JANUARY 1993: In one evening I shake hands with Harvey Keitel, Vanessa Redgrave, Roger Moore, Mutter Beimer, Horst Buchholz, Peter Ustinov, Bono and Kris Kristofferson. I have made it.

APRIL 1993: I move in with my best friend in Cologne – I am an assistant director at the theatre, we live off horrendously little money and are happy.

APRIL 1993: I train successfully as a state registered nursery nurse. It was hard being a single mother with a school age daughter: In my old job everyone had to work nightshifts and I couldn’t find anyone to look after my daughter at those times.

JUNE 1993: Why am I me? Why am I not that beetle, that bird, that person over there? The question doesn’t strike me as anything other than normal, no more profound «why is that man funny-looking» or «what’s for lunch.» I ask my mother, because adults seem to know these things. She cannot answer. To this day, neither can I.

JUNE 1993: We move from Baden to Wallis. For my parents it is a return home. They think that it is the same for us children.

JULY 1993: My sons both leave home at the same time – the elder one emigrates, the younger one starts an apprenticeship in another part of the country. Shortly afterwards my mum dies of cancer.

AUGUST 1993: Nik, who has hardly been born, takes his last breath in my arms.

NOVEMBER 1993: In Jorgos Canacakis’s grief seminar, I realise: My grief is real and so am I.