42, ‘the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything’. She hated it when people would refer to this book. Because it was just fiction to all of them. No one would really understand that her life had actually revolved around that number. 42. The age her mother had died. In her thirties a part of her was kind of ‘waiting’, almost expecting, to get cancer. Just like her mother and her sister had gotten cancer in their thirties. But nothing happened. She got lucky. Her thirties were a failure though. She hadn´t achieved what she wanted the most. She hadn´t started a family. She had never gotten the children she had hoped to pass on the endless love she had experienced as a child. Her apartment was mostly silent. By th time she turned 40, she was depressed for exactly a year. By the time she turned 42, life was better again before she realized that a part of her did not only think to get cancer anytime soon but also believed she would never turn 43. In her mind, life somehow ended with 42. She couldn´t really tell anyone. She knew it was silly. And her friends were mostly busy with their children or overwhelmed by stress at work. And what should she have said: I can not imagine to turn 43. She knew how insane that did sound. Almost as crazy as teling people she was in her perimenopause at the beginning of your fourties. Being haunted by serious depression at the end of every cycle. A kind of depression that she had never experienced before. Absolutely independent of her emotional state of mind. She would almost start crying during her happiest moment of the week, aerobic class. She would cry cycling home and all evening even though she had just fallen in love. It was like her body betrayed her. What happened to her had nothing to do with her but there was no escape. She had developed a chronic migraine which took some of the things away from her she loved the most, sometimes for weeks. No sunlight, better no light at all, no music, no radio. Instead silence. Almost everything that usually gave her happiness tortured her. She could hardly sleep, not at night, and for sure not during daytime. She couldn´t even close her eyes because the aura would drive her crazy. It was just moving too fast. The last epidsode ended a couple of days before her 43. birthday and she could finally visit her father and asked him something she had realized a while ago. Last year, or maybe the one before, she knew all of a sudden why her mother had died the first night in the hospice. Just some hours after she had arrived there. And she was right. It was weird for her that it took her psyche over 20 years to bring something up she must have known all along. But the question remained: Why hadn´t she said good bye?