world hold on

it was 2005 when my friend franziska told me, that her friend yvonne was diagnosed with a brain tumor as big as an orange. i remember the day we went to visit her in hospital. a few days before that visit yvonne shaved her hair because she did not want it to fall out in tufts when combing it. i knew that she would be nearly bald and i had the worst imaginations of her with no hair and a big scar over her head.
but then everything was not too bad. she wore a scraf around her head and she laughed and said she was sorry if she could not answer right away because she was having a hole in her head now and the things she wants to say seem to fall in there and dissappear. i let her explain the operation to me and was quite astonished how calm she was talking about such a serious topic. she could have been dead. but she wasn't.

and nobody was expecting her to die. she was treated with chemotherapy and radiotherapy. she put off her apprenticeship to become a nurse and tried to get well again. we met at the beergarden during world cup 2006 and while we were drinking beer she would have apple spritzer, even if she was tempted to drink alcohol.
at the end of 2006 doctors found a relapse in her head where the tumor was. the cancer cells had started to grow again. this time she also was tested positive on a preliminary stage of cervical cancer. she had some of her eggs taken out and frozen, because she could not be sure if the cancer would damage her ovars.
i met her in spring 2007. she was in a chemotherapeutic cycle and often feeling sick and tired. it was a nice day, the sun was shining and i fetched her from home. she was wearing a woolen jumper to prevent her from freezing all the time. on our way to nymphenburger château park we bought ice cream. we spent almost one and a half hours in the park, watching people and i listened to the latest progress she had made in defeating the cancer.
after she had finished she asked me how i was and i told her that i was feeling very uncomfy with my studies and that tv was a bunch of shit. it's funny how your own big problems can feel so small and unimportant when you're talking to someone who has real problems. i almost apologised for telling her.
when we said goodbye i did not think that she could die. she was very, very sick, yes. she was suffering from brain cancer which is not a broken foot. but i never considered that it could end deathly. she was always too fun-loving, too alive and much too sarcastic when it came to the death-topic that i would ever have thought about her never getting well again.

yesterday franziska told me that yvonne is in extremis. in october 2007 doctors found another relapse which was growing very fast. her tumor is inoperable. it's growing into the cerebral tissue (instead of repressing it), which means that in an operation you would have to cut into the brain. one by one her brain functions will fall out and at some point there will be a cerebral haemorrhage that will cause a coma and death.

she is almost unable to speak anymore. she forgets things. she cannot understand why people are crying. franziska says she's not sure if yvonne is aware of the fact that she will die.

i don't know how it comes but again i underestimated the cancer. it is too abstract to believe or understand although i saw my father die from cancer. and there are enough people i know that had or still have cancer. it's hard to keep in mind that it is a bloody dangerous disease and that you're never never safe from getting it.

when it comes to death the absurde thing is that everything will continue. you will still laugh and cry and be hungry and shower and go to work. all people around you will act like nothing happened, cars will go, traffic lights will switch from red to green and back to red. everything will go on and on and on and act like nothing happened.
and what's left is a stupid feeling of being not worth this normal life. because there is absolutely nothing you can do.

people come and go
it's just the way of the world
love just ebbs and flows
what's left for us to rely on?

yvonne turned 28 on january 6th. her life has almost come to an end.