In Memoriam

I met Marion in Yugoslavia in 1990. She was on holiday with her boyfriend of seven years and we hit it off. We exchanged addresses and over the years we wrote letters and phoned and we even met up a couple of times. She had one massive problem though: she was a big girl. And when I say big, I mean big. Big as in 'I am having trouble walking for more than five minutes' big. It meant she couldn't go out to work, that she would be teased and pestered (even by her relatives) and her life was quite constricted. However, she always wrote nice long letters with everything that happened to her and her boyfriend and everybody else in her aquaintance.

Today my dad phoned me. My mum had received a phone call from Marion's boyfriend Ernst and I immediately knew: she had passed away. I phoned him back the minute I got off the phone with my dad and I learned she had indeed passed away.

She had been in hospital since the beginning of December last year. She had had surgery to remove some of the fat that was hindering her most. Of the 176kg (27st 10lb or 388 pounds) she weighed, she lost 50 (7st 12lb or 110 pounds). By March however she was still in Intensive Care due to her own body poisoning her and they had to amputate a leg. According to her boyfriend she just couldn't deal with it anymore emotionally. In the end she died peacefully on Easter Sunday. She was only 45.

Rest peacefully Marion.