I Didn’t Want to but I Had to Answer this One

Daily writing prompt

If you could relive one day from your past, which day would it be and why?

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I don’t really want to answer this question but if I do, maybe it will quit haunting me.

The last time I saw my daughter alive, I was standing in the doorway of her hospital room, itching to leave because my husband and I were late for a meeting. We’d been ‘visiting’ if you want to call it that for a couple of hours, her four-year-old daughter Paulina, our granddaughter, sitting on the wide windowsill watching videos on her mom’s phone and my husband, daughter, and I watching a seemingly endless game show that involved guessing numbers and either winning big or jumping off a cliff in desperation.

Every so often, my daughter would see an imaginary speck of dirt on her bed, pick it up with two fingers and flick it on to the floor. We knew she was having a procedure done later in the afternoon, a last-ditch effort to unstick a heart valve that was causing so much trouble. It was an intravenous thing, not a surgical thing so we felt okay leaving, even though she expressed surprised that we weren’t coming back to, what? to sit in her room waiting for her, I guess. We were exhausted with everything – the room, the condition, the time, the future, things that happened decades ago floating around the room like vaper from an unplugged oxygen machine.

Thirty days of visits to the hospital had made me crazy. Crazy with wanting fresh air, crazy with wanting to be driving somewhere, crazy to be free of the game show and the flicking of imaginary specks of dirt. So, I beckoned to my granddaughter who was by then sitting on her mother’s bed. “It’s time to go. If we go now, we can go to the playground.” It was the bribe that always worked. She loved the playground more than anything.

It was then my daughter started stroking Paulina’s hair. We’ll never get out of here, I thought. I heaved a big sigh. “Time to go, honey.” We’d be back the next day, probably to spend the entire night before my daughter’s open-heart surgery. “We really have to go.” I might have been tapping my foot, I felt like I was tapping, drumming my fingers, jumping out of my skin, that’s how bad I wanted to leave the room, close the door behind me, walk down the endless hospital corridor to the outside world, hold Paulina’s hand and go to the playground where there was air and sunshine and families eating McDonald’s.

And that was when my daughter looked me square in the eye and said, “You better go, Paulina. Grandma’s getting impatient.”

Those were our last words to each other. Our daughter never woke up after the procedure to unstick the valve and passed away the next day during open heart surgery. So yeah, if I had a day to relive, that one would be a prime candidate.