For Centuries - Season 3 [Completed]

Episode 6

James' journal August312022h.mp3

"The Gilded Hand", by Radical Face

Ethan. I know, I'm avoiding the subject.

There's a moment of him that I remember particularly. The way he talked about Elise at her memorial. We finally had a ceremony, because it was what he wanted. And on this day, he told us some stuff I didn't know.

He told us the story of how Elise had adopted him and his brother Paul. How their biological mother had died in her sleep, and how they were living alone in the streets until Elise found them.

It was in England in 1658, if I remember correctly. Ethan was 9 and Paul was 7. She took care of them.

"We felt loved," he said. "That was her greatest gift, to make you feel loved."

They knew she was immortal. She had told them early on.

She taught them everything. He said she loved to read to them when they were kids, and that she told them stories and tales.

And most of the time, they didn't know if they were imaginary or real. Because she had lived such an uncommon life, with memories so incredible that they looked like the matter of myths and dreams. Sometimes nightmares too, but they found out about it later.

And Ethan told us about Paul's murder. And how it was just him and her at that point.

"I thought I would grow old and die someday," he told us, "and that she would bury me." But one day he had an accident, and he became immortal. He remembered the conflicted expression on his mother's face very clearly: the joy that he was alive and the sadness of knowing what he would have to go through as an immortal.

It took him some time to understand how she felt at that moment because he was so happy to be alive and to be like her. But at some point in his life, things happened and he did understand.

"Today I understand more than ever, as I finally outlive her, and I feel I have lost everyone," he said. It was heartbreaking.

He told us about how she showed him the world. He told us how she taught him not to take himself too seriously and how she made him laugh. How she was always there for him. No matter what. "I had the incredible honor and luck to have my mother in my life for more than three hundred years and she never ceased to surprise me," Ethan said.

Everyone shared some memories of her. At the end of the ceremony, Ethan put a picture he had framed on the table near the coffin. A picture of Elise at the piano, playing in her apartment. "It's the last picture I took of her," he said.

After his death, we put a picture of him near hers.