This is probably my favorite short story I’ve done so far. I hope you enjoy it.

A Lasting Decision

I never thought about my death much. What it would be like, would my life flash before my eyes, etc. I’d only passively despaired that everyone might be better off without me. That was before the crash.

I remember seeing the hospital walls between patches of mottled color and unconsciousness. It was so bright, so sterile looking. Voices spoke to me in choppy, incomprehensible bursts. The pain was terrible; even the morphine drip couldn’t get rid of all of it. My head pounded with it; my body rang with it; the sweat poured from my skin by the gallons.

I remember saying, “Just wipe it off. Just wipe the sweat.” The choppy voices would respond, and soon someone would press cloths to my face. I could see the discarded cloths, but I couldn’t figure out why they were red. Sweat wasn’t red.

Blood was red.

I suppose in these last minutes I should have been thinking of Lila, my daughter. All I could think of, when thought didn’t evade me, was of escaping. I wanted it to be over. Happiness would come when it was over.

Death came little by little. I began to feel less attached to my body. The pain was further away and that much worse when I became reattached. When it was time, it came as a question in my mind, or what my bodiless self thought of as my mind. Perhaps it was the ghost of my mind. The question was this, “Should we go?”

“Oh, yes. Please yes,” I said.

The attachment ended then. I could see the hospital walls clearly. I could see the huddle of people in lab coats and scrubs working on me. I could hear that famous flat line that signaled my heart failure, but none of it seemed important. None of it was real anymore.

“We can stay, you know.”

I was pain free, and nearby, complete happiness awaited me. “Why?”

“Lila.”

I feel guilty for admitting that my first thoughts of Lila were after my death. Only then did I wonder if my eight-year old daughter was going to live. She had been in the car too. How bad was she?

“Is she here? Is she like me?”

I don’t know how this other voice of mine knew what I consciously didn’t, but it did. “She is alive,” it (I) said. “She has already decided to stay.”

The old thought came back to me. “She’ll likely be better off without me. She will be happy, won’t she?”

“Yes, would you like to see?”

“I would.”

The hospital room faded, the bright lights morphing into the natural light of the sun through tall paned windows. I saw my husband at an altar, another woman, veiled and dressed in white beside him. It was strange, but I wasn’t upset. His face was serene; I couldn’t begrudge him that.

Lila was seated on the front row of a small audience. She looked on without decipherable emotion, but I could feel her uncertainty.

The scene changed, forwarding over Lila’s stages of warmth with her new family and stages that felt very cold. Some she would laugh, others she would drown her pillow with tears. I could hear her calling out to me. Ever present in her mind was the question, “Why?”

Lila blossomed into a woman. She was beautiful to my proud eyes. She married a handsome man and birthed three children. Inside she brimmed with happiness, but the question didn’t fade. Some nights, it even grew stronger. “Why?”

“How will it be if I go back?” I asked.

The scene changed again. I was in my home staring as two bandaged bodies laughed at a television, then cried from the pain of laughing. My own bleary eyes stared out from a set of bandages, Lila’s from the other.

She grew into a teenager. We argued, shouts penetrating the walls of our house. She stormed out, slamming her bedroom door. Lila cried herself to sleep in her room, and in another so did I.

I saw her leave for college, and call home twice a week to hear my voice. I heard her ask for my advice; vent her frustrations with friends, boys, and school; and I heard her end each call with “I love you, mom.”

She married again, had three children again. She was happy again. I saw myself die again, but something had changed. She didn’t ask “Why?.” She felt peace for herself and peace for me. This time she understood.

“I could be happy right now.”

“To go back would be painful,” It (I) agreed.

The hospital room was back before I knew I’d made the decision. The huddle had spread. No one was working on my motionless form. My dead eyes were staring at me. That face, that body didn’t look like me anymore. But I was going back. I floated into the eyes, settling myself back where I thought I should fit.

“Don’t you want to know why Lila stayed?”

“Do I?” I wondered. “She was scared? Maybe she got lost?”

“No one gets scared here. No one gets lost.”

“What was it then?” My body began to grab hold of the part of me that had escaped. The pain was returning worse than before.

“She knew how sad we would be without her.”

The “Why” made more sense. I had supposed it was a young girl’s natural response to the death of a parent. What I hadn’t realized was that it was really a questioning of betrayal. Why had I moved on without her, when she had stayed for me?

My other voice vanished, replaced by choppy exclamations of shock as my lungs inflated with a fresh breath. The agony was explosive, ripping through my nerves like fire. I didn’t wish to escape this time. Not everyone would be better off without me.