A Series of Unfunny Jokes

If you're familiar with Anamnesis, you probably won't be surprised to learn that death and finality are probably the two things I fear the most. The game revolves around renascents and cycles so that nothing feels like it's going to be the last time it can possibly ever happen. No matter how unlikely, the chance is still there, and that alone is enough to give me the comfort I need to truly relax and enjoy myself when I'm looking for some escapism.

57 days ago my mother walked into the hospital on her own in the highest of spirits to get this long delayed one-and-a-half hour long minor surgery out of the way after enduring months of mild pain in a waiting list, and 53 days of continuous hospitalization and 6 major surgeries later she died a slow, ignominious and agonizing death.

Over the weeks she progressively lost her ability to stand up on her own, several kilograms of vital organs, her voice, her dignity, her hopes to ever see her grandchildren again and her will to fight and live, although the latter only happened when the woman that had never rated a pain over 4 in a 1 to 10 scale had already spent 4 days with a clear 10. The exact details of what this agony entailed will remain unsaid.

At first like everyone else I was naively happy to get to see her after so long, since the hospital was in the same city in which I live now. By the third surgery I was slightly annoyed that I had to eat the entire kilo of quesada I got her as a gift because she wasn't allowed to eat a single day during her stay and the expiry date was drawing close. Also because all of my year's paid days off so far had already been spent accompanying her in the hospital barely getting any sleep or anything of value done.

It was by the fifth surgery that I had to start finding excuses to get some time to cry alone, and by the sixth I was already fearing every ringtone and notification sound from my phone and very glad to have used as many days off as possible with my mother while she was still alive.

All this happened 7 days after the first anniversary of my moving out of the family home, which is incidentally days before the first anniversary of my bunny's death.

I spent the night before the burial in my old room at the family home, the last place to which my increasingly crippled bunny was able drag himself into with no small effort, perhaps expecting to find me there as he usually did but instead finding an empty chair next to which he lied and waited one last time.

Now I was the one probably lying in there one last time not fully being able to remove the silly hope that perhaps the whole last year had been some sort of bad dream and I'd be waking up to see everything back the way it was, walk up to my mother's room, say good morning, and feed my bunny already eagerly standing on two legs as soon as he heard me come out of my room the half cracker he had gotten used to get every morning before I left for work.

All this magical thinking, no matter how embarrassing for an adult to have, seemed to have no effect though. Mom's bed was still empty besides some rather unaffected-looking, cheerfully smiling stuffed toys, and only a laundry basket stood where my bunny used to. At least the basket's mood seemed more neutral.

And even these formerly mutually shared memories along with all the others we had together have already decayed and become irreversibly destroyed in the remnants of the only two living beings with which I interacted in any meaningful way on a daily basis during the past decade, so none of this can ever possibly happen again.

And this is very discomforting and I don't like it.