Part 2: My Invisible Friend Update
Part 3: My Invisible Friend, Conflicted
Part 4: My Invisible Friend, The End
As I said in my last post, when I googled Petra a couple of hours after her death, I discovered I did not know her whole story. For example, being listed as a missing person. Since then, I’ve discovered more. Things she’d never told me. But why?
Yesterday, a friend suggested it could be because in escaping one life to live another, she may have wanted to represent herself to people as who she had chosen to become, not as who she used to be. But that means that now that she is gone, I’m trying to piece the parts of her story together. I wish she were still around to ask. I’m sure she would tell me.
To understand someone better once they are gone…I’m not sure it’s possible. But I’m going to try.
The indisputable facts. Petra died a few weeks after her 59th birthday of breast cancer, undiagnosed until it was Stage 4, when it had already spread to her bones. I have her German ID card and her hospital records. So that much is true.
As for what she told me: she did not have children. Her mother died in childbirth with her brother, when Petra was very young. Her father then married her mother’s sister, who, seeing what happened to her sibling, never had children of her own. Petra broke off ties with them years ago. They weren’t horrible people, she said. They just didn’t see eye to eye. There was more to it, I’m sure, but she didn’t like talking about it. When I asked if she wanted me to contact any family members after she died, she said no. She had read in a newspaper that her father had died a few years back, and she was not close to her stepmom or brother. “That was all over years ago.”
Petra was a lover of animals. She loved animals more than people, mainly because they’re pure of heart. I got the feeling from her fierce animal love that humans had disappointed her one too many times and that she had given up on them.
She especially loved the crows in the park, carrying pockets of peanuts for them, and calling them her “customers.” She knew their individual traits. (She’s shy. He’s protective. She’s so pushy she followed me home!) She would give a maximum of two peanuts per couple…and she knew all of the couples and where their territory began and ended and whether or not they had chicks the year before. In the hospice, she told me how disappointing it was for her that she would not see which couples had hatched chicks this spring.
Petra knew all of the dogs and their owners and approved or didn’t of how they treated their pets. (She told me these things, and if she thought the people might listen, made polite suggestions.) She had owned a few dogs during her life, all adopted, and from the way she spoke of them, they had been her children.
She loved flowers, especially brightly-colored tulips and the peonies she bought from the Saturday morning market. She was very upset that a species of moths killed both of our geraniums and was coming up with a plan for alternate window boxes. She once brought me a long stick and said, “Put it in water.” As usual, I followed her advice. My kids thought I was insane, until a week later, the whole branch spouted buds and flowered.
She loved reading until she lost sight in her right eye. (Which was how she discovered her cancer.) Since then she had been watching movies and TV series, and made me a list of recent favorites:
Her last few favorites were Ted Lasso, Transatlantic, The Diplomat, and The Empress. In the end, she couldn’t concentrate for long, and turned to TikTok animal videos for entertainment and distraction.
Petra was a vegetarian. She hated waste, be it money, food or clothes and was strict about recycling. She believed in herbal remedies, and was always telling me to drink thyme tea for colds or sage or whatever it was that she thought I needed, and if I didn’t get around to buying it, she would bring me some. She loved chocolate, rhubarb tart, and ginger snaps. She also loved Indian food, which is where we went on one of our only non-park outings.
Petra had trained as a nurse and worked with the elderly, first in a clinic and then, enjoying the freedom, doing house visits. She used her vacations to travel the world and indulge in her greatest passion - tango.
When she spoke to me about tango, her eyes would light up. She said that in the beginning you’re just flailing, and then when you “get it” it’s the best feeling ever. You want to put all of your energy and time into improving, and re-living that feeling of two people moving perfectly in sync to the rhythm. (I do not dance, besides jumping around at concerts, and have no sense of rhythm, so I listened and admired her passion, but could not know what she felt.) She would put thought into what she wore to tango, and money into the right shoes, of which she had owned some very special pairs.
She spoke at different times of traveling in India. She had spent months (at least) in Africa, where she had gone on several safaris. She encouraged me to go to Kruger National Park in South Africa and talked of the animals she had seen in Zimbabwe. I know she had been to South America, definitely to Brazil. All around Europe, including Italy and Greece.
She told me she had lived in Ireland and worked as a tour guide, and had me bring back Barry’s Tea from one of my visits to Dublin. When she got locked out of her computer near the end, and I helped her get back in, her password was Fedhlim, which she said was the name of her first boyfriend in Ireland.
She said that she had dated, then lived with Maurice in Paris. They split up amicably and he even came to visit her in Germany. But after that, she fell into a deep depression. She cut ties with everyone. She wanted to die…didn’t see any sense left to life. But instead of ending things, she packed one bag, came to Paris, and showed up on Maurice’s doorstep. They got along well for a couple of years. And then they had the falling out that ended the communication between them. She tried to save the relationship by suggesting they adopt a dog, since they had done that the last time she lived with him. He immediately said yes, and they adopted Burrow, but it didn’t fix the relationship.
I invited her to go to exhibits or events, and she always declined, saying that was a part of her former life. She was no longer “in the world.” (The park didn’t count.) So I was amazed when she accepted my invitation to Thanksgiving dinner. By then, she already had trouble walking, so Tibor went and picked her up, and Tallie took her back home that night. They didn’t remember their conversations with her, but she did and cherished them. (My kids were among her chosen humans that she admired. I think it’s because they’re always so willing to help me, love dogs almost as much as she did, and, according to her, are atypically unselfish and curious…for teenagers.)
She was frugal, but she loved beautiful things. She gave me a whole chest of silk saris from India that she had bought because she couldn’t help herself - the colors were so vivid. She gave Tallie a leather handbag from a Bavarian designer that she was expensive, although that could have been a gift, like the two Certina watches that she left me with a note, “These ones are very expensive!” She had some beautiful scarves and nice perfumes that Maurice had bought her. And she told me once about a fedora-style hat that she loved to wear because people would remark on how smart it looked.
She left several envelopes full of unused art postcards. She seemed to buy them at museums she visited, as a sort of “best of.” These included a whole envelope of William Blakes drawings…
a collection from Venice:
some Botticellis
Some late-19th and 20th century pieces in an enveloped labeled “Lucien Freud”
and a pack entitled “Sculpture” including a couple shots of David’s butt (because one David butt-shot is apparently not enough).
She didn’t bring them to the hospital with her. But, seeing that she had me throw several bags full of documents into the trash, having these waiting on her bed for me was a conscious decision to preserve her “collection.”
Some of the postcards contain notes, however, and I used them to piece together details of her life from 1989 to 2003.
Which leads me to the next part of her story. The part she didn’t tell me.
When I googled her name a couple of hours after her death, the first thing I found was a 2009 thread on a German true-crime message board. Amateur sleuths were trying to discover the identity of a woman’s corpse found in Finland. In the coat pockets of the corpse were found torn-out pages from a German passport and some German coins. So the sleuths were looking at missing persons reports from Germany. Petra’s name came up as a possible fit.
The links to the missing person’s report and related news articles no longer work. But from the comments on this and a similar Finnish crime board, I found out that Petra had been listed as missing since 2005. There were more details, but they were too strange for me to believe. So I backed up to the first document I had.
In the 1989 postcard, a friend tells 25-year-old Petra she’s jealous that she gets to spend the summer in Ireland.
Petra lived in Berlin at some point, and had a “great love.” I am thinking it might be after this date, working as a nurse.
Postcards in 1999 and 2003 were sent to her at an address in her parents’ town, so she was now near near home, probably still working as a nurse.
In the 2003 postcard, the friend says she can’t reach 39-year-old Petra by phone, so is writing instead.
Since I can't reach you by phone, I will try this way. How are you? Where are you working? There are so many questions. I'd love to see you again. I'll be in Turkey until 10.10, but after then!?
Her friend couldn’t reach her by phone. So something was going on. But Petra had this postcard in her possession. So either she was still home then or someone forwarded it.
It was just after this that Petra seems to have gone off-radar.
The true crime board quoted the Bavarian police as saying that Petra went to Cuba, married a Cuban man (!!), and moved to Paris with him in 2005 (age 41). She was still in touch with two girlfriends, but they lost contact in 2006. The family tracked down the Cuban man in 2007, but he said he and Petra had split and he didn’t know where she was. The German police believed she went to Ireland at this point. The family didn’t officially register the missing person’s report until 2009.
In the stories she told me, it sounded like Petra lived in Dublin for a couple of years. She moved from Ireland back to her parents’ town in Germany, likely after the missing person’s report was made. I know this because she told me the story of a Dutch man who she gave a Dublin tour to with his parents. He had asked if they could stay in contact, so she gave them her parents’ address. She said that she was staying with them, and he just showed up one day, having driven from the Netherlands. He proposed. She turned him down.
Somewhere around this time, she met Maurice dancing tango. She lived with him in Paris and they owned a dog before they broke up amicably and she moved home once again.
It is after this that she suffered her deep depression. When I told her about the hormones I was taking, she admitted that her depression might have come from menopause. “I wonder what would have happen if I had gotten treatment?” she mused. Then, I could see her shutting that door in her mind, and she quickly changed the topic.
2014 was her last post to the Facebook page I found for her. It is the only post remaining, and is her swapping her profile photo for a photo of flowers. I assume she deleted any previous activity and photos. 44 friends remain, and most have something to do with tango. Her likes are related to yoga, vegan food, tango and “pre-loved fashion.”
In April 2019, she moved back to Paris, arriving on Maurice’s doorstep. She once again cut all ties with friends and family. She went from the long dyed blonde hair she had always worn (which appears on her ID cards) to a natural brown bob. In spring 2021 she discovered she had cancer. We met in October 2021.
What does all of this mean? This pattern of disappearing and starting elsewhere from scratch? I know she had very high expectations of people. Of the world. Of life. In the end she placed her trust and affection only in what was predictable: the park, the seasons, the animals.
She suffered from depression. Maybe her last dark bout was not her first. She told me she had considered suicide at that point. Maybe when the pain got too intense, instead of ending her life in a physical way, she did it in a situational way…leaving everything and everyone behind and starting again. Which, to me, means she never completely lost hope.
For those who are wondering, I sent a copy of her ID card and death certificate to the German embassy in Paris. So if anyone out there is still searching for her, her death will be on record.
But I don’t want to leave you with this sad and mysterious ending to Petra’s story.
After being stopped in the park several times by dog owners all asking where Petra was, and telling them individually what had happened, I decided to post on the 355-member WhatsApp group for dog-owners in our park. I said that Petra had died and that her ex was taking care of Burrow (in case they saw him in the park) and that we all missed her.
I have told you how I saw Petra. But I will leave you with the words of the only other people who saw her in her last few years: the dog owners of Buttes Chaumont.
(All translated from French)
Sarah: Oh, what sad news. She was so sweet and Ruby always danced around when she saw her. Thinking of Burrow who must have his heart broken.
Nadine: Affectionate thoughts for Petra.
Clémentine: What sadness! All of our condolences to the family. Ilda adored Burrow and Petra! Our thoughts to them.
Sebastien: What sad news. We have all been missing her sweetness and gentleness in the park for some time now. May she rest in peace. And big thoughts to Burrow, who must miss her the most.
Nakacha: May Petra rest in peace.
Francoise: Hello and thank you for this photo of Petra. Her sweetness, her smile. It was one of the happiest parts of the beginning of the day.
Nathalie: A great friend of the crows too, who escorted her discreetly on her morning walks next to her sweet Burrow.
Laetitia: Yes, I remember her birds. She was such a lover of animals. Bon voyage Petra. We’ll see each other again some day.
Mathilde: A woman who was adorable and so kind.
Borra: What sadness. Always so charming.
Laura: Oh no. I used to see her often at one point, and really loved her. What sad news. I’m devastated to hear it.
FDL: What sad news. Petra was one of great kindness and always smiling.
Daisy: Au revoir Petra, and thank you for your smile.
Aline: Oh no. I loved her, and Oscar loved Burrow. What sadness.
Zaz: Peace to her soul. I loved this woman, sunny and light. I’m so sad. May she rest in peace.
There were more along the same lines. But I will leave you with my favorite.
Julie: Dearest Petra. Sunrises at the Buttes will now seem empty without you. Don’t worry, we’ll take care of the crows and the little couple you loved so much. Our friendship was simple and kind but sadly too short. Your aura will long illuminate our morning walks and our rests, sitting in the green grass. Rest well.
In the end, Petra had every right to tell me what she wanted of her life and keep the rest for herself. I wish she had told me more. But she is still the same loving and generous person in my mind…just a little more mysterious. And, oh how I miss her.
Bon voyage, Petra, my friend. You always sought peace. In this life, it was elusive. I hope you find it in the next.
I'm just a little bit in awe of Petra, because I didn't think it was possible to disappear in the modern world, to the degree she has. As someone who also dances with depression, I find solace in her strength to keep moving. Much of her story may be a mystery, but from what you've told us, I think it's clear that you were a great source of comfort and love to her, even if only for a handful of years. I'll light a candle for her during the full moon this weekend, praying always that she's found peace.
<3 <3 <3