My father – my favourite Bulgarian – passed away a few months ago, standing. In this way, he gave his sons the last – and perhaps most important – example of his life, but that’s not what I want to speak about here. Bai Mitko Enev died while trying to climb the steps at the top of which an ambulance was waiting, promising salvation or at least hope against the noose of a heart attack, which, as you surely understand, had already fatally ensnared him. He didn’t manage to climb them, but before that he refused the help of the medics and neighbours who insisted on placing his heavy body onto a stretcher. I hope you’ll forgive my proud words, but I see in this a beautiful act of free will, a truly Bulgarian stubbornness, one that would rather show death the middle finger a hundred times over than bow its head before the inevitable. And perhaps somewhere in that lies the seed of what allows me to live in Germany without feeling uneasy every time I have to explain that I’m Bulgarian. “Be whoever you want to be, but keep doing it until the end” – something like that runs through my head when I think about my father’s death. That, and the hope that my children, even if they don’t speak Bulgarian, still carry within them something of their grandfather’s hard-headedness. And of his big-hearted soul, which always insisted on looking the other way when it came to life’s troubles. For his whole life.

On the other hand, my family is currently occupied with another, foreseen death. My wife’s grandfather – dry and tough as a piece of dried fish, a German from the Baltic edges of Germany – lies on his deathbed, surrounded by the care and attention of relatives filled with love and respect. May his bed be light, good Erwin has earned everything he receives. He’s been through all the circles of war’s hell – on the Eastern Front, no less – then through the command-ridden times of German socialism, he raised four children, and until just a few months ago was still downing half a schnapps a week, washing it down with a beer or two. I say this only to clarify that I respect this man deeply – people like him, tough and time-resistant as beech planks, are the reason Germany and its people have become a myth for Bulgarians (well, mostly for those who don’t know them well – but we’ve already spoken about that).

I repeat – I have great respect for Grandpa Erwin. I say it, and I hurry to add that something inside me resists and cannot accept without reserve the way in which he is dying. I wonder whether these words hide nothing more than the arrogance of youth, even if I no longer count myself as particularly young. I don’t know, of course, but still I find this death somehow too reasonable and impartial, too German – let me spit the stone out. My long immersion in philosophical texts has taught me to understand that the acceptance of death may be one of the core achievements of our civilisation – but my atavistic Bulgarian instincts rebel against this foreign wisdom and make me shudder every time I try to imagine the reality of such a slow goodbye. To lie endlessly on a special mattress, paid for through an expensive insurance policy, to feel the last sparks of life draining from your body along with the warm trickle between your legs, to feel fear slowly but surely turning you from a person into an animal... brrr, may God spare me the wisdom of such acceptance!

“The horror, the horror,” whisper the whitened lips of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now – and that’s the only image that flickers before my eyes when I think of death in its civilised version.

 Sozopol, 2003