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Instead of citing once more why I admire the Dalai Lama I think I will say why I admire my friend Petra.

I know her since 20 years. Before starting university I took a one year course in foreign language correspondence – a language focused secretary training basically that my Mum insisted upon before I started studying literature – not exactly a subject that promises a job afterwards…

So I went. An all girls class. Sounds nice? I can assure you in reality it was not at all what one might imagine. Anyway. I came to sit next to a plump blonde with glasses. We started talking casually immediately, but nothing special. Then, a few hours into the first day, our Spanish teacher, Senor Gonzalez, started cracking jokes, clearly enjoying his all-female audience. Petra started laughing – and didn’t stop for about 10 minutes. In the end everybody was laughing just because she was.

This is how I got to know her: a truly devastating sense of humour, a laughter like a 9.5 Richter earthquake. Always in when it was to dodge a stupid lesson for a glass of champagne in our favourite bar “The Cucumber”. When something was important she was dead serious and sometimes annoyingly precise and correct.

When I think about our friendship I do not remember an ongoing process. I remember individual moments, like spotlights finding a certain face in the dark. I remember how we got once hopelessly drunk in an Irish pub on Guinness beer. At one point Petra started cleaning the tables and emptying the ash-trays – an occupational disease that always plopped up like a cork after the fourth beer: In her life before the foreign language assistant school she had been a hotel manager.

I remember that during the time that we both attended that school I used to cut her hair (I am not a professional hairdresser, I just enjoy cutting hair and I am quite good at it!) – we both did not have a lot of money in that period. She was waitressing – I was nibbling away on the money I had saved in a pretty nasty job in a factory pressing plastic parts for the automotive industry.

I remember how she invited a couple of friends for “Glühwein” one winter. “Glühwein” is a German speciality of hot red wine, spices, fresh orange juice, almonds, raisins and God knows what else. She served the home made stuff – WOW: I had to go to a test run for taking my Certificate of Proficiency in English, drunk like three Russian sailors!

Many such moments come to my mind when I think about Petra. I cherish the memory because nowadays nothing is like it used to be. She has a cerebral tumour that is affecting and paralysing her entire body. It was discovered by coincidence in the course of an examination she took because her eyesight was deteriorating alarmingly – already the first symptom. She told me about that on my 25th birthday. She wanted me to know to understand why she could not be as bubbly as usual.

In the first time she tried to completely suppress this issue. It didn’t work. She is such a strong character but this was just too much for her. She began to suffer from depression. She saw a therapist, had to take antidepressants. Her tumour remained the way it was for quite a while. Then a second one came. She was always quite sarcastic “Imagine, ’Tumy’ has a little brother – I’m sure he would have preferred a guineapig…” . She frequently used to joke about the fact that she always had the full attention of even the most famous professors because her kind of tumour was so extremely rare.

A few years later the tumour started severely impeding her movements and she fell frequently – also inside her home. Fortunately at that time she had already been working for a company that had allowed her at first to reduce her working hours according to her abilities. At one point she couldn’t do her job as an accountant anymore, a bit later it wasn’t possible anymore for her to live alone. She moved into an old peoples’ home even though she was just in her late thirties then – but the idea was to stay in a place where she could stay in a private apartment but with help available 24 hours in case of need.

Like two or three years ago she had to move to the nursing ward where she is living until the present day together in one room with an 82-year old lady, who is a dementia patient. She cannot move at all by herself, needs a wheelchair, her eyesight is next to zero. The tumour has started to destroy her capacity to speak. She is working a few times a week with a language therapist to keep up her ability to speak as long as possible. Last time I went to see her she could still eat by herself with one hand, the other is spastically paralysed, like the rest of her body.

I think I do not have to explain why I admire her. I do not go to see her nearly as often as I would like. I always plan it but then I let something happen not to go. I feel really bad about it, because she means a lot to me – I mean, she bears all that without being bitter. And I am such a coward that I cannot even stand to go and see her once a month? The main reason is, I think, that I am afraid. I do not know if I should tell her about the trips we take, about my very intense professional life, things girlfriend and I do on the weekends. I do not know if that would be a change for her, like she is listening to TV documentaries, or if it would depress her, make her sad about all the things that she missed.