Tiziano Terzani, born in Florence in 1938, was the Asia correspondent for the mirror. In photos on the Internet you can see him getting older. A tall, handsome man with a mustache and light-colored clothes, who has something of the adventurer about it, takes on the appearance of a sage over the years. Like out of a picture book, with a bushy gray beard and clever, warm eyes.
In 1997 he was diagnosed with cancer. He put himself in the hands of the best conventional medicine he could find and underwent chemotherapy in New York. This was the beginning of a journey. Because he threw on his reporter mode and went on an extensive research into possibilities for healing, which he tried out on his own body. In truth, perhaps he was less looking for answers than for the right questions. Either the many years in Asia had opened him up to the idea that there are more things between heaven and earth than our Western-trained minds think possible. Or it might have been the other way around, and his open mind had brought him to Asia in the first place.
Finally he retired to a small house somewhere in the Himalayas
Physically weakened by the chemotherapy, he was drawn back to this continent, where he tried out all sorts of methods and promises of salvation, from homeopathy to Reiki, from yoga to Ayurveda. Finally he retired to a small house somewhere in the Himalayas, watched the clouds, meditated. He died in Italy in 2004. But he died, if you can say so, a winner. The cancer had come back, and more violently than before, as doctors finally told him, again in New York. If he didn’t undergo another round of chemotherapy, he’d have a year at most. He decided against this therapy.
His posthumously published book Another Round on the Carousel contains the insights he gained on his journey against death, which became a journey with death. That even the most imbecile charlatanism cures can still do good. That you can’t understand everything. But above all: that it doesn’t have to be a drama to die.
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