It was supposed to be a perfectly normal Wednesday morning in February. The day had dawned clear and beautiful, with bright spring light peaking in from behind the closed curtains. There was nothing in the air to anticipate that my world was about to collapse - except for my own suspicions.
After the phone call from a strange number I sat on the floor with my 7-month-old god daughter on my lap. I held the baby tightly against my chest and stared at the flickering TV screen without being able to see a thing. For a moment I was completely numb. Then the anxiety that had been building up inside of me since Sunday evening started to pour out, and the void it left behind began to fill with tearing pain.
Already before asking the question I had known I was going to get the worst possible answer. Still, I had decided to give myself a chance to cherish hope I knew there wasn't:
"Has something happened?"
And then my greatest fear was confirmed.
Tears streamed down my cheeks as my mind kept denying the truth. If it hadn't been for the pair of small brown eyes staring at me with confusion, I would have fallen to pieces. "It's going to be alright, it's going to be alright", I kept telling more to myself than to the child. Yet all I could think of was: "My friend is dead."
I had first crossed paths with Nanna a year and a half earlier in Lapinlahti Hospital where we were both being treated for anorexia. Like me, also Nanna had been sick since her early teens and was more than willing to get healthy. We clicked instantly and started talking for hours every day.
Nanna was three years older than me, but I always thought of her as my little sister. She aroused my maternal instinct the moment we met, making me want to protect and guide her through difficult times. I grew into the habit of supporting and encouraging her lovingly but strictly, since without clear boundaries she was easily taken over by the disorder. She learned to trust me very quickly and found me comfortable to talk to, and I soon realized I knew much more about her situation than her doctors, nurses, and psychiatrists together.
I left the hospital only after a couple of weeks of treatment and received an anxious text message from Nanna a few hours later. I had been too tired to tell anyone about my leaving; it had been a real wrangle between me and my parents before they agreed to let me come home, and when I finally got their approval, I wanted to leave the hospital as soon as possible. I replied to Nanna's message and told her I was sorry for disappearing the way I did, but she wasn't angry with me – only worried. She had mistaken my leaving as a sign of me giving up on getting healthy and felt panicky. I calmed her down by convincing her that my will to recover hadn't gone anywhere, and I promised I would still always be there for her whenever she would need me. Those messages started our daily phone communication that lasted till she passed away.
I can't say the beginning of our friendship was easy on me. Even though my thoughts were quite healthy when we met, I was still severely underweight and had to work hard to mend my own eating habits. My condition was challenging but I didn't want to leave Nanna alone, since I saw potential in her: despite having encountered countless setbacks, her will and efforts to overcome the disorder were still genuine.
Nanna's treatment at the hospital ended a week after I had left. Since she was normal weight and had been a patient for many years, she was no more offered long-term treatment. Instead, she was only given short interval periods that aimed at stabilizing her physical condition and helped her recall right eating habits. Nanna hated her disease more than anything, but the power of the disorder grew easily too strong outside the safe hospital environment, forcing Nanna to succumb to its will. At home she did her best to follow the meal plan designed for her at the hospital, to avoid compulsive exercising, and not to vomit after eating, but the disorder gave her opposite directions, telling her also to overuse diuretics and laxatives.
Normal, regular eating and the changes it made her body go through were enough to cause Nanna a sense of losing control, and it was intensified by her constant fear of being discharged from treatment too quickly. Short treatment periods made her feel as if the nursing staff had declared her a hopeless case, an incurable chronic that could no longer be helped. Maybe partly due to that reason Nanna got so attached to me; I saw her equal to every other patient, believed in her chances to get healthy, and wanted to help her reaching that dream.
Messages between Nanna and I ran smoothly ever since my departure from the hospital, usually late at night when the day’s food consumption had reached Nanna's breaking point. The meal plan designed at the hospital was sacred to her, but she still needed to be constantly convinced of her right to eat – otherwise she could only hear the disorder's twisted words that made her feel so bad about herself she would replace food with punishments.
As with most eating disorder patients, Nanna's sense of self-worth was inversely proportional to the number she saw on the scales: the more she weighed, the more she hated herself. Not eating sufficiently led her to binge eat, vomit, and use laxatives and diuretics excessively. Bulimic behavior combined with fasting had ruined her normal fluid balance, resulting in her weight often fluctuating dramatically within a couple of days. Even though she knew the quick changes on the scales resulted from her body building up fluid, Nanna forgot all the facts when she was struck with anxiety. As a result, we had countless identical conversations that consisted of me reasoning with her until she calmed down.
Due to her long and difficult eating disorder background, Nanna's body got easily into starvation mode unless she ate at least as much as her meal plans told her to. Starvation mode was her body's defense mechanism against weight loss: it slowed down her metabolism and held tight onto every calorie in order to prevent her weight from plunging. Consequently, except for the changes caused by fluid build-up, Nanna's weight stayed normal and almost stable despite her meager eating and merciless amounts of exercise. She was terrified of the possibility of her body getting into permanent starvation mode and knew the only way to prevent it was to eat more, yet at the same time she believed her weight would immediately rocket up if she increased her energy intake or decreased exercising. Her numerous hospital periods had proved her fears wrong: the combination of resting, regular eating, and restraining from vomiting didn't result in her gaining weight but instead often made her lose some as it started her metabolism and helped the fluid build-up disappear. Nanna understood well how her physics worked, but when fearfulness seized her, she lost her rational thinking to the overwhelming emotions induced by the disorder.
Nanna needed a strict authority, someone who set her clear boundaries and saw through her excuses; someone who forbade, gave orders, and commanded; who wouldn't negotiate with her or take no for an answer; who pulled her out of her comfort zone and made her push her limits; who was there to help her face her fears and who forced her to see the truth beyond her distorted thoughts; who loved the beauty of normal life and believed in her possibilities of reaching it. Someone, who held her hand along the way and genuinely cared.
The only spring we had together was hard for Nanna. Even though she kept fighting against the disorder outside the hospital, she sank into deep waters once again. During that same spring, little by little, my own health began improving and my weight normalizing. The better I started to feel, the more I could give of myself to Nanna, and as my previously round-the-clock tiredness began to disappear, so did my feelings of Nanna as any kind of burden. She was extremely happy for my recovering, and when late that summer I reached normal weight for the first time in seven years, I became her role model. Not only did I take it as a great honor but also as a responsibility that guided me forwards. I wanted to be worth Nanna's trust.
By summer our friendship had deepened onto a new level. Instead of sticking to phone calls and text messages we met once a week over a cup of coffee. Nanna loved to hear about the positive changes that defying the disorder had brought into my life. I told her all about the newly-found normal things that gave me happiness: get-togethers with my childhood friends, fun nightlife experiences, my adorable baby goddaughter, working as a substitute teacher, the wonderful foods I had finally found the courage to try, my plans to return to my university studies.
Through our long conversations about hopes and dreams we learned to know each other beyond the disorder, and she started trusting me with secrets she had never told anyone else. As time passed I figured out how to read even the slightest nuances between Nanna's lines; I knew without asking when and how much she embellished the truth. All I needed to do was to give her a look to make her tell me the real deal – which she always did, as she was well aware she couldn't make me give up otherwise. She had seen me weakened by the disease, followed my recovery close by, witnessed me transform from a smileless shadow of myself into a radiant young woman, and with the help of my example she had begun to believe she could achieve the same. Whenever she tried to doubt her chances, I responded with strong resistance: I told her over and over again there was nothing special about me, and if I was able to overcome the disorder, so was everyone else. After continuing with my arguments long enough I always won her over.
I will never forget the moment when Nanna humbly asked if she could one day have the privilege to call me her friend. That question reflected her character perfectly: she was kind and sweet yet so insecure about herself. I took her hands, held them in mine, and told her I had already considered us friends for a long time.
Nanna was a girl with magical eyes, a beautiful smile, and a warm heart. What was obvious to everybody else never became apparent to her; she could not see her true beauty. Self-hatred urged her to grab a knife again and again, scolding her arms with incurable marks of despair.
During the last fall of her life Nanna was still motivated to believe in a better tomorrow. However, as soon as winter started approaching and daylight began to give way to darkness, I noticed a change in her: her hopefulness had turned into melancholy and her eyes had stopped smiling. We both knew hospital treatment was inevitable for her and hoped she would be admitted shortly, but she was in for a long wait.
Apart from her issues with eating, Nanna had also developed a serious sleeping problem. Despite her remarkably high sleeping pill dosage she could only get a few hours of rest a night, leading to overpowering fatigue that deteriorated her rational thinking and reinforced her eating disorder symptoms. She no longer had any control over her compulsive exercising or the abuse of diuretics and laxatives, and the drastic exhaustion turned her fears irrational – she even refused to drink water as she was too afraid it would make her gain weight. I was worried out of my mind for her and did my best to be of help, repeating again and again arguments that used to bring her back on earth, but I knew there was only so much I could do. It hurt me beyond words to see her pain without being able to give her the only thing she really needed: hospital treatment.
Nanna was finally admitted a week before Christmas. Throughout the 4-week treatment period her sleep issues remained severe, her self-motivated eating became even harder than before, her urge to exercise compulsively grew stronger, and her mind was filled with phobias. At Nanna's request, I called her doctor and begged of the nursing team to give her more time in the ward, but my pleading was turned down. Nanna was discharged the second week of January. Her sleeping problem got immediately out of hand, leaving her completely sleepless and more desperate than ever. She had to fight with the authorities before they agreed to take her on another ward to be treated for the sleeplessness. After a week of incomprehensible dosages of sleeping medication that still didn't help her sleep, she was sent home against her will.
A couple of hours later her heart stopped beating.
The last time I heard from Nanna was on Sunday evening. I knew she couldn't use her phone the next day, but when Tuesday arrived with no word from her, I knew something was wrong. Nanna had never willingly kept distance from me for more than a couple of hours, and when her messages suddenly stopped, a strong feeling of loss overcame me. I tried to reach her multiple times, but her phone had no reception. I spent the night before the phone call at my goddaughter's, whose mother, my best friend, had also struggled from eating disorder. She knew Nanna and tried to tell me there had to be a non-fatal reason for her absence, but I felt differently.
The next morning I got the call.
Regardless of her decade-long struggle with the disorder, Nanna never thought of giving up. She was sick of the disease and only wanted to be normal. She believed in life and didn't want to die, but her body was too tired to go on. Nanna passed away at home on the 2nd of February. She was 25 years old.
I still can't understand Nanna is really gone. Every time I look at my phone I expect to see a message from her; in the evening I curl up under a blanket waiting for her call. She is the last on my mind at night and the first thing I think of in the morning. I miss her face, her voice, her words, her hugs, her gestures, her kindness – everything about her that made her the person she was. She didn't trust people easily, but she chose to take me into her confidence, and I can’t describe how great an honor it now feels to me like. She never forgot to thank me for being there for her and left behind an emptiness the size of our friendship.
Fly, my love, fly,
Your wings have finally grown.
I will carry you in my heart as my greatest treasure until we meet again.
This text was written on February 23rd, 21 days after Nanna's death. The most likely reason behind her insomnia was her body keeping her awake to keep her alive; it knew if Nanna had fallen into a deep sleep, she wouldn't have had the strenght to wake up anymore. Her system was too damaged.
