A Near-Death Experience from the Other Side

No tunnel, no light

I have never had a classic near-death experience.

My heart never stopped. I saw no tunnel, no light and I never went anywhere I could later say I had returned from.

And yet, I recognise something in what people often describe after such an experience.

Not so much in what they saw.

More in what changes afterwards.

Death is no longer simply something that will happen one day. Time carries a different weight. People do too. Things that once seemed important can lose their meaning while something completely ordinary suddenly becomes precious.

Only for me, it didn’t happen in a straight line.

In 2021, at the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek hospital, I was told that my prostate cancer was incurable. For a while, I began looking at my future differently. I wondered whether I would make it to Christmas. Then to my birthday. Then another Christmas.

But I kept living.

And somewhere along the way, something happened that sounds almost strange in hindsight.

I started living as though I had been cured.

Death disappeared from my everyday thoughts. I made plans, worked and stopped constantly wondering how much time I had left.

Until November 2025.

Then death came back.

Not as something a doctor told me or as a prognosis written on paper.

My body was seriously ill.

And for the first time, dying was no longer simply something I had once been told might happen.

It was something I could actually feel coming closer.

Perhaps that was where my real near-death experience from the other side began.

Not because I briefly crossed some boundary and came back.

The boundary came to me.

And I remained on this side of it.

What happens when death is no longer abstract?

At first, it frightened me.

But when something stays close, you cannot keep looking away forever.

So I began to look.

What was I actually afraid of?

Pain? Goodbye? Disappearing? The unknown?

The distance people normally keep between themselves and their own mortality was gone.

Slowly, something changed.

The fear did not disappear but it lost its monopoly.

There was even curiosity.

That almost unsettled me more than the fear.

Because as long as death is terrifying, the choice seems simple.

You choose life because you do not want to die.

But once death becomes less frightening, a far more difficult question remains.

Why do I actually want to live?

There were nights when I hoped my heart would simply stop.

Not as a decision.

Precisely because I did not want to make one.

I saw what my situation was doing to my daughter. Her care, her fear, her panic. I could not simply leave her while there were also moments when I was so exhausted that another day felt mainly like one more day that had to be carried.

If my heart stopped by itself, I sometimes thought, then I would not have to choose.

That is why I have never recognised myself in the familiar image of cancer as a battle.

I did not fight.

I balanced.

Sometimes there was enough weight on the side of life.

My daughter. Work. A conversation. Music. A thought that was not finished yet.

Sometimes wanting to see tomorrow was enough.

Not the rest of my life.

Tomorrow.

Coming back without coming back

In a classic near-death experience, there is usually a clear moment of return.

I never had that moment.

I underwent intensive treatment in Turkey and my body responded remarkably well. The disease activity dropped rapidly. My strength returned. Colour came back into my face and my hair began to grow again.

I went outside again.

I worked again.

I laughed again.

From the outside, it looked like recovery.

Inside, I was lagging behind.

My body seemed to be returning to life while something in me was still dealing with the possibility of dying.

I had not expected that difference.

I thought that once my body improved, everything else would simply follow.

It didn’t.

Suddenly, I had to learn how to live inside a reality in which I was staying.

I had never prepared for that.

Perhaps that was my return.

Not a moment when I opened my eyes.

But the strange task that remained afterwards.

You are still here.

Now what?

Owing something to life

Something appeared that I had never expected.

A kind of debt to life.

I had been given time that, only shortly before, I genuinely believed I might never have.

Surely I had to do something with it.

Something significant, perhaps.

Something that justified the fact that I was still here.

On bad days, that thought could even turn itself around.

Should I really have stayed?

Was this somehow a mistake?

It took time before I began to understand that an extra day is not an invoice.

I did not have to pay it back.

I did not have to be grateful immediately.

I did not have to make every day extraordinary.

I did not have to turn survival into another obligation.

I simply had to learn how to exist again.

Becoming an inhabitant of my own body again

My body was part of that too.

It no longer automatically felt like mine.

That affected me more deeply than I could have imagined beforehand.

Not only physically.

It changed the way I saw myself.

My masculinity was part of that.

I do not mean toughness, muscle or the kind of masculinity that constantly needs to prove itself.

I mean something simpler.

Feeling like a man.

Feeling energy. Desire. Attraction.

No longer constantly seeing yourself as someone who has been ill.

Becoming an inhabitant of your own body again.

For a while, I had lost that.

Then, during a period when I could barely see much of a future for myself, someone said something to me.

She told me how she saw me.

Behind a DJ booth. Music around me. People enjoying themselves.

She could picture the whole thing.

Private Party by Paul Hager.

I laughed.

I am certainly no professional DJ. Amateur would be much closer to the truth.

But her comment did far more to me than I expected.

She was not talking about my illness.

Not about recovery.

Not about everything I had been through.

Apparently, she simply saw a man with energy.

Someone she could imagine playing music, bringing people together and standing right there in the middle of life himself.

At a moment when I could barely see that man anymore, someone else handed the image back to me.

It felt almost like a small act of resuscitation.

Not of my heart.

Of me.

People who believe in you

Perhaps that is also why I started looking at people differently.

When you are ill, many people tell you they support you. They wish you strength and recovery. That is meaningful and often completely sincere.

But support and belief are no longer the same thing to me.

Some people mainly see what has happened to you.

Others continue to see something beyond it.

Not who you were.

Who you might still become.

Sometimes you need someone to see something in you before you can see it again yourself.

The people who have touched me most deeply are therefore not necessarily the ones who most often told me they were behind me.

They are the people who continued to believe in me.

Sometimes before I did.

Perhaps time was my tunnel

My near-death experience had no tunnel and no moment when I opened my eyes and knew I had returned.

Perhaps time itself was my tunnel.

A period in which death became less and less abstract and in which I eventually had to discover whether there was still enough on the side of life to make me stay.

And perhaps my return consisted of things far more ordinary.

Going outside again.

Working again.

Laughing again.

Desiring again.

Being seen by someone as the man you could no longer quite see yourself.

And slowly discovering that having a future means something more than simply not being dead yet.

The other side

For a while, my future became very small.

One more day.

Another morning.

Tomorrow.

Now the future means something else again.

I do not know who I will still meet.

I do not know what I will still fall in love with.

I do not know what I will still create, which nights will end far too late or which idea will suddenly take over my entire day tomorrow.

The unknown no longer feels like the black space beyond a date I may never reach.

It is simply the future again.

Open.

Love may appear that does not exist anywhere yet.

And there may simply come an evening when the music is far too loud, no one is looking at the time and I find myself behind a DJ booth discovering what happens when I begin giving it a shape of my own.

I rather like the sound of that.

For a while, death stood very close.

Now life is standing there again.

And if anyone ever asks me what that looks like, I have a fairly good picture by now.

Music.

People.

A summer evening.

And somewhere, on a sign,

Private Party by Paul Hager.

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Paul Hager – Noöhedron

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