A Life Is Lost to Anorexia; a Family Is Lost in Grief : Health: Despite their efforts, Stacey Asbury slowly starved herself to death as her parents watched.

There it was again . . . that noise. Tom Asbury squinted through the darkness and found the bedside alarm clock. It was 3 a.m.--and someone or something was downstairs.

Careful not to awaken his wife, Carlie, the Pepperdine basketball coach slipped out of bed and moved slowly, quietly down the steps. As he neared the family room, he saw her. She was soaked in sweat and strands of her long, blond hair were matted against her workout clothes and pressed along her frail neck and shoulders.

Who knows how many jumping jacks or sit-ups she had done this time--100 . . . 1,000? However many, it never would be enough. There always was another pound to lose, another ounce to be starved away.

Asbury stared helplessly at his older daughter.

“Stacey?” he said.

When their eyes met, it was as if someone had pierced Asbury’s heart with a stiletto. Anorexia nervosa can do that. It can render a father and mother useless. It can make a daughter sneak downstairs in the middle of the night and do jumping jacks until she can no longer raise her hands above her waist. It can glorify hunger.

That’s what eventually happened to Stacey Asbury. In the wee hours of Sept. 12--doctors estimated it was a little after midnight or so--she made her way down those same stairs, reached the bottom step, sat down and died. Her heart, no longer able to support even a starved, 70-pound body, simply gave up.

Paramedics were called to revive her, but it was too late. Stacey was 22.

“Her body just couldn’t take it anymore,” Carlie Asbury said.

A night earlier, mother and daughter had spent part of the evening grading school papers together. Carlie teaches junior high math in Thousand Oaks and occasionally would let Stacey help with the work. As they had done countless times before, Carlie and Stacey talked about the anorexia nervosa, that insidious and mysterious eating disorder that had preyed on the Asburys’ older daughter for nearly six years.

Once a healthy 5 feet, 8 inches tall and 130 pounds, Stacey weighed almost half that during those final days. In fact, beginning in 1990, she never allowed herself to weigh more than 90 pounds.

By September, Stacey’s condition had worsened to the point that another hospitalization seemed imminent. Carlie and Tom talked about that possibility the night before Stacey died. Asbury was in Denver on a recruiting trip at the time. He was due back the next morning.

Later, about 10 or 11 that evening, Carlie said a final good night to her daughter. They had agreed that Stacey would try a new food supplement drink in the next day or two, in the hope of somehow building her strength. “Never give up,” Carlie had told her. “Never lose hope.”

In the end, Stacey didn’t lose hope as much as she lost control. The illness consumed her, overpowered her mentally and physically. She would look at herself in the mirror, see nothing more than a stick figure and still think she was too fat. To compensate, she would eat even less, exercise in secrecy even more.

“You could have put her in a cheese box and she would have found a way to exercise,” said Dr. Joel Yager, who specializes in anorexia nervosa research at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, where Stacey was a frequent patient.

So now she is gone. The little girl who used to be a Pepperdine ball girl, who used to sell sodas and pizza slices at the annual Pepperdine summer basketball camp, who practically grew up at Jim Harrick’s house during the days when Harrick was coaching the Waves and Asbury was his top assistant . . . that girl is now among the 3% to 5% of anorexia nervosa victims who die of it within 10 years.

Don’t ask how it happened, because nobody knows. Not her parents. Not her doctors. It is, as Churchill once said of Russia, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Dr. Michael Strober, who oversees the eating disorder program at UCLA, says, “I still feel humbled in its presence.”

*

The view from Asbury’s Pepperdine office is suitable for framing. In the distance you can see the ocean’s waves falling lazily against the white beaches of Malibu. A cool December breeze moves gently through the open window. A few notes and letters on Asbury’s desk rustle, but go nowhere because of paperweights.

There is the usual collection of coach’s wall ornaments: team photos, plaques, awards. Asbury, who took over the program when Harrick became UCLA’s coach in 1988, has done well here. He has led the Waves to four 20-victory seasons, two National Collegiate Athletic Assn. tournament appearances, two National Invitational Tournament visits, three West Coast Conference regular-season championships and two WCC tournament titles. This season, Pepperdine is favored to finish first in the league.

Asbury, 48, leans forward in his chair and turns the framed photos for a visitor to see. His younger daughter Megan, a freshman at Pepperdine, is on the right, Stacey on the left.

“That’s her,” he says, nodding toward Stacey. “Beautiful girls.”

Asbury briefly considered taking an extended leave after his daughter’s death. He and his family were weary of the battle, forever changed by the memories of watching Stacey starve herself for six years. Basketball suddenly meant nothing, and yet it meant everything. He was haunted by her memory and inspired by it, too.

“Stacey,” he would say to himself, “if you were here, if you could hear me, what should I do?” The answer would always be the same: “ ‘Get to work, Dad. Get to work.’ ”

So he works, but his heart isn’t in it--not yet. During the last four months, Asbury has lost a daughter to anorexia and a father to pneumonia. He grieves for both, but accepts only the loss of his father, Ed, who was 86 when he died Nov. 17 in Denver.

“Losing a parent is one thing,” Asbury says. “Losing a child is a whole different thing. My dad was 86 and he lived a great life. He was in great health for almost his whole life. So that’s part of life, that’s just the natural order of things.

“But this,” he says, pinching the bridge of his nose to hold back the tears, “this isn’t the natural order of things.”

*

Not long after she turned 16, Stacey decided she needed to lose weight. Not much, she said at the time, just a few pounds. Tom and Carlie thought nothing of it.

A year passed and as it did, Stacey began eliminating sugar, red meat and most dairy products from her diet. Carlie would fix a nice breakfast or lunch and Stacey would throw it away. She would eat chicken or fish, salads and fruits--that was it. A candy bar? Never.

The illness had begun to take hold. Carlie didn’t realize it until she was called out of town to attend the funerals of her grandmother and grandfather. She was gone a week and when she returned and saw Stacey, she said, “It was like somebody hit me in the stomach.”

Stacey had lost too much weight, so much that the Asburys’ family physician referred her to a psychologist. The therapy seemed to work and by the end of her junior year in high school, Stacey was exercising three times a day, her weight was relatively normal and the compliments were up.

“She looked great,” Carlie said. “We thought, ‘Oh, we’re fine. Isn’t this wonderful.’ ”

Four months later, Stacey began restricting her diet even more. Rice cakes and yogurt replaced poultry and fish. There were long stretches when she would eat nothing at all. The pounds melted away.

Exercising became a treasured ritual to her, eating a necessary evil to be monitored precisely. Calorie was a dirty word.

The textbook symptoms of anorexia nervosa had revealed themselves. Stacey fit the profile to the letter: adolescent . . . pathological willingness to diet to the point of malnutrition . . . exaggerated and inexplicable concern over weight and body shape.

“The dread of body fat,” is the way Strober puts it.

According to the best estimates--and that’s all they are--0.5% to 1% of college-age women suffer from some form of anorexia. About 100,000 men and women nationwide are afflicted with the eating disorder, although the illness is most often linked to women.

Strober, who has studied anorexia nervosa for nearly 20 years, said the condition seems to develop in people with certain personality traits, such as extreme perfectionism, a need for order, certainty and routine. They are emotionally sensitive, uncomfortable with change and compliant, and tend to defer to the judgment of others.

And Stacey?

“She was a very pleasing child,” Carlie Asbury said. “She wanted everybody to be happy. She was very sensitive, sensitive to how other people were feeling.”

Said Asbury, “Highly motivated . . . above average intelligence . . . people-pleasing . . . the good kids.”

As his daughter’s weight plummeted to less than 100 pounds, Asbury sought assistance. He mentioned the situation to Harrick, who helped arrange for Stacey to get into the much-respected UCLA eating-disorders program. In 4 1/2 months, her weight had increased to 125 pounds.

“We thought we had it whipped,” Asbury said.

They didn’t. As is the case with one of three anorexia patients, a second stay was required for Stacey. She would be hospitalized for months, get better and then, upon release, revert to her former habits.

The illness had taken complete control of Stacey and she knew it. With the exception of Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, she almost never ate with the family. When she did, it was an excruciatingly tense affair as Stacey nibbled nervously at her food.

She began delaying her mealtimes, eating breakfast at noon, dinner at midnight. She became obsessed with nutrition and often told Asbury that she wanted to return to school to become a nutritionist.

In the search for a body devoid of fat, Stacey increased her exercise regimen. If one area health club--its employees alerted to look out for possible anorexics--denied her application, Stacey joined another. Carlie guesses that her daughter belonged to seven or eight exercise clubs.

“I was ready to call every one of those clubs and say, ‘How can you let her join? How could you let her in?’ ” her mother said. “Of course, some of them couldn’t have cared less. They just wanted the money.”

About three years ago, Stacey went to Denver to live with Carlie’s sister. Maybe a change of environment would help, they thought.

Instead, Stacey nearly froze to death one day as she sat in a car and listened to music while the temperature outside dropped. Anorexics, their body fat depleted, are always cold. In fact, it wasn’t unusual for Stacey to be covered with blankets and comforters in the middle of summer.

Stacey was rushed to intensive care, where she spent the next 13 days. Asbury flew to Denver and visited her each day in the hospital. She weighed no more than 75 pounds.

One day, Asbury took his daughter to the hospital cafeteria, where he sipped coffee while Stacey stared at a slice of turkey on her plate.

“I got up for about 60 seconds to get another cup of coffee,” Asbury said. “When I came back, the turkey was gone. What she had done is hidden it in her hospital gown.”

Asbury asked her: “Stacey, how can you do that? Why do you do that?”

There was never an answer, except her saying she was helpless.

There were more hospital stays. There were 12-step, self-help programs. There were visits to hypnotists. There were antidepressant and anti-compulsion medicines. Nothing worked.

“I’m unaware of a single thing that wasn’t done,” Yager said. “Everything was tried. She just died anyway.”

At one point, the Asburys confided in a Thousand Oaks physician who had treated Tom for an unrelated illness. They patiently detailed Stacey’s condition and then listened in horror as the doctor suggested a treatment.

“I’ve got the cure for her,” he said. “We’ll strap her down and we’ll force-feed her.”

Even Yager admits that the medical community suffers from a certain ignorance about the disorder. What doctors don’t know about anorexia, he said, “far exceeds what we do know.”

The ignorance is even more acute in society. Occasionally, Carlie would catch a certain expression on the faces of friends, as if they wanted to say, “Why won’t she just eat something?” It was an obvious question to an illness that has no obvious answers.

“It’s not like you can give them a pill,” Carlie said. “It just seems so simple. Even Stacey saw the solution. But seeing the solution doesn’t mean you can act on it.”

So worried were clinic attendants about Stacey’s reaction to weight gain that she only was allowed to be weighed with her back to the scale. In recent years, she constantly fidgeted with her fingers and wrists, always trying to feel for fat. There was nothing but bone and a thin covering of flesh, but she continued to look for fat.

The Asburys visited their daughter every day in the hospital. On occasion, Harrick would stop by too. The two families used to live just two miles from one another. Stacey and Megan used the Harricks’ pool all the time and the families became best of friends.

And now this.

“I’d never talk to her about her illness,” Harrick said. “We’d take her books and things. I kind of wanted her one day to be able to come work for me.

“But she was very thin and frail. Oh, it was . . . “

And then his voice trailed off.

As Stacey’s organs began to deteriorate, she had difficulty with the simplest motor skills. Asbury watched in disbelief one day as his daughter was unable to insert batteries into a portable tape player. She began to forget things and often couldn’t count very well. Her body screamed for food, but she wouldn’t--she couldn’t--give it any.

“As a parent, you want to take on the pain of your child,” Carlie said. “You think you’re going to take away their pain, but when you can’t, it’s a terrible feeling. We wish we could. We would have in a heartbeat. I’ve said it many times to friends, that if it were a transplant, I would have done it in a second. I would have. I just miss her terribly.”

*

In many ways, this has been a hollow holiday season for the Asburys. The day-to-day reminders of Stacey are too painful to ignore, so much that Megan said she couldn’t bear to come home for the holidays. Instead, the family will spend Christmas with Carlie’s parents in Florida.

The next week, Asbury will take his team to a tournament in El Paso, where the Waves are scheduled to play Dec. 29. He is almost happy for the distraction.

This was Stacey’s favorite time of year. She cherished the excitement of Christmas. She loved opening presents. Even more, she loved giving them. That was her special way.

“It’s going to be a tough Christmas,” said Asbury. “They’re all going to be tough for a while. All of the Christmases are going to be hard for years.”

The Asburys tell their story reluctantly. They do so not for sympathy but for understanding. They witnessed anorexia nervosa in its most unforgiving mood, a fact confirmed by their daughter’s marker at a Thousand Oaks cemetery.

Stacey spent nearly 18 months as a patient in various eating-disorder programs over the last six years. At an average of about $1,000 a day, the Asburys’ medical bills total more than $500,000. The family health insurance company paid $15,000 a year.

Almost six weeks after Stacey’s death, a letter arrived for her from a disability insurance agency. It read in part: “We have determined that you are not entitled to disability benefits based on the claim you have filed. We have determined that your condition is not severe enough to be considered disabling.”

Asbury doesn’t want money. If he did, he would have accepted Harrick’s offer to let some friends at Pepperdine help with the medical costs. Asbury said no.

What he does want is an end to the ignorance, to the Karen Carpenter jokes, to the perception that anorexics are victims of themselves and not victims of an illness. He is disturbed by America’s insistence on thinness and what he considers a lack of proper funding for illnesses related to eating disorders.

Most of all, Tom and Carlie Asbury want anorexics and their families to never give up. After all, 50% to 60% of those with anorexia nervosa overcome the major symptoms.

“Ours is a bad case because we lost Stacey,” said Asbury. “But you never know when something might turn it all around. You never know.”