I've always been fascinated by the creative potential of immortality. Upon mulling over the idea, I came to the conclusion that immortality is something I would never want. Can you even begin to imagine the emotional trauma of watching your family die around you when you can never join them? That thought train produced this story about Spencer Donahue, who devotes his life to curing his son of cancer and ends up trapping both of them in emotional agony on Earth forever when the rest of their family dies around them. The story is far from finished, so I plan to update this thread when the creativity takes me, but here's part of what I've written so far. Feedback is always appreciated; I hope you enjoy it.



Eternity.

The very concept haunts us.

But more terrifying than the thought of forever is the idea of no forever. The gut wrenching fear that plagues each and every one of us; the dreadful concept of our own mortality that we all try and fail to accept. The stunning realization that, in time, we all will undoubtedly perish. The very notion of our humanity is our ultimate weakness. Our superiority is our greatest strength, and our mortality is our cardinal imperfection.

Or so they say.

But I’m here to tell you differently.

As a race, humans are flawed. As beings, we are imperfect. But we have more strengths than some may ever have the fortune of recognizing.

Our mortality, something that we struggle with for the entirety of each and every one of our miserable lives, is our utmost strong point. Our mortality is our escape route; it is both our greatest asset and our kindest blessing. It is the knowledge that you will never be in the same place again and you will never be as you once were that helps make every blessed moment all the more beautiful and individual. It is the comforting awareness that you can end it at any time that makes getting through the day and, ultimately, the night just a little easier.

It is our failure to accept our fate and, ultimately, our humanity that is our most regrettable imperfection. It is our ignorance and our stubborn nature towards our mortality that is our greatest flaw. But not only is our refusal to accept our destiny what makes us flawed, but it is our constant need to desire more.

Desire is a powerful human emotion. It is what drives us to do both great and terrible things; it is what drives us to do anything at all, in the first place. It is what causes us to want more and more despite already having enough. It is what drives us to constantly strive for perfection despite the knowledge that we are imperfect. It is what causes us to want to better our situation no matter how good it has gotten, and it is what ultimately makes us fall when we aspire to do so. Desire is both our greatest emotional strength and our greatest emotional downfall.

But no matter how much we desire something, we do not always get it. No matter how much we wish and wish, we do not always get what we want. And, in lucky instances, sometimes we do.

Sometimes, you’ll find that what you once desired and what you once feared have coincided in order to switch places and turn your life into a nightmare. Sometimes, in the end, you’ll learn that what you desired was never something you should have wanted in the first place.

And that’s exactly what happened to me.

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

My son wasn’t supposed to be sick. My wife wasn’t supposed to think of me as a liar. My entire family wasn’t supposed to die one by one around me. I wasn’t supposed to live like this, if one can call it living; I wasn’t supposed to be burdened with this perpetual curse, this everlasting plague, this eternal cancer of existence.

The mere idea that I once wanted this eternal damnation sets my blood ablaze. Immortality is an infection, an abomination, an atrocity that shouldn’t exist. It’s a disease that will eat you to the core, to the very center of your being and to the heart of the existence you can never end. It will make every aspect of life seem a little less innocent; it will rob you of anyone you ever make the mistake of loving. It will bring out the dark side in you. It will blacken your heart and transform you into a wreck that feels and understands entirely too much.

It will steal your very humanity.

It’s already taken mine.

My wretched story starts in the parking lot of a too-white hospital with too-cheerful nurses and too-optimistic doctors. It starts a year after my wife and I discovered our son had terminal cancer. It starts a month after he was hospitalized for what seemed like the hundredth time. It starts a year after we were told he was dying. It starts just a few weeks after I foolishly signed my life away to an eccentric peddler and his godforsaken potions- a mistake I regret a thousand times over each and every day that I’m forced to carry on.

A rainy December evening found me trudging toward the hospital with what felt like weight of the world on my shoulders. My only son was dying, my wife and I grew further and further apart with each rigorous round of chemotherapy that always seemed cursed to fail, and I had unknowingly set myself up for the biggest mistake of a miserable lifetime that would never end.

I had devoted my very life to saving Ian, my only son and, judging by my rocky marriage, the only son I would ever have. I searched the Internet frantically like a man crazed and consulted every physicist and so-called expert that I could come in contact with (and wrote the ones I could not); I scoured the Earth and would have traveled to the very end of it to save my son.

How can I even begin to explain my desperation? During the two years that Ian’s cancer progressed, the two years preceding the damned mistake that ripped my life apart, I threw my entire self into spending time with my son and trying to save him. I felt helpless, pinioned between my heroic desire to do good and my inability to make this desire a reality. I was a ghost who felt too much and understood far too little, a ghost of my former self plagued by an excess of emotion and a lack of answers.

The only thing worse than watching your child die is watching your child die and knowing that you can do nothing.

Nothing. Nothing whatsoever.

How could I have lived with that? How could I have sit back and let my son die, knowing that I could have saved him?

I couldn’t have.

I lost all sense of self for him; I put my life on hold. My world stopped turning just for him.

I disappeared for him, and I don’t regret it.

My desperate life-or-death search finally came to an end after two years, or so I had thought at the time. I remember it as though it were yesterday- searching and searching until I finally came to a groundbreaking conclusion that made me giddy with relief. I jetted from my home in Chicago to a remote town in Austria, embracing my pessimistic nature for the duration of the entire flight by agonizing over the possibility that Ian could very well die while I was attempting to save his life overseas. I warred with myself across the Atlantic, trying to remember the last words we had exchanged.

I hadn’t told him that I loved him. How could I have been so stupid?

I had devoted to him my life, my soul, the very essence of my being, and somehow I had forgotten to relay to him those three little words with so much weight, the three most beautiful words in the English language. My son, my only son, could very well have died without knowing that his father loved and adored him more than life itself. How could I have made such a grievous mistake?

By the end of the flight, I was kicking myself for my stupidity. I immediately found a payphone in the airport and painstakingly punched in the cell phone number of my not-so-beloved-anymore wife Charlotte, who would undoubtedly be at Ian’s bedside. “Where are you?” she growled upon answering, a question that would have been punctuated with various obscenities had she not been in the presence of an eight-year-old.

“… Austria,” I responded hesitantly. “How’s Ian?”

“Austria?!” Naturally, she disregarded my burning question to launch into a tirade about my irresponsibility as of late. She didn’t understand. Why couldn’t she understand? I wasn’t asking about Ian’s welfare for her sake like all of her shallow, sycophantic, two-faced excuses for friends did- I wasn’t even asking for Ian.

I was asking for me. I had to know that he was okay; I had to know that he was still alive. The question was burning a hole in the back of my mind, burning a hole in my heart like a smoldering cigarette in an ashtray. I had to know that I hadn’t thrown away my last opportunity to say goodbye.

But if this potion I had traveled across the Atlantic for worked, I would never have to say goodbye. I would never lose my son, he would never lose his father, and he would be cured of that wretched cancer that was robbing him of the wonderful, painless life I had always wished for him but always known he would never have because we’re both too human. Too human to be pain free… too human to be perfect.

“Spencer! Are you listening to me?!” Her voice, the voice I once found beautiful and melodious that had now become constantly nagging and roughened by telephone static, fairly grated on my ears. I often found myself wondering how I had ever fallen in love with a woman like Charlotte, and I often found my answer. She had been beautiful… she was always beautiful.

Tall and brunette with kind sapphire eyes and a sinuous figure, she was beautiful inside and out. All of that time spent holding Ian’s hand, all of the time she hadn’t slept, and all of the worry from the past two years had taken the laugh lines from her face and replaced them with deeply etched wrinkles of concern, a dull and bleeding blue-gray having long since substituted her lovely cerulean eyes. We were bleeding. We were both bleeding.

I had fallen head over heels in love with her. It had been a whirlwind romance that left us both soaring with ecstasy and on top of the world, but somehow my feelings had changed. I loved her, I’ve always loved her, I will always love her… but I wasn’t in love with her.

I loved her then and I love her now, but cancer has a dreadful way of ripping things apart.

Ian should have brought us together. His sickness should have made us closer, should have ignited never-forgotten feelings that had been forestalled to focus on him, should have made us okay again.

I just wanted for us to be okay. I wanted Ian to be okay, I wanted Charlotte to be okay, I wanted our marriage to be okay. I wanted to be okay. But it’s never about what I want, is it?

Ian should have brought us together. He should have made us closer.

He only ripped us apart.

“Spencer, you’re not going to save him with voodoo and magic potions. The least you can do is stop chasing after your hopeless theories and spend some time with your only son,” she spat. I could hear the disdain in her voice and hoped she wasn’t distressing Ian. She sounded tired… so tired.

We were both tired.

She had lied when she said I should spend some time with my only son. There was an underlying meaning to her words, one I knew her well enough to interpret. She just couldn’t come out and say it in front of Ian. What she had intended to say was that I shouldn’t waste what time Ian had left off gallivanting in Europe in search of a cure she believed I would never find. She didn’t believe in me… she didn’t think I could save him. She thought I was crazy. She was wrong.

I could save him. I had to save him. I had to make it work. I had to find a way.

I slapped the console of the payphone before leaning my forehead against the blessedly cool but undoubtedly filthy metal. “Dammit, Charlotte,” I said, taking a shuddering breath. “I’m not just going to let him die knowing I could have done something. Please, just tell me how he is… that’s all I want to know.”

“Spencer-“

“Don’t yell at me,” I whispered over the cacophony of the terminal. “Just tell me how he is. I can’t have you yell at me again. I can’t do it anymore… I just can’t, Charlotte.” Didn’t she understand how desperate I was?

She sighed heavily, and I was disappointed at the exhaustion in her voice when she spoke. I didn’t want this for Ian, but I sure as hell didn’t want it for her. All of the late nights spent holding his delicate hand, the constant barrage of medical reports that spoke of his declining health, the daily burden of the knowledge that she could lose her son at any minute… I never wanted it for her.

I wanted her to have a happy life. I wanted her to have the picket fence, the whitewashed colonial home surrounded by oak trees, the romantic dates long after our marriage, the well-behaved children with straight A’s… I just wanted her to be happy. Was it too much to ask?

“There’s been no change,” she responded. Her voice was heavy, monotone, hopeless… lifeless. “He needs his father. Come home,” she pleaded. She was raw, bleeding, out of answers, exhausted, bleeding… we both were.

“I will,” I promised.

“Come home,” she repeated desperately. I was agonizingly torn, pinioned between saving Charlotte and saving Ian. Saving the love of my life or saving the life that had yet to be truly lived.

You save someone, you kill someone. You kill someone, you save someone. I wish I had known the difference.

“I will. I love you.” I poured my heart and soul into those three little words, those three little words that seemed so insignificant but meant so very much.

The dial tone droned in my ear.

She didn’t say “I love you” back.

This story is amazing, cant wait to read more (when u get the time)

Thanks !

Wow.
You are an AMAZING writer.
I can't wait to read more!

Thanks so much ! You made my day.

This is a later scene in the story- around chapter 8. Sorry to spoil the plot for you, but I skip around when I write. Charlotte and Spencer got a divorce; she married a guy named Jacob. Spencer brought back an immortality potioin from Austria that Charlotte told him wouldn't work; it did and now he and Ian are immortal, trapped in the exact same age and form forever. However, since they're frozen as they once were, Ian still has cancer that will never heal. Charlotte took to chain-smoking because of this; Ella is Spencer and Charlotte's oldest child. Here goes!

--

I didn’t want to look at her. I didn’t want to see her like that.

No, I wanted nothing more than to turn around and run like hell out those revolving hospital doors, run as far away from uptown Chicago as possible, run where no one could find me. I wanted to run where I can get on with trying to end my life in peace.

I didn’t want to see her. But I did.

I did it for her.

Charlotte’s private room smelled of a hospital antiseptic so potent my nostrils burned and of a heavy, far more overbearing stench of sickness. I could fairly smell her cancer; I could sense the goddamned disease that took my beloved son from me in more ways than one, the disease that was slowly but surely robbing me of the love of my life.

How much more could it take from me?

Hadn’t it taken enough?

What else did I have left to give?

She lay propped in a firm, uncomfortable hospital bed, one delicate hand fluttering from the oxygen mask over her nose and mouth to reach out to me in greeting. Affixed to numerous wires, machines, and incessantly beeping monitors, she looked frighteningly similar to a mechanical robot. Her face was ashen and her dull eyes sunken in black, the laugh lines around her eyes and lips having long since been replaced with the deeply etched hollows of a smoker’s mistakes.

Not just her mistakes.

My mistakes. All of the mistakes I made, all of the mistakes that aged her and stole her youth.

I’ve made so many mistakes.

I marveled at her appearance. I saw her every other weekend for the past fifteen or so years in order to bounce Ian back and forth… how could I have missed this? How could I have possibly missed the tightness around her mouth, the constant odor of smoke emanating from her that somehow managed to override the Chanel No. 5 perfume? How could I have missed the fact that the love of my life was killing herself before my very eyes?

I shouldn’t have.

“Spencer,” she wheezed laboriously while lifting the oxygen mask to speak, hoarse voice laced with genuine delight. A feeble smile curved up her once-full lips, each strenuous inhale an arduous task that caused her chest to heave with exertion. Her lungs crackled sickeningly with each breath, internally twisted in knots and blackened, poisoned by the wretched cancer that had taken everything from me.

She was blackened, withering, fading, bleeding…

Dying.

How many times would I have to say goodbye?

I dragged a worn-out easy chair across the scuffed linoleum to take my place at her bedside, lowering the guardrail to clasp her hand in a firm grip. I squeezed her bony, bird-like fingers between my own with the unyielding strength of a desperate man, steeling myself and willing my heart not to break as tears pooled in her dulled cerulean eyes and made them bright.

I had to be there for her. I had to be strong.

I couldn’t break down. Not now. Not here. Not in front of her.

“Spencer,” she pleaded brokenly, tears cascading down her face in transparent silver tracks that embellish every distinction of age upon her once ageless features. Both the innate beauty and the inherent ugliness of this cruel world coincided in her tears, and no matter how much I willed myself to be strong, I still found my heart shattering into thousands of miniscule, defeated pieces.

I was broken. She was broken. We were shattered, devastated, ruined, defeated… broken.

We were broken, and I couldn’t pick up the pieces anymore.

Not now. Not here. Not in front of her.

“Hush, it’s going to be okay,” I whispered soothingly, sandwiching her fragile hand between my own and caressing it. “You’re going to get better… it’s going to be okay, I promise.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Spencer,” she warned through her choked, heartbroken sobs. She sounded pathetic, weak and fragile… she was breaking me as we spoke.

She was undoing me.

I didn’t know what to say. How was I to console a dying woman, a woman afraid of death? How was I to tell her that she shouldn’t be scared, rather that she should be thankful? How was I to tell her how much I loved her when I couldn’t choke out one more false assurance?

“It’s going to be okay,” I repeated stupidly, stroking her emaciated hand. What else was I to say?

“I don’t want to die,” she whispered brokenly, closing her eyes briefly against a fresh onslaught of salty tears and tilting her head toward the ceiling. “Not yet. Not like this.”

“We all have a time to go,” I responded uncertainly. I had run out of things to say. I had nothing left. I was running on empty, desperate to console her but unsure of how to do so.

“You think that makes me feel better? You sure don’t seem to have a time. Look at you!” she spat villainously between sobs, a hint of the old, acidic Charlotte rearing its familiar head before she lapsed back into a weeping wreck of her former self. “This is too soon. I’m not finished… I still have things to do.” She was broken again, crying, pleading, breaking my heart…

She was a time bomb, lethally ticking away until her biological clock struck twelve midnight and the jig was up. She was an explosive with an attached detonator counting down the nanoseconds until time ran out, until it was game over. She was just a prolonged moment, an image, a memory forever seared into my life.

I suppose we all are. We’re nothing but memories, detonators waiting for the final second to transpire. We all have a time… some too soon, some too late, some that will never arrive… but we all have one. Life is nothing but a countdown, nothing but a glorious prelude to death.

We all have a time. Everyone but Ian.

Everyone but me.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered brokenly.

“Is that all you can say? ‘Sorry?!’” she burst in tearful outrage, falling back into her nest of flat hospital pillows with an agonizing wheeze before taking a brief puff from the oxygen mask. “Why don’t you do me a real favor and bring me some of that magic potion you’ve got?”

“You never believed me in the first place,” I ground from between clenched teeth. “You said it yourself. It didn’t work.”

She hadn’t believed in me. She had told me I was stupid, foolish, chasing a dream I couldn’t even dream of catching. She had said I was wasting Ian’s time, wasting my time, wasting her time… she had said so many terrible things about this wretched curse of immortality that I so thoughtlessly brought upon myself and, more importantly, burdened my son with.

She had never believed me. I had thought she never would. She believed me finally, at long last, but it was bittersweet.

I suppose it takes something as beautifully ugly as death to bring out the best in us.

“It will work. It has to work,” she responded resolutely despite her tears.

“Charlotte, I can’t,” I whispered, clutching her hand like a drowning man clinging to shore.

I couldn’t let go… I couldn’t let go or she’d slip away from me the second our hands parted. In the blink of an eye, she would be gone. I couldn’t give the potion to her; if I brought this upon someone else, I couldn’t have lived with myself. I couldn’t let her suffer the same despicable fate.

I couldn’t let that happen.

“You can, and you will,” she demanded, brushing furiously at her watering eyes for the sake of her tattered pride with the back of the hand not connected to an IV. “You have to. Please, Spencer… do it for me.”

For her.

Do it for the dim sapphire eyes pooling with tears soon to be shed. Do it as repayment for all of the amorous nights you spent together. Do it to make her as happy as she once made you. Do it because she thinks, no, she knows you owe it to her.

But you owe it to her more not to do it.

Do it for her.

Everything for her.

“Charlotte, you don’t understand-“

“What don’t I understand?”

“This. This whole… thing. This isn’t what you want.” How could I make her understand? Why could she not understand that, by saving herself, she was essentially killing herself? Why couldn’t she understand?

“You don’t know what I want,” she responded in a quiet, subdued rage. The constant shortness and rattle of her breath would not allow her to raise her once-melodious, now-gravelly and aged voice any further.

Oh, what time had done to her.

“I know that you don’t want this,” I said firmly.

She took a drag from the oxygen mask in her hand just as she used to take drags from cigarettes. Just as she used to take drags from the damned cigarettes, from the damned cancer sticks that landed her here. “You don’t know anything,” she choked out after a horrendous, gut-wrenching cough that seemed to jar her very frame and rattle her to the bone.

“I know that no one should have to live forever,” I responded self-assuredly.

“No one should have to die,” she whispered brokenly.

She was broken.

I broke her.

I didn’t understand. How could she want to live forever? How could she want my life?

I didn’t even want my life.

No one should have to live forever. A mortal can end it. When you can’t take any longer, when things have gotten too tough, when you’ve reached your breaking point, you can end it. There’s always a way out.

But not for me. There’s no easy way out. There’s no game over. There’s no try again.

There’s just life. Wretched, endless life. Life where everything is eternal and nothing is eventual.

Jacob knocked softly on the door, his blue eyes imploring. “I hate to intrude…” he began, but his meaning was clear. He wanted me to leave. He wanted Charlotte back.

He wanted me to say goodbye.

How do you say goodbye to the woman you love?

How do you say goodbye forever?

I stood slowly, wanting to draw this moment out as long as possible, wanting to prolong it for the rest of time. I cupped the crown of her head and felt the brittle, graying hair beneath my youthful palm before leaning down to meet her lips with mine. I knew that Jacob would be upset, but it wasn’t about what he wanted. I had stopped caring about him long ago… I stopped caring about a lot of things.

We kissed, soft and true, passionate but far too short. She tasted of smoke, of sickness, of cancer, of regret… of mistakes.

When we broke apart after what I wished was forever but what wasn’t long enough, our eyes met briefly before I pulled myself to my feet. I should have apologized… I should have told her I was sorry that I couldn’t help her, but I couldn’t choke out the words. How do you apologize for something you’re not sorry for?

“I love you,” I whispered.

This was goodbye.

She didn’t say, “I love you,” back.

When I left the room, I couldn’t keep myself from looking back. Jacob had taken my place in the chair and was clutching Charlotte’s hand, stroking her hair tenderly with the other and whispering what I assumed were soothing reassurances. Though I couldn’t make out his words, his voice was choked with sobs. She gazed at him with safety, with love, with everything we never were… with everything I couldn’t be.

Perhaps he had found the right thing to say. Perhaps he had said what I couldn’t.

I’ll never know.

I returned to my flat and only lamented the dark, empty space for a little longer than usual. I grabbed a pack of the cigarettes that were slowly but surely killing the love of my life and lit up in bed, knowing full well that it should kill me too and wishing to God that it would.

At 1:47 in the morning exactly, Ella called, laden with misery and sobbing like the little girl she used to be. She told me that, at 1:39, Charlotte had died.

Died. Charlotte, my Charlotte, had died.

At 1:51, I locked myself in the bathroom with a new pack of cigarettes.

At 1:52, I lit up.

At 1:53, I cried.

Charlotte is dead.

Gone forever.

But I’m still here.

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