Immortality Ain't What It's Cracked Up to Be

​Here’s the thing about immortality: you need specificity. Say you encounter a genie (as one does these days) and you wish to be immortal. Okay, but what does that mean? Does it mean you grow older and older but can’t die? Do you wish for eternal youth so you see everyone around you die and, when the planet is consumed by the heat death of the sun, you watch reality melt around you? What does immortal actually mean?

            I can tell you. If you aren’t specific, here’s what being immortal actually means. It means that you continue to grow and age. Your muscles get tighter and your tendons lose their flexibility. Your bones grow creaky and you wake up with a sprained back because the simple act of sleeping is somehow offensive to your meat spaceship. You lose your taste for some things and gain a taste for others. You sleep earlier and wake up earlier. You can’t drink alcohol without losing two days on a hangover. You get annoyed with young people and people who drive like assholes which, spoiler alert, is everyone aside from you. Your skin dries and crinkles like paper. Your hair either loses its color or disappears entirely. Your organs begin to function less and less effectively. You’re peeing more often and breathing heavier and seeing less clearly. Your walking becomes stiff and you appreciate sitting down a lot more. You see everyone around you going through the experience as well. You’re not alone.

            Then, it happens. Something in you fails. Maybe it’s a heart. Maybe it’s a liver. Maybe it’s the throbbing mass of sticky red cells lodged in your colon. It may not be permanent this time, but the damage does exist. You slow down more. You don’t get to go on hikes anymore. You start to shuffle instead of run. But you recover a bit, enough so that life continues although just in a modified fashion. People baby you a little bit more, take more care with you. Roughhousing with your kids or grandkids becomes less frequent as they are told to be gentle. You feel the gap beginning to emerge between yourself and the world around you that is still thriving, still living, still moving forward.

            Another failure. Maybe more severe this time. Maybe you still make it through but now things are very different. You don’t get to live in your house anymore. Too many stairs. Too much danger. You’re moved to a shared home with other people like you but completely unlike you. You don’t belong there. You are still you! You are alive and you know what you can do but you can’t do that anymore. You wake up early, you eat oatmeal and bananas at a table with a woman wearing diapers and a man who can only use the right side of his body. You hear crying in the middle of the night. Sometimes it’s yours. Your family visits frequently, then not as frequently, then seldomly, then on holidays only. At first it’s everyone – your kids and their spouses, the grandkids and possible spouses, siblings, cousins, etc. Then it’s just the kids and the spouses and the grandkids, maybe without spouses. Then just the kids with spouses. Then just the kids. Then just one kid. Then nobody. Christmas comes and you get a phone call from everyone saying hello with a kind of cheer that rings hollow. The gap is a chasm now and the world is shadows.

            Then the last failure, the one you don’t come back from. The heart feels like it’s stabbed and then there’s nothing. Except there is. You can’t control your body anymore. You can’t see anymore, can’t hear anymore, can’t speak anymore. You can’t even really feel anything anymore. But you’re still there. You haven’t gone anywhere. Why is nobody listening to you? Why does nobody care that you are still alive? You can’t die. Nobody is listening. Please listen.

            They took parts of you. You were generous that way. Your heart, your eyes, your lungs, whatever parts of you weren’t failing. Maybe it was a lot. Maybe it was just a little. You know they are gone because you feel that they are gone. You feel it. You know it. It doesn’t change anything but you know it.

            You can’t see or hear or speak but you know you’re in a church. You’re in a box that costs too much for too little cushion. There is music. There is crying. People say nice things about you, things they never shared with you when you could respond. How convenient. You are by yourself in your box as the church stretches out around you. The lid is closed, not that you can tell, and you are carried by people who used to care about you and you are moved to a patch of ground that somehow belongs to you and you are lowered and people cry and dirt is poured over you.

            There are words of comfort spread amongst those around you before they leave to eat sandwiches and potato salad and awkwardly reconnect with people they don’t actually care about. You want to cry out, to say that you are still here, but that body of yours doesn’t listen, doesn’t respond. You are here now, within the earth but not of the earth. Your brain is gone, replaced by sawdust, but you still think. You still live. You still exist. But you are alone, truly deeply alone, and there is no length to which you can go to move towards others.

            You want to know what immortality is? It is Being Without Being. It is Living Without Living. It is Existing with no end in sight. It is being stuck in the earth with nothing but You and You and You forever. And ever.
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            In short, Immortality is Hell, dear friends. Appreciate death and its mercies because the alternative is much worse.