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.”
