‘It was as if she left her body’

Castel d’Emilio, Italy - The chilly late January fog rises from the streets and wheat fields of Castel d’Emilio, a small hillside village near Italy’s eastern Adriatic coast.

Cold light streams in through Dalila Brancaccio’s bedroom window, illuminating a calendar on the wall from 2018.

That was the year that everything changed for the Brancaccio family - when Dalila, 29, was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa.

“[Time] stopped flowing the way it used to,” says Dalila’s soft-spoken mother Rita, a nurse, as she sits in the family’s living room with her daughter.

Everything became about helping Dalila get better.

Dalila’s illness had begun about a year earlier. She does not know why she began refusing food, only that she started to see herself differently and could no longer recognise her body as her own. She started losing weight and withdrawing from friends and social events, and grew stiff around food. She refused to eat with her family and avoided meals with them. Sometimes she’d stay out, saying she’d already eaten and send them pictures of food.

Rita, her husband Giuseppe, 62, and their son Cristiano, who is two years younger than Dalila, “were afraid”.

“We didn’t understand what was happening,” Rita explains. “And [we were] angry, too. She was evasive, almost absent, disappearing for hours." There was “constant tension”.

By January 2018, knowing her daughter was critically unwell and in need of urgent help, Rita persuaded her to visit a public centre for eating disorders. By then, Dalila, who is five feet three inches tall, weighed just 31kg (68 pounds).

The specialised centre in Fermo, about an hour’s drive away, had initially directed Rita to services closer to the family’s home when she contacted them. “They didn’t want to take her case. I was sitting here in the living room, and I told them, 'Either I die, or she dies. You figure out what to do,'” Rita remembers telling them in desperation.

The centre’s diagnosis gave them a path forward. “When they told us it was anorexia nervosa, I thought: this is an illness, not a whim. That meant there was a cure,” Rita says.

The centre placed Dalila on a strict meal plan and gave her regular appointments.

In the beginning, it was a fight to keep her alive - and then help her get better.

“When I got up, the first thing I did was light the fireplace because she was always cold. Despite all the sweaters she wore, she was still freezing. Then I’d prepare a hot water bottle for her,” Rita murmurs, giving her daughter a small smile.

Dalila would spend hours under the hot water trying to warm herself, but Rita never said anything about the high gas bills.

Dalila lights a cigarette. “My body had disappeared,” she recalls.

“She became so thin it hurt even to sit on a chair,” Rita adds. “I had to put cushions on the chairs so she wouldn’t feel pain.”

The Brancaccio family’s days revolved entirely around organising meals, buying food Dalila would eat, avoiding those she still wouldn’t, and scheduling medical visits.

“Shopping was a panic. If I couldn’t find the things she wanted, like rice cakes - because she only ate those - I’d have to go all the way (30 minutes by car) to Ancona, because only there, in the city, was there a shop that sold them,” Rita explains.

“We would go to work, while Dalila spent the day at home, researching food, calories, theories, dishes she didn’t eat, and recipes online. She criticised what we ate because, in her opinion, it wasn’t ‘right’. Everything revolved around food,” she recalls.

Once, in a pharmacy, Rita remembers her husband hugging Dalila to protect her from other people’s stares.

“Dalila was like a child again,” she says. “At night, I lay next to her - not just to keep her warm, but to shield her from the world, from people’s looks, their questions.”

Though Dalila followed her diet, she would weigh every gramme of what she had to eat over and over until she was satisfied. She cooked for herself using her own pots, and ate with her own plate and cutlery.

At the table, Dalila would “go into a trance”, Rita recalls. Her daughter would stare into space and eat slowly. “It was as if she left her body,” she says.

“She could be sitting at the table at noon, and when I returned from work around 3pm, she would still be eating chicken. It could take hours to finish a plate. We were exhausted, thinking this would never end.”

It often felt like fighting an invisible battle because Dalila couldn't talk about how much she was suffering.

The situation was overwhelming and painful, but “we were so heartbroken we couldn’t even cry”, Rita says.

From April to October, Dalila stayed at the centre, sometimes coming home during the week or on the weekends.

Her days there were structured around meals, psychotherapy, and activities such as dance, watching films or reading to distract from obsessive thoughts about food.

Dalila would call Rita nearly every day, asking for reassurance about her weight or complaining that she looked bloated. Her mother would try to reassure her, but sometimes she’d cut the call short, exhausted by answering the same questions over and over again.

Occasionally, tension at home would boil over into arguments. “I wondered if I could make it through,” Rita says, explaining that on several occasions she even thought the easiest way to end the suffering would be to take her own life.

Silence, however, was mostly how the family managed. “It’s a pain you experience in solitude. I didn’t talk about it outside the home. Even now, telling this story feels like standing on a precipice,” Rita says, her voice cracking.

At the centre, Dalila was determined that her illness wouldn’t stop her life. She focused on a single objective. If she regained weight by October, doctors said she could enrol in university where she wanted to study education. “I didn’t have a single relapse,” she says.

Rita and the family, meanwhile, sought help from a support association for family members of people with eating disorders. They learned how to handle Dalila’s meal refusals and moments of crisis and shared their burden with others.

After six months, Dalila was able to enrol in her studies. Over time, her confidence grew. She gradually returned to social life.

Dalila has rebuilt her relationship with food and her body. Over about five years, as she studied, graduated, and began working as a professional educator, she continued to follow a meal plan and be monitored by the centre. She continues to see the psychiatrist she has been seeing for eight years twice a month.

“Eating disorders aren’t something that just ends. You learn to live with them,” Dalila says, giving her mother a gentle look. She describes the healing process as a marathon rather than a sprint.

Today, Rita’s Sunday ragu is Dalila’s favourite dish. “I start preparing it around 7am and cook it until 1pm, lunchtime,” Rita says.

Throughout, Rita has tried not to dwell on feelings of guilt or whether she could somehow be to blame. Both Rita and Giuseppe reflect on feeling at times that the illness was “a kind of failure as a parent”, despite their efforts to give their children stability, guidance and freedom.

But most of all, they see the ordeal as something that helped the family grow and bring them closer together. Rita now shares her experience with other parents and takes part in local awareness campaigns.

Today, the small vegetable garden that Rita and Giuseppe cultivate at the foot of the hill helps set the rhythm of their days.

In the evenings, the wind carries the smell of the sea into the family’s home, where the old calendar hangs.

“It reminds me of what we went through,” Rita says with a smile. “And how far we’ve come.”

This story is part of a miniseries, Mothering on the Margins, exploring how five women around the world grapple with impossible circumstances to raise their children.

Read more from the series:

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'I count their breaths': A homeless mother protects her children in Delhi

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