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What Could Be Happening? Episode 2 — When She Stopped Eating and No One Knew Why
A series where I take one real home care scenario and walk through the clinical reasoning behind it — so families and caregivers learn to see what’s actually happening, not just what it looks like.
The Scene
Mrs. Iyer had always been the one who fed everyone else first.
So when she started pushing her plate away at dinner — first just the rice, then the dal, then everything — her daughter-in-law noticed within a day. By the end of the week, Mrs. Iyer was eating perhaps a few spoonfuls a meal, and the family had quietly started saying the thing families say when an 84-year-old stops eating: maybe she’s just done. Maybe this is what happens near the end.
No one had asked her why. They had simply started grieving a decision she never made.
What Everyone Assumed
Loss of appetite in an older adult gets read as one of two things almost every time: depression, or “giving up.” Both are treated as emotional or spiritual explanations — something to be sat with, not something to be investigated.
Sometimes that’s exactly what it is. But refusing food is a symptom, not a diagnosis, and it has a short list of very physical, very treatable causes that get skipped past far too often because “she’s just not hungry” feels like a kinder story than the alternative.
