Year of 2022
It isn’t long ago. Just four years. Yet in a human life, four years can contain an entirely different life, an entirely different self. It was the year the word lung nodules entered my awareness without introducing itself, without explaining, without apologizing. It was the year I first began to live side by side with the realization that everything can actually end—without warning, without dramaturgy, without reconciliation.
I remember the visit to the heart and lung clinic. I remember the waiting room. Not as a physical place, but as a state of being. A room where time didn’t move forward but stood still, where every breath became something you noticed, weighed, analyzed. I sat there thinking that this must be death’s waiting room. Not because anyone said so, but because everything around me carried the same heavy silence. Eyes avoiding each other. People who already knew too much or who knew nothing at all yet.
I heard stories. Cancer stories. Young, old. Those already fighting. Those who had lost. Those holding it together. Those who no longer could. In that room we were all the same. Titles, backgrounds, life experience meant nothing. We were simply bodies waiting for news.
When I was finally called in, I met the doctor. A female doctor of Polish origin. Matter-of-fact. Direct. Perhaps tired—or simply accustomed to standing on the border between life and death. She greeted me. I sat down. She looked at me and said:
“Do you know why you’re here?”
I answered honestly. Raw. Unfiltered.
“What the hell am I doing here?”
“Don’t you know?” she replied.
And then she began to explain. Lung nodules. Consolidations. Follow-up. Risk. Observation. Possibilities. Uncertainty.
That was where everything began. Or ended. I still don’t know which.
The year that followed, I lived in a strange in-between. Not sick. Not healthy. Not dying. Not safe. A year of check-ups, waiting, new appointments, new images, new formulations. A year where every phone call could be the beginning of the end—or just another “we’ll wait and see.”
I did what I’ve always done. Brushed it off. Played unaffected. Put on my armor. Told myself that nothing could harm me. That I’d seen worse. Lived through worse. Survived worse. But deep down I knew this was different. For the first time, it wasn’t about projects, money, relationships, or life choices. It was about existence.
And it was there and then that I came to accept death as something that actually arrives when you least expect it—sometimes before you’ve even understood what’s happening. Not as a threat. Not as a punishment. But as a fact. Something that doesn’t politely knock on the door and introduce itself, but can step in at any moment.
The acceptance didn’t come as a dramatic revelation. It came quietly. Almost mundanely. Like realizing you can’t stop the rain—only dress for it. Death was no longer something that might happen in the future, something abstract that happens to others. It was a companion in the room. Silent. Present. Neutral.
Paradoxically, that’s when life began to feel clearer.
When you accept that the end cannot be scheduled, many other things lose their power. The fear of failure fades. Prestige loosens its grip. Urgency changes character—not stress, but direction. I began to distinguish between what truly matters and what merely makes noise.
It took a year before I was discharged from the heart and lung clinic. A year before someone said, “We’re no longer following this.” No promises. No guarantees. Just an ending. As if a chapter closed without anyone really knowing how the story would continue.
You think the relief will be total. That you’ll celebrate. Rejoice. But it wasn’t like that. Instead, something else arrived. A quiet unease. A whisper in the back of the mind. A reminder that the future isn’t guaranteed. That the body isn’t a self-evident ally. That time isn’t something you own.
Some days the future still feels uncertain. Not dark. Not hopeless. Just unclear. Like fog. And perhaps that is what changed me most—not the fear of death, but the awareness of it.
I’m not the type who gives up. Never have been. I rarely yield. And when I fall, I fall forward. But something in me began to long for elsewhere. Not to escape. But to choose.
After deciding to step back, to leave the life I’d lived for decades, I chose to move. Bulgaria. A country that to many seems peripheral, insecure, different. And yes—the healthcare here may not be what you wish for when compared to Sweden. It’s uneven. Bureaucratic. Sometimes inadequate. Sometimes excellent. Much like life itself.
But there is something else here. Something that can’t be measured in care guarantees or medical records. There is space. Mountains. Air. Perspective. Places where humans are still small in relation to nature. Where you have to listen to your body. To the weather. To silence.
I’ve thought a lot about death since then. Not as a threat. But as a reminder. And I’ve arrived at a thought that even surprises me:
I would rather collapse on a mountain summit here than alone behind a closed door where no one knocks. Where no one asks. Where the systems work but relationships are silent.
This is not contempt. It is sorrow. For a society where efficiency has sometimes replaced humanity. Where safety has become administration. Where loneliness can exist amid perfect structures.
Here, nothing is perfect. But people see you. Talk to you. Ask how you are. Not because they have to—but because they want to.
The year of lung nodules taught me something fundamental:
Life doesn’t become more valuable by prolonging it at any cost. It becomes valuable through how it is lived.
I still don’t know what the future holds. No one does. But I know that I am alive now. With open eyes. With respect for my body. With a new kind of presence.
And with a decision that stands firm:
If death one day comes, it will not find me in a waiting room.
It will find me alive.
By Chris...
