Shades of Grey in Immortality

I was eight years old when I first saw someone die.

It was my mother. Despite never smoking, she had been diagnosed with lung cancer just six months earlier, and now I watched as she lay in bed struggling to breathe. The bed was surrounded by my father and four older siblings, all with tears in their eyes. My father had a strange look on his face, an emotion I couldn’t pin down at my young age. Looking back knowing what I know now, that emotion was clearly guilt. The sound of my mother dying has stuck with me after all these years. Her short, rapid breaths suddenly turned into a horrific, wet choking sound. The sound continued for around thirty seconds, and then she was gone.

It wasn’t until my sister, Elizabeth, died that I really understood death.

I was in the car when we crashed - she was picking me up from a piano lesson. For a long time, I blamed myself for her death. If she hadn’t come to pick me up, the drunk driver who was driving erratically down that specific road at that specific time wouldn’t have hit us. When I saw my sister slumped across the driver’s seat with blood pouring out of her forehead, that’s when I understood death. I understood that it was inescapable - that one day, I’d take my last breath and go from a person, to simply a cold sack of flesh.

The paramedics were bewildered at the fact that I came out of the incident almost entirely unscathed, with just a small cut on the palm of my hand. I still have a scar there now.

After Elizabeth’s funeral, I confessed to my brother, John, the feelings of guilt I had.

“You shouldn’t think that way,” he said. “It was the other driver’s fault. May he rot in Hell.”

It wasn’t the most heartfelt speech, but his words did ease my guilt a little. Eventually, I learnt to stop blaming myself, and accept that Elizabeth’s death was just like our mother’s - a tragedy. That is, until later in life, when I found out that someone was to blame, and that person was my father.

My sister Grace was the first of us to get married. No expense was spared on her wedding, thanks to my father’s growing business empire.

Grace was marrying a man called Stephen. I’d had minimal interaction with him, but I hadn’t exactly warmed to him as my future brother-in-law. There was something a little off about him - I got the sense that underneath the flashy clothes and arrogant demeanour was a sense of low-self esteem and bitterness hidden by a veneer of false confidence.

My father, who had become increasingly withdrawn and isolated over the years, put on a brave face at the wedding, walking Grace down the aisle and giving a short speech about how proud he was, how proud our mother would be.

After the first dance, my two older brothers and I headed outside for a cigarette. We found our father sitting on a cold, metal bench, downing a healthy measure of whisky and staring into space.

“Dad?” Alex called out. “What are you doing out here?”

My father jumped, like we’d woken him from a trance. He gestured for us to sit.

There wasn’t really room on the bench for all four of us, but we obliged, our knees uncomfortably knocking against each other.

“There’s something you need to know, boys.”

We said nothing, waiting for him to continue.

“Your mother, and your sister… I… they… it all could have been avoided. It was all my fault.”

“What are you talking about, Dad?” John asked.

Our father continued to stare straight ahead, as though he was too ashamed to make eye contact with us.

“I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t realise until it was too late.”

“Dad, you’re drunk.”

“No,” he said, finally turning his gaze towards us. I wish he hadn’t. That terrified yet defeated look in his eyes is the strongest memory I have left of him. “I’m not drunk. Listen to me. There’s a curse on the whole Farmer family. A long time ago, I made a deal with the wrong person, and now, I have to watch each of you die.”

None of us knew what to say to that. Eventually, Alex stood and pulled Dad to his feet.

“Come on Dad, I think you’ve had enough. Let’s get you home.”

We didn’t speak of that conversation again until many years later, shrugging it off as our father having had too much whisky, despite his protests that he was perfectly sober.

When I got the call, I was in California, studying for my MBA. It was blisteringly hot, and I watched the orange-red sun out my window, its rays sparing no mercy on the people on the sidewalk below.

John’s name flashed up on my phone, surprising me. We were still fairly close, but we were both busy with our own lives, and didn’t see each other too often. For him to call me was a rarity.

“Hey,” I answered. “Is everything-”

John cut me off immediately. “Grace is dead.”

Another black suit, another emotional speech from my father. The huge bouquets of sickly sweet-smelling flowers that filled the room reminded me of Grace’s wedding. Her face full of love and joy as she walked up the aisle, not suspecting that the same man who she was promising to love forever, would murder her in cold blood a few short years later.

Stephen went to prison for life, of course. There was no trial, as his lawyer encouraged him to plead guilty, but none of this was any comfort to our family.

Not only did we have to grieve another sibling, I started to believe my father’s confession. One death was a tragedy, two was a coincidence, but three was a pattern. We never discussed it, but I knew from my brothers’ changes in behaviour that they believed in the curse too.

Alex became extremely risk averse, refusing to drive, avoiding large bodies of water - anything he could think of to put off the inevitable. All of this was in vain, however, as he died of a heart attack before he turned thirty. He dropped to the ground in the middle of a work meeting, to the shock of his colleagues, who quickly called an ambulance. But he was dead as soon as he hit the ground. An undiagnosed heart condition, the doctors said. He’d had it since birth. I wasn’t so sure.

John, on the other hand, decided to accept fate and go out with a bang. He emptied his savings account and traveled around the world, drinking everyday and trying every drug known to man. The last contact I had with him was a photo he sent me of him on a yacht in Monaco, his left arm round a blonde in a pink bikini, a bottle of champagne cradled in his right. There was no accompanying message, just a series of emojis: a party face, two champagne glasses, and a boat.

He died just six months after Alex, of an alleged accidental overdose.

While adjusting to my new life as the only remaining Farmer child, I tried to strike a balance between the two extremes my brothers had chosen. Of course, I spent a lot of nights wide awake, staring at the ceiling, wondering if tomorrow would be my last day.

But, living in fear gets boring after a while, and by thirty-one, I had decided to enjoy life while I still had it, and was married with a baby on the way. My wife and I both had good jobs and a mortgage that we were slowly but surely paying off. The curse, it seemed, had yet to rear its ugly head. In fact, if you gloss over the huge amount of family loss, I had a life that most people would kill for.

Things came easy to me - promotions, friendships, financial stability. While some of my friends and colleagues were going grey or balding, I was still blessed with a full head of thick brown hair. My skin was perfectly clear, and I maintained a trim figure with minimal effort. Each six months like clockwork I would attend a dental checkup, and the dentist would smile and say my teeth were perfect. I’d never once had a cavity, despite being too lazy to floss most nights.

My wife gave birth to a healthy, beautiful baby girl. Two years later, came her little sister. I continued to climb the ladder in my career, making more money, but although my life seemed perfect to an outsider, there was always that little voice in my head telling me that I was living on borrowed time.

My first close brush with death was on a flight from New York to Seattle. I was returning home from a business trip and the weather had been bad all week. Strong winds and constant downpour. There had been a flurry of cancellations that day, so I was pleasantly surprised when the flight’s gate number flashed up on the departures board. A few people looked worried during boarding, but I wasn’t too concerned. It had been a long week and I was eager to get back to my family. Besides, I was a relatively experienced traveler, and no stranger to turbulence. I’d read in an article once that there wasn’t a single recorded incident in history of a plane crashing due to turbulence. Well, until this one.

Most people were screaming as the plane went down. My seat neighbor was gripping the armrests and praying under her breath. I stared straight ahead, my hands folded in my lap. I’d spent so long fearing this day and now it was here, I felt nothing. My whole life had basically been leading up to this moment. Once I was dead, the curse wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone anymore.

I woke up in a hospital bed. The doctors told me I had been in a coma for a week, and that I was the only survivor of the crash.

Reporters hounded me for a while, offering me eye-watering sums to give them an exclusive story, but I refused. I was grieving in my own strange way. Grieving what I thought was inevitable, but hadn’t happened yet.

The plane crash was the first thing that made me suspicious, but there were other signs, too. My ageing seemed much slower than those around me. People at work joked about me being a vampire or having a secret Botox habit. When I turned fifty, I still looked thirty, and my wife would complain that it wasn’t fair, she felt frumpy next to me.

I hadn’t seen my father in many years. When his nursing home called me and said his health was deteriorating rapidly, I decided it was for the best that I go and see him before he crossed that bridge. Not because I particularly cared that he was dying - he hadn’t been a great father, and if there really was a curse, it was his fault our whole family was dead - but because I thought it might give me some answers.

At the nursing home, a kind nurse led me to my father’s room, where he lay on his back in a king-sized bed, hooked up to a variety of unidentifiable machines.

“Please take all the time you need,” she told me.

She shut the door gently behind her. I sat on the plush velvet chair by the bed and reached for my father’s hand. He seemed barely conscious, but when he saw my face, his eyes lit up in surprise.

“Dad,” I cleared my throat. “I need to know about the curse.”

He made a face that looked like he was in pain, but whether this was from what I’d said, or his physical condition, I couldn’t quite tell.

“Son… I am so sorry. If I could take it all back, I would in a heartbeat. None of it was worth it. I just wanted to be successful. I wanted to take care of my family.”

“The curse affects me differently, doesn’t it? I should be dead by now. Has it skipped me?”

Tears filled my father’s eyes. For all the funerals we had attended together, I had never once seen him cry until now. “I wish I could say it had skipped you. He said it would be different for the last born… I thought they meant…”

He started making that wet, choking sound that I heard for the first time at eight years old. I was running out of time.

“Dad, please. You have to tell me.”

“Eternal success…” He croaked, squeezing my hand. My heart sank. Eternal?

The machines started beeping loudly, and several nurses ran into the room. I leaned in close and whispered in my father’s ear.

“Can I die?”

The machine flatlined, and one of the nurses ran out to fetch a doctor. Another nurse put her arm around me and told me how sorry she was for my loss. He was gone.

But in the split second before he passed, after I’d asked the question I was terrified of getting an answer to, I could have sworn I saw a blink-and-you’ll miss it movement from him that I doubt the nurses picked up on.

He looked me straight in the eyes, and shook his head.

I tried to make peace with the curse at first. There are some perks to living forever, though they’re far and few between.

I read thousands of books, and learned six languages. I climbed Mount Everest. I scuba dived with sharks. I road-tripped across America, visiting all 50 states.

By 400 years old, I was bored. Bored of travel, bored of adventure, bored of life. So, I started trying to die.

Several decades earlier, I’d bought a BMW-M5 that could go from zero to sixty in less than three seconds. I got into the car, ignoring my seat belt, and drove it up to a winding mountain road that was well-known as an accident hotspot. During the drive, I thought of my sister Elizabeth, and how I’d survived the crash that killed her all those years ago.

Slamming my foot down as hard as I could on the accelerator, I shut my eyes and let go of the steering wheel.

Moments later, I found myself lying over a pile of sharp rocks, surrounded by pieces of metal and glass. I stood up and brushed the debris off my clothes, disappointed yet not surprised that I had escaped another accident without a single injury.

In a twisted way, I felt like my siblings were the lucky ones. To die prematurely was surely a much more desirable fate than to live forever.

Another memory came to me as I began the long walk back home, my beloved car completely wrecked behind me, black smoke pouring out of it. One from a long time ago, when I was still at school.

Sitting on a plastic chair, swinging my legs. My teacher drawing a diagram of the solar system on the chalkboard. She was explaining that nothing is forever, not even the sun. A small hand went up.

“What will happen to us when the sun dies?”

“Well, we’ll all be long gone by then.”

“What about the people who are still here? My great great great great great grandkids?”

“There’s a few more ‘greats’ in there, but, in short, they wouldn’t survive. The sun will engulf the Earth.”

I had nightmares for weeks after that class. I kept wondering: What if the scientists have got it wrong? What if they’ve miscalculated it, and the sun will actually die tomorrow?

Now, I smiled. There was one thing the curse couldn’t possibly get around. I just had to wait it out.

It is time. There is no civilization. The oceans have boiled, the planet is barren. Even the trees are gone - yet, I somehow still draw breath.

I have watched the world change in unimaginable ways - technological advancements that the best science fiction writer couldn’t come up with, the eradication of all diseases, the invention of teleportation. But underneath all this, humanity has stayed much the same. People still start wars, the governments are still corrupt. People are still primarily driven by greed, as my father was back when he was a young businessman with a carefully pressed suit, making a shady deal with something ancient and evil.

As I sit on the dusty, dehydrated ground, I think about my life. Perhaps the most difficult thing about eternity has been that my memory has remained perfectly clear. I still remember my childhood, the few happy memories I have of all my siblings together before tragedy struck our family. I remember falling in love with my wife, our wedding day and honeymoon. I remember raising our daughters. I remember every birthday, every Christmas, every trip we took together. Most of all, I remember the long years without them. The boredom, the monotony, the painful loneliness.

The sky is completely red now and the heat is unbearable, but I am happy. It is finally over. I wait eagerly for my limbs to be ripped from my body, for my very being to disintegrate into a million pieces. A deafening whooshing fills my ears and everything goes black. In my final moment, I think again of my family. The forty-odd years I had with my wife, the eighty-odd years I had with my daughters - less than the blink of an eye in my lifetime, but still the best years of my life, and what I want to remember as the curse is broken.

There is silence. The sun is no more. It is very dark, and very cold, and I am still very much alive. I start to scream.