"Far or close to me, I am still in love with you, pretty little thing," wrote Bruno Setti on Orkut, Google’s social networking site, in a touching farewell to Ana Carolina, 21, the Brazilian fashion model who died this Tuesday, November 14, from anorexia.
Hundreds of people on Orkut have been leaving messages for Bruno and commenting on the passing of the young beauty who wouldn’t eat.
The site has also messages exchanged between the two of them like this one in which Carolina asks the boyfriend not to worry: "I don’t want you to worry about anything because what I told you today was just a doubt in my head. I’m afraid of suffocating you."
Ana Carolina Reston Macan had been taken to a hospital on October 25 with a kidney malfunction. Her medical profile, however, soon deteriorated to generalized infection and doctors weren’t able to save her.
The model, who was 5.7 feet (1.74 meters), weighed a mere 88 lbs (40 kg). She has been buried at the Pirapora do Bom Jesus cemetery in the Greater São Paulo.
The green-eyed Ana Carolina was discovered by a Ford agency modelling scout in a shopping mall in Jundiaí, a small town in the interior of São Paulo. She was only 13.
After working for Ford she also was hired by Elite and L’Equipe. She used to say that her dream was to become a naval engineer and that she was modelling just to help her mother with the house’s expenses.
Míriam Reston, the mother. visibly shocked with the loss of the daughter, told reporters that she and her family had insisted with the daughter to eat and look for treatment for her disease: "She would tell me: ‘Mom, don’t get mad, I don’t want to eat, the food doesn’t go down.’ To avoid fights, I would just keep quiet."
Miriam, a jewel artisan, is not keeping quiet now. She made an appeal to all parents to pay attention to the eating habits of their children: "Take care of your children, keep your eyes open so you will not lose them as I lost Ana. I hope her death will serve as example to many girls who do not ask for help and do not want to recognize that they are sick"
The mother says that the family tried to avoid what ended up in tragedy. She revealed that she would have loved to accompany her daughter in her overseas trips, but didn’t have the money for that.
Mirtes Reston, Ana Carolina’s aunt told that the model’s agents were also very worried about her. But she wouldn’t listen to anyone, responding to any admonition with a "Look, I still have a little belly."
The family, in the last few months, had asked her to accept the help of doctors and psychologists. But as her cousin Geise Reston Strauss stated she wouldn’t accept the fact that she had a problem or a disease.
And she added "Ana Carolina had a dream and she lived it, but because of this she wasn’t able to fulfill other dreams like to marry and have children, something she also dreamed of."
Ana Carolina’s and her parents’s lives haven’t been glamorous at all. Her father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s recently and her mother became a street vendor after robbers stole 4 kg of gold from inside her house. And Ana Carolina herself had been working at night promoting and distributing leaflets for a nightclub to make some extra cash.
According to friends, in a recent trip to Mexico, the model was abandoned by her agency and didn’t have money even to buy her plane ticket back home. Lately she was working for L’Equipe. After shooting a catalogue for Giorgio Armani she was sent back to Brazil with the warning: the girl is too skinny.
