I wanted to eat. When I was five, my mother bought a can of macaroons for Passover and put it on the highest kitchen shelf so that no one would eat it before the seder. I woke in the middle of the night, climbed on a chair, and took down the can. I managed to open the pull tab, but when I reached in for macaroons, I slit my wrist on the lid. Even today the white scar looks as if I might have tried suicide.
That same year, eating dinner at the town deli, I was determined that my father wouldn’t get my French fries or my frank. I ate fast, faster. Suddenly, a hunk of frankfurter caught in my throat. It was years before the Heimlich was invented. My father, who had earned the money for his grocery store as a middleweight boxer, grabbed me from my chair, lifted me by my ankles, and shook me until the frank dislodged. I would rather have choked to death than let everyone in the deli see my panties.
As I write, I’m thinking about what time I can eat my next meal, and what that meal will be, all the while knowing that a meal will not end the craving. When I get on the scale, if I haven’t gained weight, I think I’ve gotten away with something and calculate how much more I can eat without gaining. The only time I can stop myself from eating is if I do my elaborate oral hygiene routine and put my night guard in.
I know about the modern drugs that can break the hex of this obsession, but I am highly allergic and can’t even take an aspirin.
I return to an exercise an eating disorder therapist recommended years ago. Write down your feelings when you get the urge to binge, she said. Well, that’s always. I sit in my easy chair and begin to write. Out comes a stream of—I don’t know what to write…. Then, a siren goes off inside me. I see my father’s big hand flash out, the veins bulging in his forehead as he devours food. A volcanic agitation overtakes me, as if I am still being forced to sit at my childhood table, eating every bit of what I hate. I put down my pen and take breaths. More breaths. It comes to me that I’m alone here, without Bernie’s arms, without his hand in mine as we walk off calories. I hear the earth pelt his coffin.
The hell with this, I think. I reach for the dark chocolate-covered almonds that I put out of reach, high in a kitchen cabinet like my mother had the macaroons all those years ago. Not daring to climb for fear of breaking my birdy-bones, I go after it with a granny grabber. The plastic box opens as it comes down, raining chocolate almonds that bonk my head, scattering on the floor. Many roll away beneath the refrigerator. I step on some, leaving size eight chocolate tracks.
I burst out laughing. I spot my face in the mirror. I wear a chocolate smile.
Rochelle Jewel Shapiro has published in the NYT (Lives), Newsweek, and more. Nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and for Best of the Net, her short stories and poetry have appeared in Prism, The MacGuffin, Euphony, Penumbra, the Iowa Review, and Rogue Agent. Her poetry collection Death, Please Wait, was published by Box Turtle Press. http://rochellejshapiro.com @rochelle.j.shapiro @rjshapiro @rochellejshapiro.bsky.social https://www.facebook.com/rochelle.j.shapiro
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