“I am eating my husband”: The shocking story of a grieving woman addicted to eating her husband’s ashes – The Times of India

This is not your regular story. It’s the story of a grieving wife. When you lose someone you loved deeply, the foundation of your existence collapses and the world around you can fracture in minutes. It’s a grief that terrifies you, breaks you and alters reality. Something similar or worse happened to a 26-year old Cassie when her husband died suddenly. This incident might be old (years ago), but the kind of love story it depicts lives forever in our minds. This news is from 2021 when multiple media houses had published it. This is a story of a young woman who was in love but her life shattered and the grief consumed her after the death of her husband. After dating for 10 months, Cassie and Sean, living in a small town of Tennessee in UK, decided to get married. Their life looked perfect and dreamy when one day death did them apart. Sean suffered a sudden asthma attack and his lungs failed overnight one day. One moment he was all healthy, talking and loving; the next, boom, he was dead, gone, forever. No warning. No alarm, No ambulance, just gone. Just silence.It was shocking for friends and family. But for Cassie, her world ended. The family saw her sink deep in emotional turmoil as the days passed. She stopped sleeping, eating or doing anything. Though her heart was beating, it died the moment her husband left.Two months later, Cassie was seen carrying her husband’s ashes everywhere, literally everywhere. From grocery stores to movie theaters and even to bed at night, Cassie was carrying the urn to keep her husband close to her, as she did not know what else to do because she missed him so much. She would also talk to it like a normal person and tell it about her days. She used to cook dinners just how her husband liked. It was as if the urn was him.

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But one day something bizarre happened that turned her life upside down. In the video, she says something that shifted her coping from mournful to obsessive…While transferring his remains from the temporary cardboard box into its new urn, some of the ash spilled onto her fingers. But instead of wiping the dust away, she licked it off her fingers. “I didn’t want to wipe them off because that’s my husband, I didn’t want to wipe him away,” she said on the show. “So, I just licked it off my fingers and… I can’t stop.” It was an act of panic that comes from deep loss. She thought that this was her husband so without giving it a second thought, she brought her finger to her mouth, and never stopped.Soon it became an addition. In the video, she is seen licking her finger first, then dipping it into the urn many times a day and easting the ashes off like her favourite snack. She describes the taste of the ash as “rotten eggs, sand, and sandpaper.” What doctors say

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Doctors call it a form of traumatic compulsion. But in Cassie’s case, science wasn’t the point. She began to describe what she did not as eating dust, but as eating her husband.“I’m eating him, I am eating my husband,” she told the producers of TLC’s show My Strange Addiction.She soon started losing weight. Days went by where she’d eat nothing but the ashes of her husband. Friends stopped inviting her out. She stopped taking care of herself. Her entire routine turned upside down. She would eat it five times a day or more. In her mind, she was getting close to Sean.For most people, the her behavior must look like “disturbing,” “unsettling,” and “almost like a horror story come to life.” But for Cassie, It was coming from love, from raw and unfiltered grief.

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Therapists tried to talk to her and medical professionals also warned of the chemicals and possible toxins in human cremains. At times, she also confessed that she was terrified of finishing the ashes—because if there were none left, what would become of her? In the end, the show convinced her to check into an inpatient care facility where she was kept under constant watch. She was gradually separated from the urn.Cassie’s story is disturbing because it reveals the raw side of a human’s coping mechanism. We may never fully understand why she did what she did, but her experience reminds us that grieving is a part of human behaviour. But when it crosses the limit, it can play with our mind, reality and push us into darkness.