Losing a loved one is never easy, but when 26-year-old Casie lost her husband, Shawn, to a sudden asthma attack, the grieving process went in a direction she never expected.
Casie, a resident of Fayetteville, Tenn., appeared on the season finale of the TLC series My Strange Addiction found herself eating his cremated ashes as a form of comfort.
When the couple first met in 2008, it seemed like a match made in heaven.
“Everything I had ever wanted in a man was right in front of me,” Casie said during the episode. “And it felt so great.”
Casie’s mom, Linda, says the two-and-a-half years her daughter was with Shawn were probably the only time in her daughter’s life that she was truly happy.
But the good times ended after Shawn died of a sudden asthma attack, a day Casie says when her “own world stopped turning.”
At first, her mourning took the form of carrying around her husband’s cremated ashes wherever they went, including the grocery store, movie theaters and restaurants, the Daily Mail reported.
Things soon went slightly more extreme one day when some of the ashes spilled onto her hand.
“I didn’t want to wipe them off because that’s my husband and I don’t want to wipe him away,” she said. “So I just licked it off my finger.”
Since then, she has been unable to stop, and estimates she has eaten at least a pound of ashes thus far, with about five more remaining. Despite the cremains having a taste that Casie describes as “rotten eggs, sand, and sandpaper,” she has developed a taste for the death dust.
Although many people would find Casie’s addiction shocking — including her in-laws, who don’t know she’s slowly licking her husband away — the real danger isn’t becoming a social pariah, it’s that the ashes also contain chemicals that have been known to induce psychosis when ingested.
There is hope: At the end of the episode, Casie checked herself into an inpatient care facility, and she did not bring the ashes, according to Jezebel.com
