The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

A friend of mine died two days ago. I read this line whenever I read a comment she wrote - it was her signature -, and I always thought it fitted her perfectly. She was the most determined person I know, bold ... and also willing to make sacrifices for the things she deemed worth it. She went to an art school, but because she didn't have a lot of money, she had to work to pay her way. It was hard. She seldom missed a lesson, though. She wanted to be an artist, and she was ready to pay the price. She told me that she didn't see enough of her little daughter, that she hoped, her daughter would understand. "You are a great role model," I said. "She's going to learn how to achieve an aim, something she really wants to have in her life ... because of you." She said, "I hope so."

She was funny, too, giddy sometimes. I loved to chat with her. She called me silly when I started our conversations with "What's doing?" (I, a German, read that phrase in a book, she, an American, never heard of it before), or when I complimented her. But sometimes I had to tell her how much she impressed me - because she did. She was all dreams come true. She graduated and found a job she loved - "Inqy is now a full-time artist, and plans to be for the rest of her life," she wrote in her Journal.

Yes. I'm talking about .

The rest of her life turned out to be extremely short. She was ill for a while, but she couldn't afford to see a doctor. She had no insurance ... I'm so sad, I'm so angry. I can't believe that in the US someone can die without getting help, just because there is not enough money to pay for it.

I don't want to believe that the price she had to pay for being an artist, for being herself was an amount of life so huge that she had just 29 years left. I read something she wrote, aware that she wasn't all right. "I often wondered at the sense of urgency I've always had, ever since I was little. I always felt that I would never have enough time to do everything I wanted to; and so I felt like I had to squash it all into as little time as I could. It's made many things less enjoyable, and many more things more enjoyable." She said something like that to me quite a while before.

I'm going to miss her so badly.


This is one of her last pieces of art:


Ein Anruf
Erich Fried

Ich mache die Augen zu
weil meine Wände sich biegen
Ihre Bilder sind krumm und getrübt
wie durch ein Glas gesehen

In der gebogenen Wand
wo sonst nur der Kamin ist
führt eine offene Tür
in ein Nebenzimmer voll Sonne

Dort klingelt das Telefon
Nan nimmt den Hörer auf
und sieht mich an und ruft
dass es für mich ist

Nur steht mein Telefon
in keinem Nebenzimmer
und hat auch nicht geklingelt
und Nan ist tot


A Call
Erich Fried

I close my eyes
because my walls are warping
Their pictures are distorted and cloudy
as if observed through a glass

In the warped wall
where usually there’s just the fireplace
an open door leads
into an adjoining, sunlit room

There, the phone rings
Nan picks up and
looks at me and says
that it’s for me

However, my telephone
isn't in an adjoining room
and didn’t even ring
and Nan is dead