Bibian Mentel, a Dutch Paralympic champion snowboarder who repeatedly beat cancer while the eminent figure of her sport, shared an update through her foundation on March 5.
The cancer returned, this time in her brain, and no treatment was possible. Doctors advised her to say goodbye to her loved ones.
“I still like to take every day as a beautiful moment,” Mentel, 48, said at the beginning of a national television interview last week, according to a translation. “That sounds cliché, but we’ve had — in the past two weeks — a lot of time to speak about everything with family and friends, and eventually you reach a point where you wonder, ‘Are there still things that need to be said?