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The Inherent Loss of Immortality

When you live with someone for a long time you start to notice the habits they’ve picked up and never lost. And Esther and Peter had been married for almost 300 years.  

Esther still preferred to pin her hair up, the way she had in the 1820s, and she never used an electric curler as a rule.  She hated modern music (Peter mocked her for being a snob) and thought parties used to be so much more interesting, so much more actual conversation Peter, and better dancing, none of this getting drunk for drunkenness’ sake you see everywhere now. When she was concentrating on something she sometimes tried to ball her hands up in her apron, only to laugh self-consciously when she realized she was wearing trousers.    

Peter fiddled by tying cords into sailors’ knots.  He shined his own shoes regularly and complained about the difficulty of finding fresh herbs anymore.  He slipped into German on occasion when talking about music, a leftover from his time in Austria.  Esther just laughed over his explanations that he wasn’t being pretentious, actually, he just didn’t know the English words for what he was talking about, then refused to speak to him in anything other than Irish Gaelic for an hour.  There’s always time to waste when you’re immortal, no need to rush to say what has to be said.

Esther couldn’t remember her mother’s voice, but she twisted her fingers together in the way she thought (hoped) her mother used to.  She listened to Peter and heard his accent change on “locksmith” and “bungalow,” the ghosts of the people he learnt the words from briefly flickering back into existence.  Peter saw a grimace cross Esther’s face, and struggled for a moment to remember where and from whom she had learnt it.    

To live forever strips you of any kind of coherent identity.  Both had been rich and poor, lonely and loved, foreign and native, travellers and homebodies, friends and family.  Esther butchered her own pigs, and lamented her inability to find a decent seamstress.  Peter played any jig you asked for on his fiddle and refused to eat potatoes because they were “peasant food.”  It was easy for them to forget what they were at times.  

But to live forever is also to know that remembering what you can is important.  So Esther visited her mother’s grave every year on her birthday, taking flowers.  The graveyard was old and overgrown but it received regular anonymous donations. She no longer grieved her mother, how could she grieve someone she barely remembered?  But maybe she remembered warm hands, and soft sung melodies, and she might have known where her backbone of iron came from, and mostly that was enough.  Peter knew he once had a brother, so he searched through family registries and parish documents until he found his family staring out at him in scrawled black script.  He wrote the name Sam on the wall in the kitchen and looked at it every morning.  

And Peter remembered that Esther took her tea black because during rationing in the War she had given up taking it with sugar.  And Esther remembered that Peter always put his right shoe on first to avoid bad luck. And they told each other the stories they had lived through: “Do you remember when Elaine lost her glove?” “Do you remember when Dr Parker came back from China?” “Do you remember that little boy in Florence?” “Do you remember?” “Do you remember?” “Do you remember?”  

Because when you live forever, you become less what you are, and more what you did: I used to run away from chores and hide underneath the overhanging river bank I used to climb to the top of the rigging whenever I could to stare at the horizon I learnt to weave using three different types of looms I made myself a knife before I even left home for the first time I was a painter during the Renaissance I was good friends with Haydn I helped deliver Margaret Ewell’s baby in a hovel and she named the girl after me I taught Robbie Sumpter how to whistle I threw the most extravagant Christmas party in all of London in 1878 and Martha was livid I took vagrant children off the streets and tried to give them a home I was a spy during the War I helped Germans escape across the wall—

I married you (I married you).        

When you live forever it’s hard to remember who you are, but someone else can make it easier.  And when so many years have passed, and so much has been lost, that becomes the most you can ask for.