Infinity

I’ve been through every stage of grief since I was given my terminal diagnosis.

I started with denial. I didn’t want to accept that I would never get married, never have the family I wanted, never lead the life I’d dreamed about, and never grow old. So I didn’t tell anyone for 3 months, thinking that it would go away if I ignored it.

I moved onto anger. I finally told my friends and family, then I pushed them all away from me, thinking it would be easier for them to cope with my death if they’d already let me go. I lost a lot of my friends, people I’d known my whole life; they tried for a while, then gradually they called me less and less. I was lucky my family stayed by my side, and my best friend refused to leave however awful I was to them.

Then came bargaining. I’d never been religious, but I started to pray every day, hoping that there was something out there, and if I promised to do good for the rest of my life, that it would be more than six months.

I moved into depression after a doctors appointment, as they confirmed that I would not be improving, that my disease was accelerating at an even faster pace than they’d anticipated and that we were no longer talking about months, we were talking about weeks.

I spent too long of my short time left in depression. I lay in my room, taking the tablets I was told to take, ate the food I was told to eat, pretending to my family that I was okay, but I was a total shell.

It’s only now, as each breath I take becomes more laboured, I’ve finally managed to move into acceptance. But I don’t know if I would have got there without my best friend.

We’ve sat for hours talking about my life. We spoke of all the things I’ve achieved in my short time on this earth and all the things I still want to do and never will. In fact, I’ve talked so much, I’ve run out of things to say, but I couldn’t bear the silence, so I asked them to tell me about their life.

I don’t know how much of their story is true and how much is hallucinations caused by the drugs I’m being given. They told me of the thousand lives they’d lived, the names they’d had over the last millennium. They told me what all the things that I didn’t get to do were like, and described to me all the places that I wanted to visit, but never got the opportunity to. They told me about the families they had loved and lost, their wives, their children, their grandchildren. They told me about the sacrifices they’d made to avoid their families being persecuted when people had started to notice they didn’t ever seem to age.

They held my hand as my breathing grew ragged and whispered to me, “The strangest part of immortality...is coming to enjoy feeling grief and loss...because it lets me know I can still love and grow attached like a normal human. I’m terrified of the day loss stops breaking my heart. You will always live in my heart, and your name will be spoken for a thousand years to come”.

I looked into their eyes and suddenly believed every story they’d told me. As the world faded around me, I could see the thousand lifetimes behind their eyes, and as everything faded to black, I finally accepted that my life had served its purpose.