A great song to listen to when you're depressed. Or even when you just need something to bring you back into reality. It is by Queen and was used beautifully in the series The Highlander. This is one of those songs that will outlive most others because the instrumentation and vocals are not dated. The emotion and power of the words could have been written a hundred years ago or yesterday. Truly a remarkable song.

It also provokes an intriguing question. It's great to talk about science allowing us to live, potentially, indefinately. But is that what we would want, deep inside? Will any life-span ever be enough? And if we did live forever, what would we accomplish? Some of us experience so much pain, guilt, heartache, regret, grief... before our life is even a third of the way over -- or even a fifth, sometimes.

Would suicide be more frequent? How many decades or centuries of broken relationships and promises and missed oppertunities would we tolerate before we decided to do away with ourselves out of our emotional complexity, building and compounding through the years?

On the other hand, perhaps we would see our time before us and realize that we needn't enter situations so hastily. And pain builds wisdom, so perhaps after our first hundred years, we would accomplish a level of enlightenment and self-comprehension that our choices would be less devistating to ourselves and those we effect.

An on another note -- what about people who lose their loved one? There are stories -- and we've all heard them -- of someone's boyfriend or girlfriend or husband or wife who dies and the grief is so great that the remaining partner either kills themselves (intentionally or through self-destruction via food, alchohol, drugs, etc). What if you find that one person who absolutely melts into your life and brings you everything you need? After a couple hundred years, either of you dies or is killed... and you're supposed to move on from that?

Perhaps our lifespans are currently dictated not so much by the medicine or diseases that we perceive to effect them, but by our ability as humans to handle pain and grief and remorse and heartache. We may not be at all ready for immortality because inside, we're imperfect and easily destroyed by the non-physical elements of our world. The fact that we are mortal -- very mortal may be our saving grace. Our savior at the end of our dark halls of bleak memories. Sleep for the tired.

So posing the question "who wants to live forever?" may be interesting and fantastic to comprehend in the beginning, I think we need not dig too deeply to see that we may be happy with the short span of our lives as granted by... the cosmos -- or whatever grants us the lives we have. And tempering the shock of death and nothingness, in our oh-so-human-way, with the fantasy that there is an afterlife and that our thoughts and conciousness live on may not be what we will receive. Perhaps we'll receive what our by-then broken souls need so graively -- oblivion and non-existance. Eternal tranquility by virtue of expiration.

Rarely is it said that one artist covering a song originally recorded by another artist is superior to the original. It might not even be true, but Sarah Brightman's recording of Who Wants To Live Forever comes very close to the mark. Of course, like many, my opinion is likely severely jaded by circumstances surrounding my encounter with the song.

There's no time for us
There's no place for us
What is this thing that builds our dreams, yet slips away from us

The amazing thing about my friend Don was that he knew he was running out of time and embraced life in the meantime. In the two years we had worked together he had suffered a heart attack and made several trips to the hospital with other maladies. All this for a man in his early fifties who never drank liquor, never smoked cigarettes, never did drugs of any kind and only ate food of a healthy variety. His only rebellion against healthy living was an occasional "nice piece of cake."

Yet this man, who was a practicing Mormon and a child of East End London, had his contradictions. He moved from England to America to be with the woman he loved and left behind family and friends. His idols were British rock icons. In the early 1970s he was known to hang around outside of Apple Records hoping to catch a glimpse of The Beatles. George Harrison was his favorite Beatle, but when he did stumble upon George one day he could only manage to ask, "How has John been?" A couple years later he would work in the delivery business and one of his deliveries was to the home of Jack Bruce. Jack wasn't home, but his wife greeted Don warmly and took him on a tour of her husband's memorabilia. She offered Don one of Jack's guitars, telling him that Jack would never miss it, but Don turned her down. He felt funny about stealing a guitar from a man he considered to be a musical god.

Who wants to live forever
Who wants to live forever . . . . . ?
Oh ooo oh
There's no chance for us
It's all decided for us
This world has only one sweet moment set aside for us

Don worked with me on the night shift at our less than impressive workplace. The last night he spent on the job he was agitated by accusations by the manager that he had been sleeping on the job. He had, but you see, he was never all that well and the sleep helped him see another day. On his last night of work he promised he would "milk my illnesses for a very long time." He would show them not to mess with him.

We also used to trade a lot of CDs and listen to the music we recommended to each other. The CD he gave me that night was a Sarah Brightman collection that featured this song. A week later we learned he had leukemia. After three months of weekly visits to him in the hospital he told us he was going home to die.

Who wants to live forever
Who wants to live forever
Ooh
Who dares to love forever
Oh oo woh, when love must die

We considered it an honor to be considered amongst the handful of people he insisted on seeing the morning of his death. There was his family and those who were very close to him. In all, we counted in the single digits, those who walked into the living room and saw this proud man on a hospital bed waiting to die. We clasped his hand. Each of us went up in turn. There were three of us. We were like his American children. Anna went first, she was the youngest child and Don's favored "pet lamb." She cried as she gripped his hand and he tried to comfort her, as the dying will often do with the living. Then Mark went to him, the struggling middle child, always the joker. He didn't know what to say. He had been closer to Don than any of us. I went last, as the eldest child, and took Don's hand in mine. He had but one message for me, to look after Mark, who he called "the boy" and to make sure he didn't make any mistakes he would later regret. I looked him in the eye and he told me with a smile, "but you know all about this don't you? I can tell. Take care of the boy. Take care, my son."

But touch my tears with your lips
Touch my world with your fingertips
And we can have forever
And we can love forever
Forever is our today

We sat outside, alone with our thoughts, three vagrant children smoking cigarettes and unable to look to each other for comfort or answers. We waited for the word. There was a phone call from his daughter in London. She was the last to speak to him and it had been what he waited for. The word came. Don had left us. We put our arms around each other and there were tears. We drove home in silence. There was nothing more to be said. A person can live forever in memory, but in the moment of their passing, there is always grief.

Who wants to live forever
Who wants to live forever
Forever is our today
Who waits forever anyway?

---

Lyrics by Brian May
First recorded by Queen in 1986
For the motion picture Highlander