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My mother died Tuesday.
She was 79. Her heart, they said. It just wore out. The old way.
I spend my days making sure other people's hearts don't.
I'm a care tech at Vitalis, a longevity clinic off Fifth Avenue South. Our clients are 60, 70, 80. Most of them look my age. Some look younger than me.
Every March I run their Pace. It's a finger-prick and a chip. The number doesn't tell you how old you are. It tells you how fast you're getting there.
A man walked in Monday with a Pace of 0.71. He's 71. His body ages at two-thirds speed. He golfs. He dates. He's going to see 2075.
My mother's Pace was 1.0. Dead on schedule. She never tested it. She said she didn't want to know.
The clinic has three tiers.
Bronze is the monthly shot. The metabolic one. It keeps your blood sugar flat and the weight off. Everybody's on that now. Even me.
Silver adds the clear-outs. They flush the tired old cells out of you… the ones that just sit there and stoke a slow burn inside.
Gold is the Reset. That's the big one. They take a cell and walk it back toward young. Not slower. Younger. Like turning back an odometer.
Gold costs more than my house.
And here's the part nobody tells you. I don't envy the clients. Not exactly. I miss something else.
I miss when everybody aged together.
When I was a girl, a face told the truth. Gray hair meant something. A wrinkle was a receipt for a life. Now a face is a purchase. I can't read anyone anymore.
But I won't pretend it's all loss.
My grandson, Eli, was born with sickle cell. In my mother's day that meant a short, hard life. They fixed him at eleven. One treatment. They pulled his cells, rewrote them, put them back.
He's nineteen now. He runs track. One shot… and a whole future that didn't used to exist.
So I hold both things. The clinic that keeps strangers young. And the cure that saved my boy. Same science. Different door.
I laid my mother to rest in a plain dress. Her hands looked like her hands. Eighty years of them.
I keep thinking she got to be finished. Nobody at Vitalis is ever finished. They just keep buying more time… and paying by the month.
I don't know which of us got the better deal. We'll see.
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