Death certificate

Last night I was at work, quietly staring at a computer screen while gobbling up coffee - not so different from home after all - when a nurse came to my office because she had found one of the patients dead.

It was an expected death, actually this woman born in 1952 had a breast cancer with metastasis, was in terminal phase and had been expected to pass away much earlier, but she seemed to have fought until the very end.

I entered her room.
I had seen her before in this hospital, a few weeks ago. As I only take night shifts once in a while in this unit I don't know all the patients so well, but I remember I had seen her at least once before. She was then requesting some more medicine, to calm her anxiety.

Now she was pale, her mouth opened, her eyes half closed. Her face and her skinny body seemed edematized, maybe because she had been given high doses of cortisone for a long time. The nurses were already wrapping her in her bed sheets, wedging up her head on her pillow so that she would look like she was sleeping when her family would come in.

I looked at her for a while. She wasn't my first "death", far from it. But the tortured appearance of her body, contrasting with the calm and relaxed expression of her face, the oedema hiding her wrinkles, while she might have suffered until a few days ago when she had finally lost consciousness, made me wonder how her life could have been like until she was diagnosed this cancer.

If she knew she would be diagnosed at 48 years old, and pass away at 57... What would her life have been like ?

Would she have lead a carefree or frivolous life, to seize the days until her time would come ?

Would she have struggled to become someone people would remember, thus leave a track in this world she would have to leave prematurely ?

Would she have fallen into depression, because she didn't want to be sick, fear, suffer and die so young ?

I thought, what is the point of worrying or fighting with people we should love or leave, for futile matters ?

What is the point of escaping from real life, entrusting ourselves into machines which we become slaves of... And forgetting we're not cyber creatures ?

Why are we such people ?

...When real life might call us back anytime, telling us the end is much closer than we thought, bringing us back to the sad reality of our condition.


I want more music, I want more laughs, I want more memories.

Memento Mori. Remember you shall die.