"Today I Turned 162 Years Old. And There's No Sign of Stopping"

Via Reddit/NoSleep:  When I was born in London, the sewing machine had just been introduced into the world. Before I was in my teens, dynamite became a reality. And when I married my first wife, the only things with wings were natural, with airplanes far in the future. I fought the first world war with grey hair, and I watched the second one pass with a cane in my hands. By the time the nuclear bomb had dropped, I’d thought I’d seen it all, and that soon I’d be joining the fallen soldiers in the afterlife.

I was wrong. And I found that out on the day my wife died, in 1947.

We’d both exceeded our life expectancies, until one winter morning her body grew cold next to me, her breathing stilled, the light in her eyes extinguished. From the back of her grey hair, I could almost pretend she was still alive. And for an hour I did, my eyes welling up in tears as I realized that without her, my life was no longer worth living.

So I walked to my dresser, and I reached into the top drawer, my wrinkled hands searching towards the back, shaking as they found the cold metal wrapped in old rags. And pulling out the loaded revolver, I made my way back to my bed, slipping back on the covers. Laying next to my wife, this time forever.

Raising the gun to my temple, I felt no hesitation. I was done here on earth, finished. My purpose complete, and with the failing of my physical and slowing of my mental facilities, I’d prefer to die than deteriorate.

I was almost excited to pull the trigger. And when I did, I was met with only one sound.

Click.

I frowned, checking the cylinder to make sure each of the slots had a bullet. A dud, I thought, and raised the gun again. And once more I pulled the trigger.

Click.

Click, click, click, click, click, click- one for each of the bullets, all of them failing their duty.

So I moved on to the medication the doctors had prescribed to me in my final years, downing several multiples of their recommendations until darkness overtook me. But then I awoke in my own vomit, the remains of medication strewn over my bed, and my body weakened but still very alive.

At my wife’s funeral, I decided to let nature run its course. To wait for death the typical way, until old age claimed me. But then a decade passed, and another, and another. Every few months I attempted suicide once more, but each time failure awaited me.

Jumping off a bridge onto concrete yielded broken bones, but no death. Drowning only resulted in me awakening face up and sputtering on the shoreline. Suffocating myself always ended in an unexpected leak where fresh air was able to enter, and revive my starving cells.

No reputable scientist believed my claims. Nor did doctors, though often perplexed. And every year more of me deteriorated- I lost a foot to diabetes, the nerves on my right hand failed, my eyes have long lost their once sharp vision. By the eighties I was completely deaf, by eighty five I could no longer stand, and by the early two thousands my thoughts came slow but still conscious. Simply writing this took three weeks, my focus waning in and out, my misspellings so frequent that my friend could barely transcribe this passage.

And it wasn’t until just last week that I finally heard a scientific explanation of what was occurring to me, explained by the same friend who transcribed this for me.

That there was a theory in science that stated that so long as there was a chance for someone to stay alive, that they would stay alive. That due to infinite possibilities in infinite univerces, there will always be a version of me that never dies. That though 99% of the universes with me in them die with every suicide attempt, only the 1% of the times where I survived mattered. Because so long as there was a sliver of a chance that I could be alive, there was a version of me that would be alive.

That because I’m only conscious in the universes where I’m alive, none of the other universes mattered. That they collapsed somehow, that they didn’t matter.

Though I don’t quite understand it, he assured me that this theory, quantum immortality, could be very real. And with my age as proof, that it is real.

What’s terrifying for you is not that I’m experiencing immortality. It’s that you will too, but you won’t know until the years slip by and death never claims. Especially since the universe that you will experience this is astronomically not likely this one, so you never have read this. You won’t know until it happens.

And you can’t escape.