I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 lately, and I’m bad at it. This isn’t relevant, except to say that I have often had to reload the game from a prior save point after I single handedly get the whole adventuring party into an impossible pickle. In the escapism of the game, I have let my mind escape reality even further and try to imagine having the ability to reload life from a prior save point.
This then led me down a rabbit hole of when? Not actually having true answers about the why of my sister’s death makes this hard.
The night before she died? Would it be possible to somehow bring her to a hospital and change the trajectory of her death, despite the fact she went to bed and was totally fine?
A few months before she died? Perhaps there was something about the medicine she was using that could have been adjusted? Maybe the dosage and frequency her doctor prescribed was responsible (though the autopsy did not make this conclusion) and a different option would yield a different result?
A year or more before she died? Maybe if I had not taken for granted that she was happy and fine, we could have talked more and I could have encouraged her to take on the fitness goals she put aside because she was tired from 12-hour work days. Would a couple more 30-minute workouts have had a butterfly effect on her heart, the most likely culprit for her otherwise mysterious death?
Would I go even further? Five years? Ten years? All the way back to the day she was born to replay the game and do it better this time? To love her more overtly and to not take for granted the time that seemed endless?
I drove myself crazy with this line of thinking until I had to put it to rest. You can’t load at a save point, because there aren’t any. This life thing is a one-time-only playthrough and there aren’t even tutorials.
But still…
Wouldn’t it be nice?
Unmoored Sister 