Once again I woke in a body claimed by death. My mother was hovering over the bed, my medicaments and a glass of water in her hands. The sheer terror and fear of the possibility I might not awake was still plainly visible behind the relief in her eyes. I groaned. It was no bad dream, no tear-jerking Hollywood movie, just goddamn plain reality. It was unfortunate and a real shame.
“Honey, how are you feeling today?” my mother was fussing over me again, and though I could never have imagined such a thing it got worse with every day that past. With each day that meant there was one less for her daughter to live. But then again I guess it wasn’t easy for parents to helplessly watch their child fade away. It wasn’t the natural order of things. And so I endured the sometimes suffocating mothering, fixing a somewhat faint but hopefully reassuring smile onto my lips. Then I got up, popped the various pills she gave me, and swallowed them down with a gulp of water.
“I’m fine, mom. I’ll just grab a shower.”
Worried eyes fixed me as if trying to keep me from vanishing into thin air right then and there. “Sure. But breakfast is ready, hon.”
“I’ll make it quick,” I promised and gave her a little peck on her cheek and tried that reassuring smile again. It must have worked this time since she nodded and the corners of her lips curled slightly.
In the bathroom I stripped out of my pajama. And for the first time in quite a while and for whatever the reason I turned around to really look at my reflection in the mirror. I didn’t like what I saw. Some women wanted to look like anorexic sticks, I wasn’t one of them but I certainly could join the club now. I was skinny, in an unhealthy bones-and-angles-showing kind of way. But that wasn’t even the worst of it all. My skin wasn’t just pale, it was gray. I looked like a walking corpse, and to my horror pretty much felt like one as well.
I was going to die. I knew it, and with each day that passed there was one question in my mind that pressed ever harder to be heard.
Pushing away the thought, I stepped under the spray of warm water, let it caress my sensitive skin, let it wash over me. When I was finished I toweled off, and rubbed a hand over my bald, scarred head.
Dressed, I went downstairs. My father was sitting at the table, reading the newspaper, of which one corner nearly drowned in his coffee.
“Morning, dad.” I sat down. I wasn’t hungry, but with the inspection of my corpse still fresh in my mind I grabbed a roll.
“Morning. How are you feeling?”
“Good.” I sighed and let the roll drop onto my plate. I couldn’t put it off. Time wasn’t on my side. And so I took a deep breath. “I want to stop the treatment.”
The resulting silence was absolute. And then came the storm.
“What the hell are you talking about?” my father’s face was red with sudden fury and his eyes huge with helplessness at the prospect of losing his daughter. “Are you out of your mind?”
“The treatment isn’t working. I don’t respond to it.”
“Then we can still try that new one.”
“No,” I shook my head and looked at him, utterly calm. “No, dad. We won’t, because I can’t take it anymore. The treatment is killing me, the doctor told me so. My liver is shit. We have to stop. And what’s the use anyhow? What would we win? A day? I don’t even know what I’m fighting for anymore. I don’t feel good. Look at me. I’m numb, I don’t feel anything. Even with the treatment, all we would do is stall. The treatment won’t heal me, we all know it. So, please, let me have the time I have left.” I got up and headed for the door, and out. I needed to get away. I got in the car and just drove, blindly, to wherever it would take me.
After some time I stopped and really looked out the windshield, and saw my old school. It hadn’t changed much. Some signs of old age here and there, but the schoolyard in front was still filled with squealing, talking or quarreling children. And those who were hiding out to have a smoke and thought that made them pretty clever and cool. There were places where time preferred crawling to flying. With memories filling my head and an idea forming in between them I pulled away. I knew where to go now.
I drove nearly two hours to see a friend I hadn’t met in a long time. I parked the car, got out and walked to the door of the five-storey building. After searching the name, I rang and waited.
“Yes?”
“Delivery,” I said into the interphone. With a click the door was opened and I got in, heading up the stairs.
She stood waiting in the door. The last time I’d seen her she had short blue and red hair, now it was brown and flowing past her shoulders, but the rest, complete with the black clothes and spiked bracelets, seemed the same. Her face wasn’t what one would call beautiful or pretty, with a sharp nose and strong chin, but the chocolate brown, almond-shaped eyes gave her a certain interesting attractiveness. That typical expression on her face, that others might identify to be one of boredom but which was a careful study of faked indifference and what-do-you-know, hadn’t changed either.
When recognition dawned, her eyes went wide with surprise and her eyebrows went up. “What the hell? Charlotte?”
I came to a stop in front of her and grinned, “Hello Bea!”
The smile that spread across her face was one of those that always reached the eyes, an honest and beautiful smile that made guys and sometimes even women look back at her.
“Can I come in?”
“Sorry. Sure.” Bea stepped to the side to let me in, before she closed the door behind me. The living room looked nothing special except for the mural painting covering the length of the wall. It showed a magnificent black dragon, crouching with its wings about to spread above its back – and it made the flat all hers. Bea loved dragons and painting, and pissing off her landlord surely played a factor as well.
We walked into the kitchen. “Well, if that isn’t a surprise I don’t know what is. What are you doing here?”
I walked to the glass door that opened to her balcony. Instead of answering her right away, I asked, “How are you? And how is it going, at the university and with the family?”
She sighed, “Ah, well. You know how my folks are. I don’t like it. My parents keep an eye on my studies, and look at me with disappointment and pity while wishing for me to be a little more clever and better. But otherwise they don’t give a shit about my mental state, nor my general well-being come to think of it.”
Bea had thought about suicide while we’ve still been in school. The scars were still there. She’d been living in a prison her parents had forged out of their own unfulfilled dreams, high-wrought expectations and a scary indifference to their youngest daughter’s personality. I had told her to hang on in there, that graduation and a flat away from her folks was just around the corner, and invited her over for half of our last summer holidays.
She shrugged, “Otherwise I’m fine. And you?”
“I’m dying.” I turned around, “Cancer.”
For a moment she just looked at me, speechless. “Want a beer?”
It felt as if I hadn’t had one in years, “Yeah.”
She grabbed two green bottles out of her fridge, uncapped them and gave me one before she motioned for me to sit down on one of the chairs. She grabbed the only other one, turned and straddled it. “I’m all ears.”
Turning the sweaty bottle between my fingers, I told her of my disease and that my own body now forced me to end the treatment. When I was finished, she took a long gulp of her beer and then said, “Well, that certainly qualifies as bad news.”
I went out onto the balcony and took a deep breath. The air was fresh, and I smelled that unique salty yet also sweet scent of the Baltic Sea on it.
Bea followed me out. “What do you want to do now?”
“Can I crash here?”
“Of course.”
I nodded in thanks. For the rest of the day we turned to other superficial subjects and just enjoyed brushing the dust off the bond between us. The two of us hadn’t seen each other for nearly six years and were rather different, and somehow not. We could talk about everything, in the fashion of old friends, as if time hadn’t passed and at the same time accepting the changes it had brought.
At some point I called my parents so they wouldn’t worry about my whereabouts. After the sun had set I made myself comfortable on the couch as Bea walked towards her bedroom. In the door she stopped and turned around, “How long do you have?”
“A couple of months,” I answered honestly. With a thoughtful nod she disappeared, and I lay down, turning onto my side and looking at the dragon on the wall. I hadn’t talked about my disease in such an open no-nonsense way with any other person. It was nice and relieving. Soon I was fast asleep.
“Hey, wake up!” Someone was shaking me. My eyes opened. Bea was leaning over me. “God, you sleep like the dead. Practicing already, or what?”
“What? What is it?” I scrambled to get up.
Bea plopped into her black arm chair beside me, a notepad on her knee and a pen in her hand. “Top three places you want to visit?”
I shook my head, trying to clear it from lasting scraps of some dream. “What?”
She shrugged, and explained a little impatient in a voice reserved for the mentally challenged, “You’re dying, and I want to know where you would like to go before you snuff it.”
Right. “Um. Jeez Bea, I don’t know.” I pinched the bridge of my nose and looked at her without a clue, “Paris, Canada maybe.”
She scribbled away on her pad and muttered, “Okay. What do you want to do? Some reckless stuff, I mean.”
“Escape death.” When she gave me one hard look, I recognized that Bea wouldn’t go away any time soon and that she was earnest about this and so I tried to get in a more comfortable position and sat cross-legged on the couch. I blew out my cheeks, rubbed a hand over my face and concentrated on what she was asking me. “To swim with a whale. I always wanted to see a whale, in the wild, not in a tank.”
Bea looked up again and grinned, “Ah, that’s more like it. Now we’re getting somewhere. What else?”
I smiled back at her, and finally in the mood I gave it some thought. “Can we go back to that first question? Do you remember the pub we used to go to in Rostock? And the pact we made there?
The smile widened on her lips, “Yes. We swore that if we’d ever go to Ireland, we’d go together the first time.”
“Yeah, Ireland, that’s my top one place I want to visit.”
“Okay,” Bea jotted it down, and then stopped. Looking up again, she leaned forward, a daring gleam in her eyes, “Let’s go there tomorrow. We’ll take a plane and be there in a heartbeat.”
Of all the people I knew, Bea was the only one I could imagine to do such a thing - to drop everything and fly to Ireland with me. She would do it, because no one else would dare to and probably panic at the idea of missing out on University.
When I hesitated, she lifted one of her eyebrows and asked, “Got anything better to do?”
No, I hadn’t.
“Alright,” a nearly hysterical laugh tickled my throat and bubbled out.
The next day we were on a plane, destination Dublin, where we rented a car. Since Bea didn’t have a driving license, I got to sit behind the wheel. It took me a while to get used to driving on the wrong side of the road which resulted in some scary and damned funny moments when turning at junctions, but eventually I managed. We had brought CDs and we listened to U2. It seemed to be a cliché but we didn’t care then the music was good. For a while we followed the M7 but then turned onto back roads that led us through Templemore and Newport. The air seemed so clean, and scented of grass and lakes and the sea. The rise and fall of green hills and the silvery ribbons of clear streams were breathtaking. The vine-covered houses and churches and the stone bridges were beautiful. We stopped at castle ruins, reminder of times long gone that made me think of rainy nights and sieges and the noise of clashing swords. Others I imagined caressed by sunshine, buzzing with busy maidens and filled with the sound of children’s laughter as they chased fairies. A little ways before Limerick we stopped and had a picnic by the River Shannon.
“Do you think it’s an advantage to know when you will be pushing up the daisies?” Bea asked.
We were sitting on the grassy banks of the river and I had been watching the glittering sunlight dance upon the water. At her question I turned my head to look at her, caught between laughter and disbelief, “First ‘snuff it’ and now ‘pushing up the daisies’?”
She nodded, grinning widely, “Or bite the dust or kick the bucket. I prefer those to the good old ‘die’.”
So did I, I suddenly realized. It held less of that feeling of impending doom. She finished off her sandwich and nursed a bottle of Harp, “But don’t change the subject here. Back to my question!”
I sighed, “Maybe it is. I mean, others just suddenly die in a car accident or they have a heart attack, and most of them are alone. They have a family and friends but they are alone in the car or out on the street or wherever, and they die. I don’t want to die alone.”
“You won’t.” Bea toyed with her second sandwich as she cocked her head as if in deep thought and tried to get back the beforehand cheerful atmosphere, “Shouldn’t dying people be all accepting, really wise and philosophical and all?”
I shrugged, “Yeah, well. I guess that’s just another pretty but fake little picture Hollywood likes to draw. In reality we’re as clueless as any other and angry at the world and pissed off with the universe in general and scared shitless.”
“Ah well then, that’s comforting.”
We looked at each other and snorted with laughter. Any other, after what I had said, would have patted my shoulder awkwardly, trying to get out some nonsensical ‘don’t you worry, it will all be fine’, but not Bea.
She got up, “Come on, lazybones. We need to head into Limerick. I’ve got a surprise for you.”
Bungee-jumping. The woman who wanted me to have some fun and live before I die wanted me to jump from a ramp sixty meters above the ground, free-falling headfirst. Sure, why the hell not.
Her arms were wrapped around me, mine around her. “You said you wanted to escape death. Dropping out of the sky, literally hanging by a thread - if that isn’t escaping death, I don’t know what is,” she announced happily grinning.
Right. My heart beat somewhere in my throat and I didn’t dare looking down. Then we both jumped off the edge, and screamed.
The next day as we headed towards Cork I was sure I still had adrenaline pumping through my veins. But I had to give it to Bea - I felt alive. I drove through the probably most beautiful country ever to have existed, full of laughter, joy and life. That morning my cheeks had been rosy, and I had even taken the time to moisten my skin with a sweet-scented lotion and applied some mascara, going against a lately acquired habit.
While I drove, we listened to music and Bea pulled out her notepad again. “You ever had sex?”
“Sure. Why?” I asked.
“Damn.” I looked at her as if she had suddenly gone insane. She shrugged, “What? It would have been so sweet and tragically romantic to set you up.”
“Being my deflowering pimp would have been sweet and tragically romantic?”
Bea nodded, grinning, and I shook my head, laughing. She was incredible.
With a carefree smile on my lips we drove into Cork – where Bea had organized for us to go on a whale watching tour. When she told me her plan, I hugged her to me, tears, of joy and of thanks and of sorrow, filling my eyes.
*
My friend Charlotte passed away on a balmy autumn morning as soft rays of sunlight played across her bed, and surrounded by those she loved. I will never forget what a wonderful time we had, what we had done and experienced. It was a journey of discoveries, as much of the land as of ourselves and life. And the lesson was clear: live, and enjoy every moment of it, even if you do nothing at all. Now I appreciated and knew that there was nothing greater or more delicate than the bitter-sweet taste of life.