One Hundred Days

As he waited for the light to turn green, he repeated the words the doctor had said just moments earlier:

“You have three months left to live.”

The sentence hung in the air. Just as when he had first heard it, those words meant very little to him now. When the light turned green, he drove on.

Traffic, people rushing about, stray animals...

“Everything is just as it should be,” he thought.

He remembered the doctor's words again. But this time he repeated them differently:

“Your life... three months left.”

He took a deep breath. What he had said still seemed meaningless. Although he had only a short distance to travel, traffic was heavy because it was rush hour. The ache in his lower back from sitting in the same position for so long made matters even more unbearable. A horn from the car behind startled him. His nerves were stretched to breaking point. Spitting as he shouted, he erupted:

“Damn this traffic! God damn you! I'm sick of the same old thing every single day!”

That wasn't enough to release his anger. This time, he pounded the steering wheel.

As traffic began to move, he spotted a parking space on the right side of the road. He immediately steered towards it. After parking, he closed his eyes and leaned his head against the seat.

“So I've only got three little months left to live?”

The moment he said it, it was as though lightning flashed before his eyes. His throat tightened and breathing became difficult. His nose began to sting; words rose to the tip of his tongue, but all he could do was swallow.

He repeated:

“My life... three months... left...”

His heart was pounding so wildly it seemed too big for his chest. He looked at himself in the rear-view mirror. Beads of sweat covered his forehead, and terror filled his eyes. Unable to bear it any longer, he looked himself straight in the eyes in the mirror and spoke the painful truth: “I'm dying.”

He punched the steering wheel.

“I...” he said. “Three months isn't enough for me.”

He banged his head against the headrest.

“My daughter has her university entrance exam in four months. We've got a holiday booked in five months. I promised my wife we'd take a cooking class together. And then there are her retirement plans. We were going to get our daughter married and travel the world. I've been working for as long as I can remember; we were finally going to enjoy ourselves...”

He looked helplessly from side to side and shook his head.

“No! No way, I absolutely can't go... Where has all this business of leaving come from anyway? It's just a simple illness that's spread everywhere. What's the big deal? I'll rest and it'll pass... Will it, though? And there was that camping trip, too; we were going with Ahmet and the others. We were going to leave the wives at home and drink until we were blind drunk... No! Absolutely not. It's far too soon. I can't go. I've got so much to do. How much time did I have left again? Three months...”

He turned the ignition. The moment the engine started, he pressed the radio button. He turned the first song that came on up as loud as it would go. After straightening his hair and beard in the mirror, he set off.

He decided not to think about his illness. This time, he would ignore what he had heard. He sang along to every song on the radio all the way home.

He stopped at the pastry shop on the corner. He chose the biggest, most elaborate cake on the shelf, then headed home.

The moment he entered the apartment building, he smelled fried fish. As he breathed in the aroma filling the entire stairwell, he realised how hungry he was.

“Oh, man, please let that be coming from our place.”

The higher he climbed towards his floor, the stronger the smell became. He rang the bell eagerly. As soon as his wife opened the door, he realised that the delicious smell drifting through the building was coming from their own home, and he was overjoyed.

Suddenly, his nose began to sting. His throat tightened, and the instant he realised his eyes were filling with tears, he rushed into the bathroom. He broke down crying. And he cried so hard that he was overcome by sobs. He locked the door so his wife wouldn't hear. He tried covering his mouth with his hand, but it was no use. He turned the bathtub tap on full.

A pan of fried fish had turned his entire state of mind upside down.

After crying for a while, he washed his face and pulled himself together. During dinner, he chatted and tried to make jokes now and then so no one would notice anything was wrong.

While his wife excitedly recounted what she had done that day, their daughter kept nudging her mother, waiting for her turn to speak. She was waiting for dinner to end so she could show her father what she had learned in her art class.

They spent the entire evening talking. As they ate some of the cake with their tea, he paused.

“I've never eaten cake this delicious before.”

His daughter immediately chimed in:

“Dad, you never eat cake!”

“I've been such a fool, sweetheart.”

“That's okay, Daddy. You can eat it from now on.”

His wife sat on the opposite sofa, watching her husband. She had noticed the change in him, but she was hesitant to ask. That night, when they went to bed, no matter how much she pressed him, she couldn't find out what was wrong.

After everyone had fallen asleep, Ayhan got up. He lit a cigarette and stepped onto the balcony. In the silence of the night, drawing the smoke deep into his lungs, he watched the cars on the street. The thought, “Months from now, you'll all be carrying on with your lives, and I'll be gone,” upset him.

His work came to mind. Invoices to issue, cheques to pay, payments to collect... There were still so many tax returns to file. Who would do all that now? How would the business, for which he had sacrificed everything else, be managed without him?

His life passed before his eyes. He had always devoted himself to his work. A holiday? I have work. A shopping trip? I have work. His daughter's school graduation, his wife's medical tests, the days when someone was ill... Work had always come first.

Regret, anger, disappointment—all his emotions were tangled together. What troubled him most were all the things he had left unfinished.

* * *

The next morning, he woke to the alarm on his phone. Without getting out of bed, he reached for the phone on the bedside table and silenced it. He was just about to get up when he changed his mind, lay back on his back, and stared at the ceiling.

“If I've only got such a short time left, then from now on I'm going to live however I want.”

He didn't go to work that day. Or the next...

On the third day, his boss called. After staring at the phone for a long time, he put it on silent.

He now spent his time with his family, doing, one by one, all the things he had wanted to do but never had.

Whenever his wife and daughter asked, he would say, “I'm very tired. I'm just getting some rest.”

The first thing he did was sign up for a cooking class with his wife. Every day they tried all sorts of recipes together; he ate everything they made to his heart's content, without worrying that his blood sugar might rise. They had so much fun on their first day of class that the whole household talked about Ayhan's clumsiness until bedtime. Making fun of himself, Ayhan told his wife, “I bet all the students are telling their families about me and laughing right now.”

The following day, he painted a landscape with his daughter. They pushed all the living-room furniture into one corner and turned the room into a little studio. Although they made a mess of everything by the end of the day, his wife, Sinem, didn't get angry with them because she could see how much fun they had had.

He went to an amusement park for the first time. He rode the motorcycle he had always dreamed of riding. He even got a pedicure with his wife. In the final stretch of his life, he was gathering so many memories. In his own way, he was savouring every day to the fullest. For the first time, he felt truly alive.

“If only,” he thought, “I hadn't missed out on so much of life.”

He was now doing so many things he had never done before. This new way of living did him so much good that each time he would say, “So there were all these beautiful things in the world after all.”

While he went about thinking he was dying, the days followed one another, and before he knew it, weeks had turned into months. There were times when he thought about death, but he quickly distracted himself with other things.

A hundred days had passed since he had received the terrible news.

He had secretly taken care of all the official paperwork. During those hundred days, he had been happier than ever before. For the first time, he had truly tasted what the world had to offer.

One morning, he looked at the calendar. The time the doctor had given him had long since run out, yet he was still alive, still opening his eyes each morning.

One day...

His phone rang. It was his doctor. He stared at the screen for a while before answering. After pressing the answer button, he took a deep breath.

“Hello.”

“Mr Ayhan, is that you?”

“Yes, speaking. Go ahead.”

“As you know, three months ago we gave you a diagnosis and told you that you had...”

“Anyway, Doctor, please get to the point. We know that part.”

“While reviewing your test results from three months ago, we noticed a mix-up in the laboratory records. A result that did not belong to you had been entered into your file.”

“What do you mean? I'm not dying?”

“No, you're not dying. You're perfectly healthy.”

“So I didn't have only three months to live?”

“No. According to these results, you're very healthy.”

Ayhan's lips trembled.

“So... I'm not dying?”

“You're not dying.”

He closed his eyes. He took a deep breath.

The call ended.

For a while, Ayhan stared at the screen in his hand. Ahead of him lay a lifetime whose length he could not know. As tears streamed down his face, he made promises to himself.

This time, he would not put off living.

A note to the reader: That phone call may never come... Don't put off living!

Özlem Akgül Altuntaş

3 October 2026