#9: Redo

If you could visit anyone on the planet right now, who would it be?

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“Can I rephrase that?” I’d say, standing in the doorway of 1994 by my grandfather’s hospital bed— but this time as an adult, in an adult body, and with a more fully developed adult mind and understanding of the situation and its repercussions.

I would go stand beside my younger self and beside that hospital bed where my grandfather lay, broken but peaceful, a mixture of chemicals keeping him sedate. With one hand on my younger self’s shoulder, I would stroke my grandfather’s cheek. I would tell him I love him—and mean it—and of the moments I wish I could remember and the home videos I wish I could make real—and not just fiction—in my mind again.

I would tell him that Grandma is still here with as much life as ever, though she is slowing down, and there seems to be a bit of sadness and quietness in her eyes now. She’s going blind and she fell down a couple weeks ago, but she’s okay. 

She still keeps his photo by her bedside.

Then I would sing to him. I hope he can hear me—the nurses said he could hear me.

In real life, I am not there. But years of loss and grief, I hope, have shaped the way I approach such pain and sadness. I wish I could take that moment just one more time.

My mother once told me that, as that timid and uncertain little girl, I had reached out and held my grandfather's hand. "When you took his hand, he tried to open his eyes," my mother told me. "He wanted to open his eyes so badly."

I remember nothing.

I yearn for a redo—I yearn to love more fully and with more intention. And I hope my grandfather, in his heavenly home, heard me rephrase that.