Eva Waldvogel's terminal cancer

Eva Waldvogel's terminal cancer turns the Waldvogel home into the setting for a long, exhausting vigil and establishes Delphine as the person who stays beside her through treatment, decline, and death. The cancer resists surgery and successive radium procedures; the illness cannot be separated from the work of caring for Eva, from the emotional intimacy the two women develop, or from the losses the novel places around her death.

Diagnosis and Treatment

When Delphine returns from Doctor Heech’s house, Fidelis Waldvogel is away looking at livestock, and Eva has been given morphine in the backseat of the delivery car. Delphine carries medical orders identifying whom to seek and what might be attempted. Doctor Heech contacts a clinic and asks a surgeon to prepare for Eva, whose tumor is pressing on her vital organs and, he warns, will cause her death within days if it is not removed. Delphine takes the practical lead in seeking treatment at a moment when the illness has become an emergency.

Surgery is followed by radium treatment: hollow metal applicators containing radium are inserted into Eva’s uterus, removed, refilled, and inserted again during her hospital stay. Once she is home, the cancer continues to spread. Eva describes herself as smelling burned and asks Delphine to get lilac water; Delphine buys it to wash her, but the remedy cannot change the course of the illness. Eva’s worsening condition is not a single crisis but a succession of treatments and setbacks, with the burden of care returning to the home after hospital procedures.

Doctor Heech next administers monthly radium treatments using long gold needles tipped with iridium, inserted into the new tumor with forceps. Eva is given ether for the procedure and morphine afterward; the needles must remain in place for six hours. Delphine stays with her through that interval, reading, dozing, or knitting. Doctor Heech fears the treatments may be useless and leaves the room cursing under his breath. The repeated procedures thus coexist with the growing recognition that medicine has not stopped the disease.

Delphine’s Care and Witness

Delphine’s role is both practical and intimate. She arranges access to medical care, remains present during the long treatments, and tends Eva at home. When Eva becomes too weak to fend off the Lutheran women Tante has gathered to pray at her bedside, Delphine tries to keep them from crowding around her. Feeding the visitors cake becomes one way to send them back to the kitchen rather than let their prayers turn the sickroom into a gathering place Eva does not want.

The illness also affects Delphine physically and emotionally. As she watches Eva endure treatment, she experiences stomach pains and a bodily distress that seems to echo Eva’s suffering. She continues working and conceals her own pain. Her response is not framed as a cure or rescue: it is the strenuous labor of remaining present when she cannot make Eva well. Her irreverent curse, “Spit in your eye,” stands in place of a prayer she does not believe she can honestly offer.

The illness narrows time for both women. In the final period, days seem to melt together; Eva takes only small sips of water, grows extremely weak, and becomes unresponsive to what is around her. Morphine no longer changes the fundamental fact that her body is caught between living and dying. Yet the connection between the women persists through their gaze. Eva had taught Delphine to look directly into her eyes, and their locked attention becomes an intense, shared experience in which the ordinary world seems to fall away.

The Final Vigil and Death

Before her death, Eva asks Delphine to be the one to handle her body and to write to her mother, telling her that Delphine cared for her and that Eva loved her. The request gathers the practical and emotional strands of their bond: Eva entrusts Delphine with her body, her message to her family, and the acknowledgment of love between them.

On the night Eva dies, Delphine wakes to the sound of her striking the bed’s headboard. Delphine tries to hold her arms as Eva moves restlessly, appearing to run in place. Delphine is exhausted from nights of interrupted sleep, but she remains at the bedside and holds Eva’s hand. She later thinks she might have called Fidelis or the boys, but at the time her attention stays with Eva, who is afraid. When Eva’s breathing stops, Delphine does not move away or try to force it to resume; she remains looking into Eva’s face and witnesses the moment of death.

Eva’s death ends the immediate demands of treatment and caregiving but not the relationship’s presence in Delphine’s life. Delphine later sits by Eva’s grave and speaks to her, reflecting that she has continued running the household and business. She imagines the family’s burial plot with Eva between herself and Fidelis, and feels both closeness to the dead and the loneliness of her own childhood loss. The grave becomes a place where Eva’s absence touches Delphine’s enduring longing for her mother.

Family and the Wider Pattern of Loss

Eva’s illness unfolds within a family shaped by different forms of separation. During her decline, Markus and his brothers continue their daily routines, while the family dog stays near Eva’s door as if keeping watch. After Eva’s death, the surviving family must carry forward the life and work Delphine helped maintain. Eva’s request that Delphine care for the boys and consider marrying Fidelis belongs to that practical future, though the illness’s immediate focus remains the care of Eva herself.

The novel places private illness beside collective historical loss without equating them. In a story Roy tells Delphine, Minnie’s childhood survival of the Wounded Knee Massacre becomes a family history of violence and bereavement. The account of Minnie’s father being killed and Minnie escaping on foot gives historical depth to the grief that later generations inherit, while Delphine’s reflection at Eva’s grave connects her present mourning to the childhood loss of her own mother. The book also places the family’s later experience of wartime separation and captivity alongside these earlier wounds. In Erich’s prisoner-of-war camp, songs stir emotions and dreams, but he suppresses thoughts of his family and clings to an adopted German identity. These strands make loss a recurring pressure across generations, not a condition confined to Eva’s sickroom.

Significance

Eva’s terminal cancer is consequential not only because it ends in her death, but because the narrative gives the care around that death sustained weight. Medical intervention is described in specific stages, yet the decisive action increasingly belongs to Delphine: arranging help, staying through treatment, protecting Eva’s bedside from unwanted visitors, holding her hand, and carrying her last message. The illness reveals the depth of the women’s attachment through work and attention rather than through a simple declaration alone.

The story’s movement from urgent treatment to prolonged vigil also resists the expectation that every medical crisis will produce recovery. Doctor Heech’s efforts continue even as he doubts their effectiveness; Delphine’s care continues when there is no saving Eva. Afterward, grief does not disappear with the end of the illness. In Delphine’s return to Eva’s grave, the present loss opens onto an older one, making her caregiving both an act of love for Eva and an encounter with the loneliness she has carried since childhood.