He was 19. He wasn’t happy. Then he got cancer. So he started to live.

1. The Beginning and the End

On a Saturday in October 2022, in a village in the Zurich lowlands, a celebration takes place for which there is no name.
On the edge of the village, voices penetrate the brown walls of a cottage where wine once had been made. A cloud of shrieks and laughter, as befits a place that clubs and families rent for their parties.
Cars are parked at the roadside, the windows down. A carefree world.
Tables have been set up in the former wine press house, bowls full of jelly babies and crisps on white paper tablecloths, paper sacks with more supplies lined up against the wall. There is cake, a salad bar, and to the side, a screen on which photos will later appear, making the guests laugh out loud and sometimes go very quiet.
There they are: a mother, smiling, filling bowls, greeting people, leading them to the drinks counter; a father, tall, distant, serious-looking; another middle-aged man with grieving eyes; and a young man, only 24, a cap pulled low onto his forehead, a plastic bag in one hand, hunched in his chair.
This is Zack.
This party is for him. It’s only a few weeks ago that he sent out the invitations, nobody in Switzerland would normally find the time at such short notice. But they all have come for Zack, two friends have flown in from the USA and South Africa and are flying back that very evening.
Now they are sitting next to Zack, his hand clutching the plastic bag, the other holding his phone. He’s swiping through photos from his last trip.
At the beginning of the month, he’d travelled for two weeks, visiting a friend in Seoul and then taking a trip to Vietnam on his own. It wasn’t his first visit, but it was definitely his last.
“See, bro, 125 cm3, I was sitting in the back there.”
“Wow, bro, no shit. They almost drive right onto the tracks!”
“Yeah, right? That was in the middle of Hanoi! In the middle of the city. And then a train goes through at 50 km/h. Ten days before I was there, it hit a man who wanted to take a photo of himself at the rails just like that. He wasn’t even a tourist!”
“That’s sick, dude!”
Zack talks about Ho Chi Minh City and rice paddies, how poor the people are, and how happy the journey made him.
“Look, they drive right here – ” He breaks off the sentence, presses his fist to his mouth, bends down, drops the hand with the phone. He tries to finish the sentence but can’t. His mother rushes over, crouches down next to him, he holds the plastic bag to his mouth. The man with the grieving eyes is now standing next to him, too: it’s his doctor, Luc, who wouldn’t be here if this were a normal doctor-patient relationship. But as Luc puts it: “There’s been only one Zack in my whole career. There will only ever be one Zack.”
It's the last party Zack will celebrate. His farewell party. Zack doesn’t want a funeral, neither do his parents, the Logans are atheists, but you have to have something, don’t you, if someone dies, even if it’s just for the loved ones.
Zack battled cancer for five years. A year ago, it became clear that he’d lose the battle. For a few weeks now, it’s been a matter of surviving from day to day.
Zack finds it all unfair. But not for him, for the others. “I always feel like I’ve got a tactical advantage because I’ve been dealing with death for five years now. Day in, day out. I found my peace this way. But for others, it’s just like: ‘Bye everyone, I’m off now!’”
He goes on talking quietly to himself: “Above all, I wish they knew that I’m happy to go.” He pauses. “Well, not happy to go. Just glad to be free of this whole thing.”
Zack makes two kinds of pauses when he speaks. There are the pauses of exhaustion. And those in which he seems to realise that he actually believes the exact opposite of what he just said.
Am I happy to go? Or not happy at all? Is death liberation – or is it simply defeat?
Zack wants it to be either the one or the other. A clear answer, a clear story. But he is so intelligent, and he’s grappled with these questions for so long, that he knows: in life, everything is always both.
Five years of cancer. His mother gave a name to the first tumour. Zack is obsessed with politics and history, so evil could only have one kind of name, “a Nazi name”. “But not a name that sounds like an efficient, dutiful Nazi … like … Heinrich! A Heinrich might win”, Zack explains. “We called the tumour Manfred. Sounds like a fat, lazy Nazi. I can win against Manfred! But not against Himmler or Rommel.” And indeed, Zack defeated Manfred. As the second tumour appeared, the Logans didn’t give it a name.
The five years of cancer were more than just a campaign against a fat and lazy enemy. For Zack, it was a hunt for life. An attempt to cram as much as possible into the time he had left. Without knowing how much time that would be.
Every life must end. Most of us suppress this knowledge. Sometimes, say, when someone close to us dies, we become aware of our mortality, a flash of lightning briefly illuminating the horizon. But usually, it remains a faint warning in a world full of options for repression. A flash of lightning, but no thunderstorm.
Zack spent five years now not repressing his awareness. He wanted to be able to leave without grief and regret. So he studied death from all sides. Sometimes it seemed as if he wanted to defeat it by befriending it.

2. The Email and the Home

Who would do such a thing, who’d write such an email? “Zack, of course”, his friends say. “That’s so Zack”, says his mum, laughing nervously and rolling her eyes. “That’s Zack for you”, says his brother dryly, in English, the family’s most used language. But he smiles too, with what seems like pride.
Zack wrote the email in December 2021, on a night when he “felt death, felt it was coming for him”. First, he saved it in the drafts folder. Only when the doctors confirmed that further treatment held no hope of recovery, was only a matter of postponement, did he send it off. That was on 22 February 2022. 
He sent the email to the address for readers’ letters [the original contains the newspaper’s name]. From there, it reached me.
In this email, Zack introduces himself, a 23-year-old student of business economics and chemistry, and a cancer patient. He recapitulates his medical history and then writes that he’s just started chemotherapy again to inhibit the growth of new tumours. But this time is different.
“The prognosis is not good, and I don’t know how much time I have left. Despite everything, I’m motivated and positive and I’m trying to shape reality as best I can. I’m still going to university, and I also have a 40% job in the office of a small business.
“But sometimes I’m also a bit overwhelmed. I keep thinking about my mortality; I’ve been dealing with it since the very start. I don’t know if it would help me, but I wanted to ask if you could perhaps write an article about me and my situation and accompany me until I die. I often feel lonely, and I find it difficult to talk to my friends about death. I wish there was perhaps more information about the process and articles that show what it is like to be confronted with death at a young age and to accept it. I think we live in a death-supressing society, a society in which death is hushed up as if it didn’t exist. I would be very happy to hear from you and I’m open to questions.”
In early March 2022 I find myself sitting at a dining table in a village in the Zurich lowlands. The table is in an open-plan room, on the left a kitchen with a chrome soda maker and an espresso machine, on the right a living room with a corner sofa and a flat-screen TV on the wall. As neat as the photos in an advert for a model flat. A garden, high hedges, an immaculate home for a perfect family, but, since the cancer, also a fortress of sorts.
The Logans fell in love by chance. Zack’s father is English, Zack’s mother grew up in the USA, the child of an Indonesian and a Swiss. The two met on an island off the coast of Singapore. They were 23.
For both, their relationship was an attempt to create something they’d never experienced themselves: family happiness. The mother no longer had any contact with her Swiss father. When she gave birth to Zack at the age of 24, he called the hospital and said “what have you done!” It wasn’t a question.
With this background, Zack’s parents loved each other and the family they created all the more. Zack would often talk about his parents’ relationship. A pure, strong, unshakeable love, his role model and protection, which at the same time becomes a curse when he himself begins to look for love.
We are sitting there alone, his parents are upstairs, Zack says. His face is white, drawn with clear lines, eyes like buttons, a cap pulled down low, which makes him look childlike, but also abstract in a way, almost tough.
Only much later would I see photos of Zack before the cancer, without his cap, with dark, thick hair.
During our first meeting, he recounts his entire life like a film script, act one, two, and three. “What comes next is act four”, he says. He means dying. Then he laughs.
That’s very Zack. He keeps joking about his life; it seems funny in the first moment, and in the second, it burns. Like home-distilled schnapps that leaves the distiller sober but briefly numbs the guest.
Later, when we are studying the menu in a restaurant, he hesitates: should he get the burger or treat himself to the huge T-bone steak. Deciding in favour of the latter, he says: “You only live once, enjoy it while it lasts!”
When he laughs, he sounds not apologetic but like someone genuinely amused by the joke. He knows that, for many people, this is too much. He lacks the common filter, he no longer knows what others can and cannot stomach because so many abnormal things – his hair loss, his festering sores, his shortness of breath when walking – have become normal. “I can see it in the reactions. Wow, that’s hardcore what you just said.”
Sometimes his humour becomes caustic, his mood fluctuates, the way it does with many young people who are looking for a place in the world and a way into the future. Except that Zack is no longer looking for a future; all he wants is to stretch the present.
This can only be done in a systematic way. He hasn’t only structured his story into acts like a play, he’s also measured and reviewed it. Since his cancer diagnosis, he’d been using an app to record how good every single day was. Most days were good. Very good, even. Zack also keeps a diary. On and off. Since he was 16. He wouldn’t recommend that sort of diary to anyone, though: he only writes when he’s feeling down. “Anyone reading it would think I’ve had the saddest life. Which isn’t true at all.”
Still, I could read it if I wanted to, he says.
Zack tells his story like a sculptor who can’t stop chiselling away at his statue, always finding another spot to carve out a little more precisely. And so he goes on, confessing to me every secret, every shameful thought, and every supposedly embarrassing episode in his life. The sculpture should be perfect. But for Zack, perfection lies not in flawlessness but in honesty. Perhaps because this means completely detaching himself from the audience’s reaction. It is his life, his story, regardless of what others think. An attempt to retain control one last time.
Life, on the other hand, is uncontrollable. Before the diagnosis, Zack had applied to be a grenadier because he’d been looking for a total change. “And I got one, too! Just differently than planned.” He laughs again.
I’d been scared to meet him. How much death could I bear in my life, even if it was the death of a stranger? How much grief would that trigger in me? But then I sat there, listening to Zack, and after a few hours I said that I’d accompany him until he died.
At the end of that first meeting, Zack confesses something to me. “My parents aren’t on board with this.” They wish to remain anonymous and don’t want Zack to appear in the newspaper as “the cancer boy”. All names in this story have therefore been changed.
It’s an awkward moment. Here I am, sitting at the family dining table, learning that the Logans don’t want me there. They are upstairs, but they know I’m here, says Zack.
I ask him if I can at least introduce myself. “I don’t think they’ll want that”, he mumbles but then disappears upstairs. After a few minutes, he returns with his mother. “Not so easy with Dad”, he says curtly. It will never become easy. But his father will always be there – in Zack’s stories. During my visits, he’d usually be upstairs in his office. I’d only get to see him at the very end.
Amélie, the mother, apologises: she doesn’t want to offend me, she says, she’s sure I’m a good journalist, but all this is just too much for her. She doesn’t want to be asked about the cancer by strangers. She doesn’t want her other son, Charlie, to be “the cancer boy’s brother” at school. “Only my closest friends and my boss at work know that he now has terminal cancer; I haven’t told anyone else. I don’t want the pitying looks.”
The approaching death has turned the Logans’ circle upside down. Amélie says you lose friends as the parent of a cancer patient. Many people can’t deal with it, and that, she understands. “When someone told me about the death of a relative, I never knew what to say.”
Would she know now?
“No. Still no idea.”
But they made new friends, too, and some friendships became even stronger. Amélie has been close with her neighbour for 16 years, and now her flat has also become a refugium. This is where we meet when I interview Amélie a few months later. She doesn’t want to talk to me about cancer in her own home. That’s why she often comes here. Here is where she’d escape if Zack decided to end his life at home with medication provided by Exit [A Swiss organisation helping the terminally ill with euthanasia]. She wants to be there when he dies, of course. “But I don’t want to watch him carried out of my house in a coffin.”
The urn is also waiting at the neighbour’s place. Amélie bought it herself. She didn’t want to have to choose one hastily in the chaos after death. An act of control in a life that has become uncontrollable.
Zack has approved the urn. Amélie doesn’t know yet where it will be placed. She’d like to put it in the garden, among the flowers. Her husband doesn’t want to think about it yet. The very fact that it’s already been bought seems to him like anticipating death, disturbing the order of things.
Before I leave the Logans’ home for the first time, Amélie says something that will stay with me: “Do you know what I think is the worst when you receive a diagnosis like that at the age of 19? You realise what could come in life, what life could offer – but you’ve had almost none of it…” It’s then that I see her cry for the first time.
But Zack will not die without having lived. He’ll receive – he’ll take – more from life than most 24-year-olds, perhaps more than many much older people. That is what he’s resolved to do.
Travelling taught him that time is “absolutely relative”. He’d been away for two months and could now recount every day of it, he says. These two months felt like a whole year. “It’s not about how many years you live, it’s about how many unique memories you collect. The more you squeeze in, the longer it feels.”
That sounds far too serene for a dying 24-year-old, I think at times like this. But soon enough, I, too, will find myself saying: That’s Zack for you. That’s just the way he is.

3. Old Zack and New Zack

In February 2022, when Zack asks, the doctors say 5 to 15 months – they say it hesitantly, reluctant to give even such a vague prognosis. 

How much is left now? For four years, Zack’s been asking himself this question every day. For four years, while he was still hoping to beat it, he’d lived with a minimum storage life and an unclear expiry date. Cancer is rarely defeated for good, explains Zack, the chemistry student that he is. “Cancer is a race against evolution, against natural selection. I think that’s a very powerful concept.” Chemotherapy kills most of the cancer cells, but a few strong ones may still survive. “You keep breeding the next-stronger cancer. At some point, there is simply no chemotherapy that works anymore. And… well… that point is now. Now it’s just a matter of buying time.”
It used to be different.
When Zack felt his tumour for the first time in September 2017, he didn’t even think of cancer. He’s in the shower when he senses something in his anus. Maybe weight training is at fault? His GP thinks it’s an abscess and lets it grow for three months, until it’s cut out on 6 December. Zack has asked for a surgery appointment in the afternoon: he’s got a biology exam in the morning. The subject: cancer.
After the operation, the doctors at the hospital say: “The thing was solid, not liquid. That’s strange. We’ll do a biopsy.”
Zack says he should have known at that moment. What with the biology exam beforehand, the look on the doctor’s face, the MRI the next day – why am I lying here? It was just an abscess, right? Or could it...? But no, I’m 19. Impossible. Not me.
“The chief physician had ‘death’ written in his eyes”, Zack says today. “It made the doctors uncomfortable”, says his mum.
The tumour was five by eight by thirteen centimetres. “Quite a hunk”, says Zack; “Stage III”, say the doctors. The cancer cells had already spread to the lymph nodes. That meant a survival rate of 30 to 40 %. But he didn’t care about such numbers at the time, only his parents did. “It was clear to me: no matter how much poison I have to take, I’ll do everything I can until I’m healthy again. I had to be among the 30 to 40 %, no question about it.”
Zack starts his first chemotherapy at Christmas 2017. One week of chemo in hospital, two weeks of recovery, repeat nine times. Then radiotherapy, six weeks “like a hefty sunburn”. The tumour grows just behind the anus; at some point, Zack needs a doughnut cushion.
His father says he’ll wake him up every day, help him go to school as long as he can. “I’ve got cancer, leave me alone”, Zack grumbles. But in summer 2018, he takes his A-levels.
Zack before the cancer and Zack with the cancer are two different people. That’s what everyone who knows him says. And it seems the Zack before the cancer wasn’t the better version.
The old Zack was difficult. “An exhausting child who lied a lot”, says his mum. “He had no love of life, he was always gloomy”, says a friend. Another: “Zack was very unhappy.” His younger brother agrees: “I now can see the dark hole he was in.” And Zack himself says: “I was lost, completely lost.”
Zack says he started weight training because he was feeling insecure. With women. With friends. “I wanted to grow broader and broader.” Even though that was against his nature, he believes now. He is built like his father, “a cyclist’s body, a body made for endurance.”
When Zack talks about the time before cancer, it comes across as reflective and honest, but he is so hard on his younger self that you sometimes want to shake and scold him. You were a kid, I want to say, which youngster has ever not felt insecure and naive and stupid? But every time I’m tempted to take sides and contradict Zack, I hesitate. Is it my place to correct the story he tells about himself? After all, it may be fulfilling a purpose I can only guess at: to protect him and give his illness a purpose that may ultimately let him go in peace.
In the summer of 2018, he’s still mostly the old Zack, the one struggling to find meaning in life. He torments himself with the question: Why me of all people? And the first answer that comes to mind hurts.
After the diagnosis, the doctors initially say that environmental factors could be responsible. His parents search for an explanation. Was it something in the air, something he ingested? A malignant disease of the muscle tissue – were “the contaminated substances” that he took for muscle growth perhaps at fault?
Amélie says: “His father was always against Zack taking these. If he found a packet, he’d throw it away.”
Zack says: “I hid the stuff in my locker at school.”
Then the doctors say: “The fitness products have nothing to do with the cancer.”
The mother says: “Of course I believe the doctors. But surely the cancer must have come from somewhere? I keep asking myself: Did I fail to do enough? Was it something we did wrong in his upbringing? Something must be to blame!”
Zack’s cancer is rare. Per year, three out of every hundred thousand people are diagnosed with soft tissue cancer. The reason is probably a random cell mutation. But evolution doesn’t make a convincing villain. If it’s just nature, the question of blame provides its own solution. A statistical coincidence turns into a supposedly meaningful narrative.
Zack says: “I knew it wasn’t my fault, but still I had this strong feeling: something’s wrong, I must change something, my worldview, my behaviour. I have to sort myself out.”
Zack Logan’s narrative is full of trials. And indeed, in these first three acts, coincidences and strokes of fate are strung together as if it some god was pummelling an unbeliever into faith.
The chemo- and radiotherapy work, and the tumour can be removed. But the doctors also have to remove part of the sphincter muscle. Since then, Zack has been living with a stoma bag that collects faeces. At this point, this torments the 19-year-old more than the cancer, which could return but seems to have been defeated for the time being. A life with a colostomy bag. What woman would ever get involved with a guy like that?
But at least the survival prognosis is better now, “fifty-fifty”. So Zack tries to live. He passes his A-levels, finds a temporary office job and, for the first time in his life, goes travelling alone. He spends two months in Japan and Korea.
Such a trip is often life-changing. There is quite a difference between merely knowing that there is another world out there and experiencing this world with its possibilities for yourself. Zack says nothing has shaped his life like those two months in Japan and Korea. “Except the cancer, of course.” But that seemed to be defeated when he was making foreign friends and getting to know people who showed him that so many ways of life were possible apart from a life in the Zurich lowlands. There was Nick, a 40-year-old Black American who moved to Japan when he was 15 because his father was stationed at a military base; or Daniel, also American, young, living in Seoul because, well, why not? Wherever Zack travels, he gathers friends. Until his death, he will continue talking about Japan and Korea, finding more details every time. A verbal chemotherapy to keep disease at bay. As long as there is Japan, there is Zack.
Then, in autumn 2019, the cancer returns. A large tumour in the middle of the abdomen that has knotted itself around the aorta. Again, weeks of chemo- and radiotherapy follow.
Then, the doctors operate for twelve hours, replacing the aorta with a plastic prosthesis. But they have to sacrifice a vein that leads into the leg. Now, if Zack walks for too long, blood builds up. Zack loved to go hiking. Now, every 150 metres he must take a break and wait for the blood to drain.
A colostomy bag, an artificial aorta, a leg which can’t handle the blood flow – Zack the Stricken says: “I can’t complain if I can’t climb Mount Everest now. Luckily, I hiked a lot when I was little and climbed mountains in my youth.”
I sometimes wonder whether Zack actually means these things when he says them, if he can mean them. These are sentences an 80-year-old might utter at the end of a full and active life. Is Zack perhaps hoping that if he keeps saying them, they will feel true?
The month after the aorta operation is the worst of Zack’s life. He sees this in the app that he uses to evaluate his days. The first ten days are pure suffering, his stomach hurts, his bowels rebel, he can’t eat or drink at all. After five days, all that comes out when he vomits is gastric juice and bile. “What are you even doing here?” he asks himself. “Why are you doing this to yourself?”
For weeks, he can hardly walk; then his strength slowly returns. And as soon as it does, he rushes out into the world.
Zack gets an Interrail ticket, first Berlin, then Amsterdam with a friend, they buy some mushrooms and the corresponding paraphernalia, stock up on gummy bears and strawberries, which taste particularly intensely during a trip. The mushrooms are “orgasmic”, he says. “There I was, standing naked in front of the mirror in the shower. I saw my scars and the stoma bag, but I wasn’t disgusted. Everything was just beautiful. The whole year since the diagnosis was racing through my head, I was in heaven.”
But then came another year of chemotherapy, a year of trofosfamide, a pill that he had to swallow every day. Just thinking about it almost makes him vomit. “Poisoning himself”, he calls it.
Zack narrates his life, rushing through the years, pointing out missing parts, he’d have to return to this chapter, and to that one. I reassure him that we have enough time, wondering if that’s true. He nods. “I really have to tell you about Lea and about Luc, though.”
Luc is his oncologist and also one of his best friends.
Befriending his oncologist? “Oh, that’s Zack for you”, says his mum and his friends.
Zack says: “Yeah. Actually, Luc broke the patient-doctor contract with that. Also, he saved me.”

4. Luc

In April 2022, I meet Luc Rubin, the chief oncologist, in a panelled room in a small hospital. Rubin, 50 years old, has thin lips and curly hair. He speaks in a soft voice, slowly but without hesitation, as if he’d already told this story to himself.
“I knew at once that the consultations with Zack would be atypical. Only I didn’t realise just how atypical.
“I met Zack during his first relapse in autumn 2019. We already knew it was a high-risk situation because of the lymph node involvement. Recovery still seemed possible, but the cards had been bad from the start and got even worse with the relapse. With this type of cancer, long survivors are rare.
“Zack had just returned from Japan, where he had so many great experiences – and then came that blow. His parents were present during that first meeting: young adults are always a special case this way. You aren’t dealing with a child anymore, your duty as a doctor is toward your patient, but the patient often still lives at home, the parents are close, and so they are part of the process.
“He came alone for the next appointments. What I quickly realised was that he had a huge need to talk. I normally plan half an hour per patient. With Zack, I overran the timing something terrible. I realised: You can’t block that out, you have to listen. Of course, that messed up my schedule, so I started planning an hour each time for him. I can’t do that with every patient, but there’s only one Zack.
“This need to communicate came with a huge amount of pain. I remember very well how lost, how lonely he felt. He often cried in the consultations. The conversations went beyond the oncological. He’d talk about books he was reading. Finally, he had someone who listened.
“At some point I realised: this affects me more than a patient should. This pain was truly tangible. I spent weeks pondering and struggling. I had to make a decision: Do I draw a boundary, or do I let him get close to my heart? I knew that I was supposed to distance myself. But how? Set an alarm for 30 minutes and then say ‘sorry, that’s it’?
“I discussed it with my wife, who is a gynaecologist. You can’t be his friend, she warned me, you’re his doctor. And I do see her point. Still, I asked myself: if I have to refuse a person in such existential distress, what is my role as a doctor? Is it just to administer chemotherapy and then say ‘your distress is none of my business’? I can’t do that. I don’t want to.
“Zack is special in every way. His honesty – he’s so incredibly honest with himself. He’s got this extreme desire to be at peace with himself. Other young patients are different. I have an osteosarcoma patient with metastases in his lungs, 19 years old, and he has a completely different coping strategy. He says: ‘Thanks, I’m fine, let’s not talk about it.’ Repression isn’t always bad. Especially in a situation when you can’t really influence anything anymore. You’re almost under more stress as a doctor; you know what’s to come and you think: it’s good that he doesn’t seem to be quite aware of the whole picture.
“Zack was completely different. He always wanted to know everything. Zero suppression. It’s always a balancing act. You know the future is uncertain, but you must try to live in the present. You can’t wait until things are fine. You’d spend the rest of your life waiting.
“So I let Zack get close, I realised he just needed to talk things out properly. In February 2020, I invited him round to our house for dinner. Of course, that meant crossing the line. I’d never done anything like that before in my life, inviting a patient round. I spoke to a friend beforehand, but no one could give me any advice. You have to experience Zack in the consultation room to understand.
“He talked until half past twelve in the morning, then he was done, emptied out. That helped me, too.
“Sometimes I almost forget what it was like at the beginning. His pain, his forlornness.
At the beginning, I once had a dream. I was somewhere in no man’s land, it was a pitch-black night, and I had to find my way home. I came across a group of people, and there was a young adult in the group. And he was screaming with fear. Where am I? he screamed. How do I find my way home? I woke up and thought of Zack. Normally, I never dream about my patients, and I don’t believe in intuitions, either, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it might be my job to lead him out of that night, to walk the path with him.
“Perhaps I succeeded to a certain extent. In the therapy, things kept going downhill with the relapses, but at the same time, he found himself more and more. I’d never experienced something like that before. Sometimes it leaves me speechless. I mean, I have 80-year-old patients who complain that they can no longer take their ballet lessons. I have 85-year-olds who never seriously considered the idea that life is finite.
“It’s not as if all I did was giving. There is no other patient from whom I’d received so much. I learnt a lot from Zack. I’d heard of Viktor Frankl and his book about his time in Auschwitz before, but thanks to Zack I read it, and we talked about it a lot. About the concept of shaping reality. Now, I often discuss it with other patients.
“I must learn to let go now. I told him: whatever you really want to do, do it this year. We might soon decide to stop the palliative chemo. There are still some experimental things we might have tried out, but Zack is tired of therapy. He’s well into the process of farewell, he says he’s no longer afraid. Now I have to let him go. For me, ‘let us fight together, let me organise the next therapy’ is the easier setting. I’ve known for a long time that we’ll lose this battle, but the emotional aspect is something else.
“I’m a believer; before my time here I was in a missionary hospital in Moçambique. We wanted to stay for four years and be there for those in need, but we had to cut our stay short. It felt like failure. The fact that Zack turned up afterwards feels like a sign: He was not in financial need but in great emotional one. Zack asked about it a lot; at some point he said that he’d like to see Moçambique before he goes. I thought that would be a cool setting, but how could we plan such a thing? By now, I’ve come to terms with the facts: we’ll try and plan it and just see if it works out.
“I don’t know how it will end. You never know. For some, it happens out of nowhere, in a few hours. Others struggle for a long time. But I think he’ll do well. I’m also afraid of what it will be like when he’s gone. Those who leave are often better prepared than those who stay behind.”

5. No Bucket List

How do you let go of life? Paradoxical answer à la Zack: by living it.
Zack doesn’t have a bucket list; instead, he has Google Maps. At one of our meetings, he shows it to me on his phone. There are green dots, yellow stars, and red hearts all over the map. They fill the whole world. There are dots in Siberia, in Thailand, in the USA, in Africa, in Switzerland. The closer you zoom in, the more dots appear.
Since his diagnosis, Zack has been marking every place he visits. Every café, every restaurant, every park, every lake, every mountain peak, every bar, every city pool, every barbecue area. A yellow star for everywhere he’d been. If he likes the place, it gets a heart.
The green dots? All the places he still wants to see. There are hundreds, if not thousands. Sometimes he sits at home and zooms in on an area he knows nothing about. He recently did this with Romania, which is now teeming with green dots. Brasov, for instance, “mega-beautiful architecture, different peoples, Saxons, Goths. Besides, it’s where Dracula come from! I can feel that guy. Plus, it’s cheap.” Money matters even when you’re dying. Zack has a job and lives at home; still, travelling isn’t free.
Of course, that’s greedy in a way, insatiable, Zack knows that: “I could live for 500 years, and there would still be more I’d want to see and do. Like going to Nepal for six months and living with Buddhist monks. Or studying everything there is to study at university. Even art history! Though actually, maybe everything apart from art history; there aren’t enough paintings that interest me quite that much.”
Looking at the map gives Zack reassurance. It makes him think that he should be grateful, makes him realise how much of the world he has already seen. And it makes him happy that he can still add new points.
Sometimes, his wanderlust seems like rage, sometimes like pure joy; perhaps it’s always both at the same time. In April 2022 alone, he takes seven flights. To London, to Istanbul, from there to Athens, and upon return, to Sicily with his family. The last family holidays. “I feel the pressure; it comes in waves. It’s extreme now.”
Travelling returned to Zack some control over his life. He once told his mother: “When I travel alone, at least I know why I’m lonely. My friends here live completely different lives that I have nothing to do with anymore. When I’m here with them, having a banal conversation, I feel lonely too, but it’s worse because I’m actually with other people.”
One lifelong dream keeps haunting him. He is powerless against it and growing hopeless about it: finding love. There’s no way to force it. He’d tried. Why else would he and his friends go to the gym so much and take steroids if not in the hope that it would make them attractive when they go out in Zurich? Or after the first bout of cancer, in Korea, joining expats on a “pick-up tour” in a nightlife district? He is ashamed to think how delighted he was at first – Korean women seemed to find him very attractive. Then, he realised that they were only interested in him as an exotic trophy from the West, not as a person they wanted to get to know.
Zack kept struggling with this. He often said to Luc how much he’d wanted to have a girlfriend. And how ashamed he was of this desire. “I wanted it for selfish reasons. I wanted to know what I would be like as a partner. That was an unrealised part of me.”
In spring 2021, Zack is sitting in his psycho-oncologist’s practice, ranting about the world, about how superficial people are. He is struggling with the fact that he might die without having loved. In the end, he says he wants to stop therapy as it isn’t helping him.
The psycho-oncologist listens, and Zack continues to talk. He sometimes wonders what his younger self would think if he knew what life would bring, he says. “And at that moment, I had an image in front of me. A boy, my own face at the age of 8, looking at me. He grinned at me, this is, I grinned at myself, that was me, after all! The boy was looking at me with zero judgement, with absolute acceptance. In that moment, all the fear, all the pain was gone.”
Zack says he was at peace with himself after this experience. That he felt free, empty, and happy. “If I had died at that moment, it would have been okay.”
When he tells me this, I’m sceptical. It sounds so simple. An almost religious experience, only it’s not Holy Mary but his younger self who appears to him, offering forgiveness. But perhaps this is only logical for someone who grew up without belief in a higher power. You are the only one who can provide redemption.

6. A Consultation with Luc (and, in a way, with Lea)

There is buzzing and banging and hammering in the oncology department of the small hospital this Thursday in May 2022. It’s being remodelled, “fittingly”, says Zack, the commentator of his life.
Zack is back from his last family holiday in Sicily; soon, he’ll be facing a new round of chemotherapy, but first, a consultation with Luc.
“I’m fine, actually”, Zack blurts out at once, “but I feel so hypocritical, you know. I told you some stuff on the phone, so maybe you can guess. I just can’t seem to get out of it. And neither can Lea. I don’t know what to do anymore. I feel so stupid!”
“Wait, wait a minute, let’s start at the beginning”, Luc asks. Lea is Zack’s girlfriend. Or she was. It’s been an on and off thing for some time, a complicated story. Luc drums his fingers on the empty table. “Yes, I can guess which way this is going”, Luc goes on. “When you rang me from Sicily a week ago, you weren’t feeling well. You said you couldn’t take this love triangle with Lea anymore.”
“Yes, exactly! I was furious. I thought I had to really draw a line. So I deleted her number and blocked her. I thought that I didn’t need her anymore, that I’d be ok on my own.”
“So, did you write to her, or did you just delete her number?”
“I only deleted it. She wrote to me after that, but I ignored her for five days.”
“And then?”
Luc Rubin, oncologist, friend, relationship coach. Later, Luc and Zack will also discuss the medication dosage. But life matters more now. Matters of the heart are most acute.
Somehow, Luc is now responsible for them, too.
Unfortunately, I’m not at liberty to disclose precisely how Zack met Lea. It would have made a lovely story, too good to believe if it was a film script. But Lea wants to remain anonymous. She never talks to me about Zack, either. Only after his death do we speak on the phone once; she says the story hurts her too much, that she hadn’t behaved well.
Here is what I can say: Zack met Lea near the university in the early summer of 2021 and talked to her for hours. The next day, he said to Luc: “I think I’ve got a crush.” Luc encouraged him to write to Lea. In June 2021, they had their first date, in Irchelpark next to the university.
Soon, Zack and Lea went on holiday to Italy. It was the first time he was traveling with a partner, as a partner. Zack was happy; the cancer was under control. Then, a month later, he felt something hard in his stomach again. It was back.
Would the relationship have been different if Zack had remained cancer-free? Today, Amélie says: “I don’t blame Lea. Why should I? Who wouldn’t want to run away from such a situation? Any woman who can stand it deserves admiration.”
Zack and Lea become an on-off thing, separated by cancer, which scares her, Zack says: after all, he’ll die and leave her alone. Besides, there’s the issue of her ex, who is not dying any time soon.
“Oh man, when we got back from the [family] holiday, I wrote to her, and she replied that she understood why I’d blocked her. We spoke on the phone, she was going out, I was playing monopoly with some friends, then she said she was at home, and I ended up at her place at 10 to 2 in the morning. So…” he concludes, embarrassed, “then we spent the whole weekend together.”
“And now everything’s fine again?” asks Luc.
“Yes. But that’s because her ex is in the USA right now. When he comes back… I don’t know!” 
“Can’t he just have a bit of patience…” Luc hesitates briefly “… and wait until you’re gone?”
“Yes, that’s what I said! Why don’t you tell him ‘Zack’s only going to live for a few more months anyway. After that, I’m free for you.’ But I understand her fear. When she fully focuses on me now and then I go, she’ll be lost. I don’t know what to do.”
Luc is also at a loss; it’s one of the most unusual patient consultations of his career.
“I don’t know either, Zack. I mean, we’ve already talked about it until we were blue in the face…  You must decide what you can take. There is no law saying that life has to work in a straight line. It never does. So if it makes a curve…”
“I know, I know.” Zack sighs.
One of their separations took place right before Sicily, marring the family holiday. Zack was in a bad mood, making cynical remarks, sometimes just walking around Catania on his own, headphones in, depressing music playing. He read some Nietzsche to boot.
Amélie says: “Out of twelve days, two were good. But maybe that’s just normal for family holidays at this age. But because he is going to die soon, everyone has the feeling that everything has to be great. The last Christmas, the last New Year’s Eve, the last holidays…  But you can’t live like that.”
Zack struggles with this. He feels sorry for his parents and his brother. It would have been a good opportunity to finally talk to him about his prognosis. Zack had been avoiding it until now. His brother is seven years younger. The family has always tried to protect him from all things to do with cancer.
“Did you tell him?” asks Luc.
“Well, I haven’t really talked to him about it directly. We had a good time, though. I’m going to a concert with him this week, I bought the tickets.”
“But do you think he knows how things stand with you?”
“Dunno… It’s like with my friends, I guess. They say it’s somehow unimaginable for them. Because I look pretty normal. One friend said that it would only really sink in if she saw me at the hospital.”
“What does that do to you?”
Zack laughs. “I think: Fuck, if you only knew!” He’s silent for a bit. “But I kid myself sometimes, too, I like the illusion that everything’s fine. But at the same time, I don’t suppress things. I read books about death, I listen to songs about death. I’m going to make a trip to Auschwitz. Sometimes I wonder if I won’t miss the time.”
“What time?”
“The time to tell them. I met some fellow students a while ago, and they asked me how things were. What am I supposed to say? I explained it all scientifically, cancer as a race against evolution, invincible super cells and stuff like that.”
“That’s okay”, says Luc.
“Well, and one of the guys said: ‘It’ll be alright, I really believe it, you can do it.” And I felt like saying: ‘What the fuck are you talking about, man? I’m fucked!’” Again, he grows quiet. “But I know he means well.”

7. Auschwitz, Exhaustion, a Visit to Hell

500 more metres to the bus stop, says Google Maps. The bus to Auschwitz-Birkenau doesn’t leave for another 30 minutes, but for Zack, the remaining 500 metres on this too hot day in May 2022 are barely manageable. He sits down on a bench in Krakow’s city park. Above, the wind is sighing in the treetops; below, Zack is gasping.
It's been three months since the doctors said recovery was no longer possible. 2 to 12 months, they said.
He coughs, takes a deep breath, leans forwards, his cap pulled almost completely over his eyes. He presses himself back into the park bench, coughs again, it sounds as if he was going to vomit. “No. No.” He pauses, sucks in some air. “You see”, he says to me, “none of this makes any sense like that.”
The night before, he’d been euphoric. “Just look, what a beautiful city, how incredibly beautiful! Really impressive”, he said on the way from the airport to the city centre. He wasn’t looking much, though, only taking quick glances out of the tram window; at the same time, he’d opened Google Maps and was saving restaurants and bars. “A sushi restaurant right next to the Airbnb, look! 4.6 stars! And here’s a Polish goulash restaurant! And the burger joint has top ratings, too.” As greedily as if it were his first trip, Zack saved more green dots on Google Maps, his itinerary, the map of endless possibilities that would also become his legacy.
Just before this trip, he’d cleaned it up. He had gone through the thousands of green dots that marked possible destinations around the world and deleted the ones he wasn’t really that interested in. And the ones that seemed unrealistic in the time he had left. “It’s reasonably clean now”, he said. “Death is getting closer.”
Leaving out Auschwitz had never been an option. The idea of the concentration camp had accompanied him since his diagnosis; in a way, it was his guide through this intermediate realm between life and death.
Zack sometimes complains that there is no manual for his situation. The closest thing to one that he could find is “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl, an Auschwitz survivor. Zack had read the book in English immediately after his cancer diagnosis. Now he’s brought it along in German. He prefers the German title, …trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen: “Saying Yes to Life, Despite Everything.”
In the book, Frankl describes how he managed not to lose his mind in the concentration camp. It is a guide on how to live your life when death can happen at any second.
Zack had told Luc about the book, and when Zack was down, Luc quoted sentences from it back to Zack.
Zack longed to see the place that had given rise to these thoughts. Perhaps because there remained some residual mistrust that one could actually believe in life in the face of imminent death.
He also says that he feels connected to “these people” – but he is ashamed of this thought. “What they experienced in the concentration camp is a completely different kind of pain. My situation is much better. But when I was lying alone in that hospital room after the operation, in pain and lonely, I found camaraderie in the thought that others were also in a hopeless situation.” He believes that seeing “this hell” would help him. “It’ll give me a jolt. Like, take a look around you. You still have some life left, those who were here didn’t stand a chance, they were much worse off. Get a grip, Zack.”
Maybe that’s an unhealthy comparison. Pain and despair should not be played off against each other. Dying is always a lonely process. Even if Zack has friends and family to accompany him. Still, he has to face death alone.
Besides, even friends and family reach their limits at some point. Amélie once told me: “This is going to sound very harsh, but I sometimes have it up to here with all the deep ‘meaningful talk’ about death and the meaning of life. Sometimes I just want to watch a cat walk through the garden, and I want to say ‘look, what a lovely cat, what lovely light in the garden’. But then every time, vroooom, straight into this whole intense meaningful stuff. And it makes me feel terrible. After all, I’m supposed to be enjoying every second left with him.”
He feels particularly lonely at university, Zack tells me. He can hardly believe that he is the only one of the 28,000 students facing such a tricky situation. “That can’t be right. I’ve been thinking about setting up a kind of death club. For students who are about to die.” But how would he find them?
Zack rarely wallows in his misery for long. He can’t walk very far, so he gets on an e-scooter and scoots through the streets and alleyways of his travel destinations. This morning in Krakow, he got up at 10 o’clock and set off. He calls this “peak human experience”.
But that was two hours ago, and in Zack’s world, two hours is a lot of time. He quickly grows tired nowadays. Three weeks of chemotherapy exhaust his body to such an extent that it takes him a whole week to recover from the poison. He suffers from diarrhoea, nausea and can hardly eat. And then, the next three weeks of chemotherapy follow. “It’s not worth it.”
Right now, he’d prefer to be in bed in his Airbnb room, but – “then I’d sink into self-pity”.
Now, on the bench in the park in Krakow, he is doing a Lebenswertgleichung. An ugly word for an ugly calculation: a life worth living equation. Out of four weeks, three are filled with chemotherapy. “Not worth living.” Then, a week’s break, during which he may or may not be doing well. Then another three weeks that are not worth living. And all this just to keep the tumours more or less the same size; they will never vanish. “I’ll still die in the end.”
An ambulance howls in the distance.
I hear myself say: “You could argue that every good week is worth it.”
Zack says: “I could, but I’ve had enough of life. No. I’ve had enough of hospital time. What I’m doing is surviving, not living. I’m not in the business of survival.”
This gloomy Zack sounds like the author of a self-help book lost in a conversation with himself. The advice he sprouts is either too abstract and obvious – or too concrete, because Zack’s situation is unique.
“I want to do so much more”, he says, “but I’m tired, death can’t come soon enough. What I really want is to sleep for twenty years. But I also want to have blown every every fuse. I wish that at the end, when I reach my destination, I don’t have a drop of juice in me. I just want to be happy to crawl across the finish line. Like: fuck yeah, finally peace, finally peace forever. That’s my philosophy of life. If you do it right, once is enough.”
And so we heave ourselves onto the bus that takes us to the concentration camp. Out of Krakow, over rolling hills, through small villages that could just as easily be in the English countryside. Fields, petrol stations, roundabouts, simple restaurants. Zack sees none of this. He dozes off, and sometimes he talks about Lea, whom he would have liked to be here, but she isn’t interested in history and politics. “I have to admit we’re very different people.” He goes on to talk, very slowly, without me asking a single question, about the best moments of the last year, “most of them with Lea, yes”, but also in the USA, where he treated himself to a helicopter flight, “only 15 minutes”, but because he was alone, he was allowed to sit next to the pilot. “So visceral!”
Sometimes, when Zack talks about such experiences, his voice and his words don’t match. He says “visceral”, but his voice says “boring”. You can stretch your life by filling it with experiences. You try to do more of everything, speed-read even faster, travel even more efficiently and more often, visit not just the museum but also the market and the castle on the same day. Your head is full, but how much of it can you actually process?
In front of the entrance to Auschwitz, he suddenly grows excited and searches for a quote in the notes app on his phone. “Can’t find it”, he mumbles, then does a long Google search. “Look, this guy, Witold Pilecki, what a legend!”
Pilecki was a Polish resistance fighter who volunteered to be imprisoned in Auschwitz so as to report what was going on in the camp to the outside world. He managed to break out and later took part in resisting the Soviet occupation. At the end, he was executed. Before he was shot, he is supposed to have said: “I’ve been trying to live my life so that in the hour of my death I would feel joy rather than fear.” Zack recites the quote and sighs: “The guy’s got it spot on! Dying with a smile, that’s what you want!”
Sure it would be nice to die with a smile, I find myself thinking, but Pilecki felt joy not because he had lived intensely but because he believed his life had served a higher purpose. Because he was convinced that he had helped others and that it was worth his death. It’s an unfair comparison, but it was Zack himself who brought it up.
It's an unfair situation anyway. No 24-year-old should have to deal with questions like that.
Before the Nazis, the Auschwitz concentration camp had been a Polish barracks. Beautiful brick buildings, birch trees whose bark glistens in the sun and whose leaves rustle like the sea. A lovely place, if you forget what it was. Like Zack, who usually doesn’t look as if something was growing inside him that would kill him. Superimposed layers of beauty and horror.
“Iconic”, he says quietly as he steps through the gate with Arbeit macht frei emblazoned above it. He listens intently to the guide, often walking at the front of the group and standing right next to her when we stop: “ThyssenKrupp, amazing, they make all the aeroplane parts now”, he says, “IG Farben, the company’s called BASF now, right?”
He says this quietly, talking to himself more than to the guide. “Zyklon B”, the guide says. “One good-looking molecule”, says Zack, a chemistry student with a body full of chemistry.
He grows quiet as we enter the buildings. A display case piled high with prostheses that the Nazis took from the inmates. Zack stands in front of it for a long time. He walks on, then hunches over in front of a display case filled with a mountain of hair. Is it disgust or his cancer? Rage, he’ll say later.
Zack’s mother once told me: “Zack’s friends and you, those who accompany him, only see him on certain occasions, witness only the positive side, the enthusiastic travelling Zack.” What we don’t see, she means: Zack after his return. Burnt out, exhausted, gloomy, desperate.
She’s wrong, though. Zack also has these fluctuations while he’s travelling. And she actually knows this, too: sometimes he calls her when he’s lonely, wondering, say, if he should spend his precious time alone in South Korea or return home a little earlier after all.
Zack always has something to say. Not in the concentration camp, though. He is quiet until we leave it. But as we slowly make our way towards the gate, he continues his real-time reflections. But now in a dark and cynical mode, one I’ve never experienced before.
“Typical that capitalism was involved in all that. So human. Why don’t we exploit them some more.”
Or:
“That’s normal schoolyard psychology, peer pressure. It’s always takes more energy to be good. Being evil, doing bad things, that’s easy. The absence of empathy, that’s the default human mode.”
It's easier to leave the world if it’s rotten and lost. A friend of Zack’s once told me that he finds Zack hard to bear in these moments. “We’re left here in this world, after all.” But Zack always realises that he’s getting carried away at such times and corrects himself, as he does now in the car park outside Auschwitz. “Well, no, I don’t think people are all bad. But it’s easier to go along with evil. Much harder to fight against it.”
In front of the entrance to the Birkenau concentration camp, right next to the track on which the trains with Jews arrived, e-scooters are waiting. Also, a bus with the words “Auschwitz-Birkenau-Auschwitz”.
“Wow, it’s immense! I never thought it would be so big!” Zack nearly shouts. The guide is far ahead, we are slowly being left behind by the group. Slowly, we walk along the ramp where the camp doctors carried out the triage. “They’d send me straight to the gas chamber”, says Zack. “Not even 80 years ago.”
On the bus back to Krakow, all he talks about is Lea. He says he understands how impossible it is to be with someone who has cancer. But he also says: “I’ve always been honest. She knew what she was getting into.”
Zack struggles with the accusation of being unable to give her everything she needs. “I, too, see my friends moving in together, getting married, planning children. She said: ‘I’m blocked, I’m 26, I can’t tackle my future if I’m with you.’ And I said: ‘How am I supposed to solve this? You knew who and what I was, didn’t you?’”
“Would you have broken up sooner if it wasn’t for your cancer?” I ask him.
“You mean because then I’d have hope of finding someone new? Yes, maybe. But if I was healthy, the relationship might not have been so complicated. Then again, we wouldn’t have ended up together in the first place. I can’t separate the cancer from myself. Right now, right here, I miss her a lot.”
That evening, Zack googles what to do the next day, the last before his flight home. There is a shooting range near the city. That would be more exciting than walking through the streets again. “I’ve really seen enough churches and palaces and castles by now. I’ve had so many experiences. Not much seems to be missing. Apart from skydiving. At some point, everything is repetition. Most things are best the first time.”
The next morning, we go to a sushi restaurant that he discovered on Google Maps. He feels upset; he’s given up on the shooting range plan. Instead, he spent a long time talking to Lea on the phone. She wasn’t interested in what Auschwitz was like; the whole conversation was about their relationship, “straight talk, finally”, says Zack.
She said she wanted no relationship for the time being; they could stay friends. “I don’t want pity, I don’t want her to be with me because she feels sorry for me”, he says. He’d hoped he wouldn’t die single. “I don’t have enough time to get over her. Fuck.”
We fly back, exhausted, dejected, and almost miss the last train to Zurich in Basel. There, I see him limping away, slowly but stubbornly, relentlessly.
A few days later, he calls me. He had discussed the new chemotherapy with Luc. It’s going better than expected. Zack sounds euphoric and is full of plans: “Maybe Luc and I will make it to Mozambique in the autumn after all!”
He has also bought another Interrail ticket. Not just to check out more green dots but to travel to the Ukrainian border. Makes sense in a way, I think. Where is one closer to death than at a concentration camp site? In a war zone.

8. The Final Summer

When Zack is feeling well, he is all action, racing through the world, making friends wherever he goes. But like a comet travelling through foreign solar systems, he only briefly lights up the sky and disappears again.
When Zack is feeling bad, he is a black hole, a star that collapses in on itself, devouring and destroying the energy that surrounds it.
Zack’s final summer is a three-month implosion.
June: Zack travels to Brussels, has some French fries at a restaurant where Angela Merkel once had lunch (“4 euros, very good fries, and the restaurant has this whole political thing going, it’s great”) and drinks beer in a bar that serves 200 varieties (“mega cool, the selection”); in Amsterdam, he and a friend have a mushroom trip; in Bonn, he visits relatives, then travels to Modena by train, tries some gnocco fritto. His next destination is Vienna, with a stopover in Salzburg, if his strength suffices.
Even for a healthy young person, that would be an insane programme. Zack senses this: “I told a friend that I was travelling around too much. Cities that aren’t worth visiting a second time aren’t worth visiting a first time, either.” But how to find out which are which? “I ask myself why I’m still doing all this. The chemo, too, it’s such torture. Moçambique in autumn with Luc, that’s what I’m holding on to. And my brother, my parents, the time with them.”
More and more often, Zack feels like a burden to others. As if people were waiting for him “to croak so that they can finally get on with their lives.” He says he understands that.
Relationship status: complicated. Lea spent two nights at his place. “But we’re not boyfriend and girlfriend.”
9 July, a text message from Ukraine: “Ciao Michael, greetings from Ukraine, I made it. What an adventure… I’m waiting at the station for the train back to Poland right now. Arrived here in Lviv at 1 o’clock in the morning. Then I realised there are curfews from 11am to 6am. I tried to leave the station, but a guy in an orange waistcoat stopped me. Understood him thanks to the Google Translate app. He said there were no taxis at that time of day. Then he said he could get me one, regardless. I thought it was a scam, so I went back into the station… met a mega-nice Ukrainian guy there, Ivan…”
16 July. Zack stops chemotherapy for good. There won’t be any new sessions. “I’m too tired. Don’t have the stomach for it anymore. If I’m still here in October, I’ll have enough time to do everything I want.”
Relationship status: deleted Lea’s number again a few days after an Imagine Dragons concert followed by a night he had to spend on the sofa. “That’s when I realised: this is the first and last time I’ll be sleeping at her place on a sofa. This is just ruining everything we had. Staying friends? Not with me.”
22 July. Zack takes a spontaneous trip to Lecce, which he’d booked two days before. He’s fleeing bad news about his blood values. There’s a problem with his kidneys, too. “But the city is amazing. So much beauty, the architecture blows me away, that art!”
Relationship status: complicated. Lea invited him to her graduation party. Her text message came out of nowhere. Long conversations followed, then an evening at her place, a day at the city pool, the weeks before just a bad dream. “Things remain undefined, though. Being my girlfriend puts too much pressure for her, I don’t want to push her.”
27 July. The first PET scan since Zack stopped chemotherapy. The situation is out of control now, a tumour is crushing the left ureter. The cancer has also spread elsewhere. “Luc, too, is surprised at how quickly things are deteriorating. I probably won’t live to see Christmas. It’s gonna get ugly.”
24 August. Zack goes to the library at Irchel. He’s just accompanied a friend from Australia to the airport and said goodbye. “For the last time.”
He wants to take one more exam. Most of his friends don’t understand why he’s still spending hours at the library. They aren’t thinking it through, says Zack. “What am I supposed to do instead? Spend every day meeting friends? They work, they go on holidays, they don’t have the time.”
The tumours are pressing into his organs, but otherwise he’s doing better than he had for a long time. His hair is growing again. He finds it “bittersweet”, a reminder of his “full potential”.
Relationship status: open, calm. Lea tries not to think of the facts, and Zack, too, does his best to resist the inner voice saying: “I’m dying, we must have as many good experiences together as we can.” Zack spends a lot of time with Lea. Now, he lives more like a 24-year-old who isn’t terminally ill might live. “I have a job, I have my studies, one could say that I have a girlfriend. I’d like to move out, but it just wouldn’t make any sense.”
For now, he can bear it, he says. “Death gives me strength, too. After all, it will soon be over.”
Zack takes care of things he’d been putting off. He talks to his brother. At last. Charlie is a good observer, he’s noticed how his parents have tried to shield him. When Zack was diagnosed, he was 12, now he’s 17 – a youth in the shadow of cancer.
Charlie says Zack made it easy for him because he remained himself. “He sucked it up.” Sometimes, Charlie almost forgot that Zack was actually the one who was mortally ill. That the issue was that Zack was going to die, not that he, Charlie, would lose his brother. “Choose your poison.”
Charlie shares his family’s sense of humour and reserve. He hasn’t told many friends. They wouldn’t understand anyway. He wants to be Charlie and not just Zack’s brother or the guy who has a brother with cancer. “But it’s a part of me. I mean I can’t say afterwards, ‘A brother? I never had a brother.’”
Zack and Charlie go to gigs; Charlie enjoys the time together – with their age difference, they were never the “kind of brothers who send each other funny memes all the time”. But what siblings do that at that age? “Cancer certainly brought us closer together. Even though Zack was away so much. In the last three months, the dude’s been all over Europe!”
In his last summer, Zack celebrates his last birthday. Amélie once said that she can’t stand this “last time” idea. You prepare so intensely that you almost hope that it really is the last time. Because: how would you be even able to celebrate it next time after this? A thought she doesn’t wish upon anyone.
Just before the end, nothing is normal anymore. As Charlie puts it, “It feels really weird. Six months ago, the doctors said he had between 5 and 15 months left. That means Zack could drop dead any moment now.”

9. Letting Go

Not everything Zack had hoped for worked out. Luc ended up travelling to Mozambique alone. And Japan, the country that Zack badly wanted to visit again, took a long time after the pandemic before it opened its borders to tourists. Zack never saw his friends there again.
Every life is incomplete. In Krakow, Zack asked me what I wanted to experience in my life. I must have looked back in puzzlement because he went on: “If you were to die soon, what would you have wanted to do before?” I’d asked myself this question, of course, but how honest was I supposed to be with him? Was it ok to point out something that he perhaps hadn’t even considered?
“Children, maybe. A family. Living in a big city abroad. A house by the sea…” I broke off.
“Yes, that’s right, children.” Silence.
“But some dreams and wishes remain unfulfilled at the end of every life”, I said.
“That’s why I’ve put new flags on my map again.” For a while, Zack had thought there’d be closure if there were no green dots on Google Maps, only stars and hearts. “Clearing the map was daft. It’s not realistic. It’s not the way things should be.”
The way things should be. Zack is longing for a clarity that doesn’t exist in life. And he knows that. But sometimes, a person is too weak. Or too honest. Or they just wish everything was simpler.
Like one day in Irchelpark, when he said: “I feel at peace with myself now. But sometimes I wonder: if so, why doesn’t my body mend itself?”
The on and off relationship with Lea ends “sometime after this turbulent summer”. Lea tells him that she’d be there for him if he needed her but that she can no longer be his girlfriend; if she was, his death would pull the rug out from under her. Zack decides to spend his final weeks without her.
Amélie once said: “I believe the meaning of life is to find love. Of course, things were complicated with Lea. But why should I be angry with her? Thanks to her, Zack fell in love; with her, he experienced love.”
The only thing left to organise is the dying. Zack has no property to speak of: two bank accounts, one empty, the money in the other to be transferred to Charlie “so he can take the trips I couldn’t” and a mobile phone subscription; the insurance policies are in his parents’ name. Exit membership has to be paid for. It costs 3,000 francs unless you’ve been a member for over three years. He’s been delaying the final step, writing the living will, until the end. When he gets to it and needs his decision-making capacity confirmed, both Luc and his family doctor happen to be on holiday. A bout of stress at the end of life.
Very close to the end, a fire is burning. It has become dark at the farewell party in the Zurich lowlands. On the edge of the village behind the former wine press house, six friends are holding skewers of meat over a grill, their eyes fixed on the flames. On the nearby road, car lights are gliding silently through the night.
“Things are moving really fast now. In summer, we still went out together”, says one of them.
“He wanted me to record his entire life. To film a narrative. We got started, too. He sat there and talked into the camera. We got as far as Japan.”
“What are you going to do with the film now?” another friend asks.
“No idea. I don’t want to bring it up. He knows he won’t be able to finish it.”
“In these five years, I never quite realised that it’s really that serious. I mean, it was always like: he’s doing his therapy. Things will be alright somehow.”
“He just never shows his pain.”
“Yes… He never said it wasn’t going well, either. We went out for drinks, he was fit, even flirted with a woman.”
They grow silent. The fire continues to burn. In the hut, music is playing. Through the door, you can see the cold fireplace. Next to it, Zack is lying in a deckchair, his cap pulled down over his face, Luc sitting next to him, his arms resting on his knees, staring at the floor.
Then someone says into the silence: “He made the best of it.”
“Maybe it’s not something I should be saying, but . . . before the illness, well, he wasn’t a happy person; for long stretches, he had no joy in life. And now, what the fuck, this sick guy lived the hell out of the last five years! I’d never have thought.”
Mhm. Everyone’s nodding.
“I’d never go as far as to say: It was meant to be. But it did throw him back into life.”
“Yeah, absolutely, as harsh as it sounds, it did have a positive side to it. Him having to deal with it, I mean.”
“Mega true. All these dreams and wishes. I’m asking myself, and I also asked him once, whether what he’d experienced, what he’d gone through in these five years would have taken us a whole lifetime.”
“I’ve often thought: do what you really want to do in life! Don’t just follow these rigid Swiss structures. But that thought, like, often disappears the next day.”
“I don’t believe any of us would have coped as well as he did. And I think he’s at peace with himself. If he was really struggling and scared right now, it would be so much harder to bear.”
“Yeah, I even told him that! He said to me: ‘I’m in so much pain, by now I guess I want to go.’ And I said: ‘Hey, look, I’m glad you said that. Don’t put any pressure on yourself, go if you need to go. We’ll remember you. Our memories will stay.’”
Half an hour later, close to ten in the evening, a friend who’d come all the way from South Africa has to leave: the return flight had been advanced. He and Zack go outside. Zack says what a good friend he’s been. “I’m so grateful, bro, so grateful.” And then, “Ciao, bro.” – “Ciao.”
Zack walks back, standing in the doorway. “It simply sucks. There’s no good way to say goodbye. I’m always looking for a way to make it better, but I’m never satisfied.”
Zack feels like he’s the one letting everyone down, though it’s him who is gasping as he sits at the table. He cuts his piece of meat into quarters, then eighths, then sixteenths: larger chunks are almost impossible to chew now. “How do you eat an elephant? Piece by piece.” He laughs dryly. “I don’t know if I’ll survive this week”, he says to me. “But I want to make it to the next weekend.” “Why?” I ask. “For my parents, another weekend for them. But I don’t really want to do it anymore.”
At ten in the evening, Amélie tries to get the projector working. The guests are sitting around a large table in front of the screen, Zack plays music on a boombox.
“I don’t wanna live forever”, Taylor Swift sings.
“I don’t think I can play this!” Amélie shouts over the music, pointing to the projector.
“Cause I don’t wanna live in vain”, Taylor Swift continues.
“I can do it”, says Charlie, rushing to help his mum.
Zack changes the music and Eddie Vedder’s melodious voice comes on. “Too dark! Next song!” one of his friends shouts.
Finally, photos appear on the screen. Zack as a child with Charlie, both wearing ski outfits, Zack on a boat on Lake Zurich, Zack surrounded by friends, all of them holding beer mugs, “we only drank Rivella [Swiss soft drink]!” a friend shouts, “yes, sure you did!” Amélie replies. There’s a picture of Zack playing chess, but you can see infusion pumps in the background. His eyebrows are still bushy and thick, as if glued on. “Some dangerous eyebrows!” a friend shouts. “No comments about the eyebrows!” Zack shouts back. In the video of the school graduation ceremony, Zack for the first time appears wearing a cap. Photos of his trip to Japan, and then Zack in his hospital bed. He smiles exhaustedly but gives a thumbs up.
The last pictures are from the family holiday in Sicily, the mother between the two sons, everyone laughing, Charlie and Zack on the Scala dei Turchi, that was a good day, one of only two on this last family trip. There are pictures of these two days. As for the ten bad ones, they are only preserved in Zack’s head.
A little later, an uncle pats him on the back like a clumsy bear, hugs him, and says: “Goodbye.” The farewells remain awkward at this party. The grandmother, who has dementia, takes leave by saying: “You look weak, Zack, you need to drink more, you should drink more water!”
We agree that we’ll meet again and that he’ll write to me if the situation worsens. It’s Saturday night.
On the bus home, I ask myself if I’d see Zack again. And what will happen afterwards, whether I’d be tormented by memories. Maybe that’s exactly what I was afraid of when I hesitated to get involved with Zack at the start. But what I feel now is not pain. It’s gratitude for almost a year of learning about life. I don’t think anyone has to follow Zack’s example, or that anyone even can. But to see someone in such pain as Zack, as disabled as him, and yet so attached to life, finding so much happiness in so many moments – there is something like hope in that.
On Tuesday morning, 1 November, we talk on the phone. Zack says he is in hospital. He’d almost choked on vomit at home on Sunday evening. “I don’t want to croak at home.” Luc had visited him. Until the end, Zack remains sure there is no afterlife. But when he says goodbye to Luc, the devout doctor, Zack says “See you soon.” Luc says the words back.
Since the farewell party, he’s received dozens of messages. He will no longer answer them.
He wants to die this afternoon, with the help of medication. We say goodbye. “See you soon”, I say. And Zack replies: “See you soon.”
Five hours later, I receive a text. But it’s not Zack’s mother confirming his death. Instead, it’s… Zack.
“It won’t be today after all . . . ? If I’m still up to it and have enough energy later on, you could come for a visit.”
This message overwhelms me. We’d said our final goodbyes a few hours ago. But then I find myself smiling. That’s Zack for you. One last bout of rebellion: why leave when there’s still some juice left in the machine? Use it all up, down to the last drop!
I write back, telling him I’ve left town after our phone call so as to process what happened. But I’d like to visit him the next day if he’s still around.
I feel guilty, but I’m also glad that I’d already left by the time he wrote to me. You can’t have a farewell like that twice a day.
Three days later, I receive a text message from Amélie:
“Yesterday, Zack left us. We miss him so much. I hope that one day we will live again the way Zack lived. Right now, it is something we have to get through, and it hurts so much. Amélie”