Not a day goes by that I don’t think about the ones who didn’t make it to “escape velocity.” About my parents, who were already past their seventies when the longevity therapies were introduced. About my brother, one of the last victims of cancer, before we understood how it could be turned off and on at will. I think most often about my baby sister. She couldn’t overcome her moral objections to life prolongation, and so I watched her age catch up with mine, and then I saw her overtake me, grow old, and finally die of a disease that had been all but eradicated in our generation. We were of the generation that came to be called “The Millennials,” both because of the timing of our births and because we were the first humans to live a thousand years.
The vast perspective, what I would once have called “wisdom”—the hindsight accumulated in 950 years, is a gift and a punishment. If I could have imagined how much I would come to know, how much I would come to understand, I don’t know whether I would have made the choice to enter the treatment trial. I didn’t share my sister’s objections, not because I had any faith in the ability of human beings to find solutions to the new problems of a swelling population of virtual immortals, but because at the immature age of 45, I couldn’t see beyond my narrow self-interest. What I didn’t bargain on was that the same therapies that made it possible to live in a vigorous thousand-year-old body would also prevent the dimming of memory in the eternally youthful mind. I never imagined that forgetting would be something I would come to miss.
And so she is always here with me in my thoughts—as a baby, a child, an awkward teenager, a young mother (of three boys who help maintain my memory of her not merely alive, but fresh and raw), but also as a middle-aged woman, skeptical of what another 50 or 100 years would mean for her, and then as I saw her the last time, bedridden, half-paralyzed, attended by a roomful of perpetual 30-somethings.
Editor’s note: The assignment was to “write about a flame…that has been burning for a long time…from a character’s perspective or from your own.” I’ve chosen to place the flame inside a fictional character in a story that I’m working on about the first people who live to be 1,000 years old.
I feel like I dropped into the middle of a book. And I can’t wait to read it! You give the premise of the landscape, tell about the pros and cons of the defined reality, establish an emotional character. I’m a little ahead of the curve about the rest of the concept because we discussed it so much the other night, but I love the idea that memory doesn’t dim at all. That we would lose one of the things that allows us to look back on life with fondness, because the memories of pain have dimmed. A brilliant addition, that. Somehow it seems more plausible if there is an understandable cost that comes with the breakthrough.
YOU HAVE TO WRITE THIS BOOK. The word according to the cheerleader.
Hugs, Gayle
Hi, Ed!
I’m with Gayle — can’t wait to read the book! As one reading this from the perspective of a 70-year-old, it’s a fascinating idea…but the memory concept is a bit daunting. Do I want to remember it ALL, FOREVER? The good things, yes, but the bad ones? Maybe not. You had me with the first sentence…and made me want to read more. Gayle’s comments (she being a left-brain, logical type) are much more esoteric than mine (is esoteric the right word?)…I reacted emotionally to this story, and immediately felt for the main character, his family, et al. You write beautifully and I suspect some day we’ll be saying “we knew him when”! Think I’ll go read some of the other stories now.