Do you wanna live forever?

You bet your ass I'm drinking the water

Tuck Everlasting.

Ringing any bells? Perhaps a vague memory of Alexis Bledel in a high-collared white-lace dress just popped into your head. Perhaps you read the novel in school. Or perhaps you are a very specific breed of theatre nerd.

In any case, there’s this story you might know, and it’s called— you guessed it— Tuck Everlasting.

It’s about a family that drinks from a spring in the New Hampshire woods that grants them eternal life. The magical spring is a secret, and they plan to keep it that way so that nobody else ever ends up trapped in a life they can’t escape from. But eventually, someone else does happen upon the spring. An 11 year old girl named Winnie Foster, whose family owns the woods. Wanna guess what happens next? She wants to drink the water, of course, and the youngest son of the family, Jesse, who she befriends, tells her to drink it when she’s grown so they can be together forever and ever.

But (SPOILERS FOR TUCK EVERLASTING) she… doesn’t.

She has the chance to live forever, but instead, she chooses to live a normal life. To marry and have her own children, to watch them grow, to see them have their own children, and then to die and move on from this world to whatever lies beyond.

She chooses to be a part of the wheel of life. Girl to wife to mother to daughter, like all her kinfolk come and gone.

And yeah, that sentiment is sweet. She gets to experience every stage of life, and in doing so she really lives— because she knows that every life experience is part of the great journey from the cradle to the grave that we all must travel, so she savors it.

But remember that part about the spring that grants you eternal life? The fountain of youth, if you will?

It’s still in her stupid woods.

You know what that means? Little Winnie Foster is forced to grow up with the knowledge that at any moment of any day she could just skip into the woods, take a long satisfying drink from the cool fresh waters of the spring, and turn immortal…

Yeah. Yup. That’s exactly it. And the never does it.

Well Winnie is a much stronger girl than I, because I would not last long with that spring in my backyard. I’d drink the damn water. And I know I’d drink the damn water.

At the end of Act 1 of Tuck Everlasting (the musical version), Jesse asks 11 year old Winnie, “Whaddya Say, Do you wanna live forever?”

And at 44 years old, I know that Jenny’s answer would be yes. Yes, I want to live forever.

It’s not the ending the novelist thought was best. But she’s dead and I don’t particularly care what she thinks.

Can you have living without dying?

Full disclosure, I’m currently in rehearsals for a production of this musical. Hence the topic of this post.

I’ve been thinking about the premise of the show and the assumption made by its creator that by showing you that Winnie ends up living a nice life in her small suburban town, getting married, having children, watching them marry and have their own children, growing old, and dying, that the audience will walk away thinking that this was the right choice.

Happy, happy, joy, joy, a woman became a wife and mother and grandmother and died in the same house that she was born in, what a beautiful story.

I get it. Life is meant to be a cycle and we’re all just walking each other home and all of that stuff.

That’s just never the life I’ve wanted for myself, like, ever.

So, am I just wrong here in wanting more from life than a home and a family and living to see old age?

Fuck no. Duh.

But this theme of turning down forever in order to live a normal life does seem to be persistent, doesn’t it? Think of Peter Pan— of Wendy Darling telling Peter that she can’t stay with him. Of the lost boys wanting to live a real life rather than staying boys forever.

The message is that embracing all that it means to be human involves becoming deeply rooted in your life and having the experiences that all humans are meant to have, and that means growing up, carving out a life for yourself, having a family, experiencing the ups and downs of life, aging, and dying.

In Tuck Everlasting, the father of the Tuck family, Angus, sings a song to Winnie called The Wheel which is a lesson about how everything is a cycle, including our lives, and you have to get on the wheel in order experience it. Otherwise, you’re just stuck, like a rowboat anchored in a pond.

You can’t have living without dying, he says.

And to that I say— not with that attitude you can’t.

At the Top of the World

I think the story of Tuck Everlasting gets bogged down by the details of how exactly one goes about living forever. I mean these four people are the only example we get to see of immortals dealing with the burden of living forever (and being indestructible, did I mention that? They can’t kill themselves).

And what have they done with this gift in the 105 years they’ve been immortal? The youngest of them is stuck at 17yrs old and he chooses to travel the world having adventures and seeing everything he can. He’s doing it right, in my opinion— but, he doesn’t see his family much and he leads a really solitary life.

The other three have decided to maintain fairly normal lives, they simply have to relocate every few years or hide themselves away. The parents mope around acting like victims of the fact that they’ve chosen to hide in a cabin in the woods rather than go out and actually experience life, visit their kids, or do basically anything but fish and lament the fact that their family isn’t together.

All I can think when I look at them is— what a waste.

Like yes, of course living forever would come with some heavy considerations. Things like - can I ever have a family? If I fell in love or had a child would I ask them to drink the water? Will I have to watch everyone I ever grow to know and care about in life die for eternity? Will I ever lose the motivation to keep going after decades— centuries of life?

I’m not saying it would be all sunshine and daisies, but the gifts of unending time are never truly explored in the story. They have one song called Top of the World where Jesse tells Winnie about his adventures while climbing a tree. He sings about the feeling of being alive that he gets when he’s up high, reaching for what’s next, and feeling on top of the world— both in a literal tree but also in life as he flits about getting into the best kind of trouble during his travels.

But Jesse is regularly scolded by the rest of his family, who continue to harp on about the emotional burden they carry. The message is clear— it may sound fun, but the reality is anything but.

It makes me wonder whether life truly feels so tedious to most people that they can’t imagine enjoying their life for longer than its regularly allotted time frame? Is there no higher calling or purpose to which they might devote themselves year after year after year? Would they actually get tired of seeing all the world had to offer if that was an option? Could they not imagine reinventing themselves every hundred years and pursuing an entirely new and exciting career or lifestyle? Could they not find a cause so worthy that they might actually live to see a real difference made in their pursuit of justice?

Would the task of filling so much time with life be too exhausting to them?

It’s hard for me to understand because I live in a world of too little time. I feel sick with the thought that my eventual demise will put an end to everything I could ever do with my life because I already know that it will not have been enough.

Because I am someone who would climb a tree every day and still marvel at the view from the top.

Whaddya say? Do you wanna live forever?

Sometimes I feel like at 44 I’m trying to stack at least three lives on top of each other so I don’t miss out on anything.

I have a home life where I’m a mom who loves to garden and adores her son and likes taking quiet walks in the woods with my dog.

I have a creative life where I make music and perform and come up with ideas and want to be out in the world deeply involved and connected to the creative community around me.

I have a work life where I have a regular job to pay my bills and a rich life online engaging in discourse and my intellectual pursuits. Writing and developing ideas and concepts that allow me to express myself honestly, hopefully help people and be of service, and to expand into a more intentional and purposeful career.

Any one of these things would be a perfectly wonderful life on its own, but I’m not built for one kind of life.

I want everything.

I’m a multi-passionate, neurodivergent, non-linear, non-traditional, generalist, shiny-object chaser, and that’s built into how I see the world and myself within it.

Life isn’t tedious to me— having to make money is tedious to me. Being expected to follow some rulebook about what my life is supposed to look like is tedious to me. Being asked repeatedly about whether I’ll ever settle down again is tedious to me. Having to make polite conversation about shit I don’t care about in social settings I’m expected to perform normalcy in is tedious to me.

But the way I see it— those things don’t matter anymore if you step off The Wheel.

Perhaps its an incredibly selfish take, but being my own guide and deciding how to spend the endless years in front of me without having to check off a box ever again would be liberating.

I would like being a shadow. Someone who disappears when they feel like it. I would like exploring the world on my own. I would like creating moments of deep connection with the people I find on my path when those moments arise, and I would be able to appreciate them for what they were when I moved on. I would like to climb every good tree I come across and dip my toes into the cool waters of every ocean and spend decades reading books and write until the contents of my soul have been thoroughly transcribed with pen and paper.

But my son. Oh, the only thing that would ever entice me to turn down the water.

If I had a choice I would wait until he was old enough to decide on his own whether to drink, and I would offer it to him. Maybe we would spend centuries adventuring together, or maybe I would let him live the life he wanted to live and come back to walk him home when he was done with it.

It wouldn’t be easy. Heavens, no. But living forever isn’t the easy choice.

The easy choice to me looks like never making a choice. Girl to wife to mother to daughter, like all your kinfolk come and gone. Perhaps that’s some people’s idea of heaven, and in that case, I’m glad your choice was an easy one.

Not all of us can make the easy choice. Maybe we’re the ones that are meant to live forever.

So yeah… I’d probably drink the water. How about you?

The Wheel ~ Tuck Everlasting (the Musical) Original Broadway Cast