Fairy tales usually end the same way: they lived happily ever after. They almost never tell us what came next, even though in real life, that final chapter awaits every one of us.
Monica is 54. She has someone she loves, children, a job, friends, favourite places and plans for the future. Then one day, her doctor tells her that the treatment is no longer working.
Monica is afraid, not because society has somehow designed death incorrectly, but because she loves being alive. She does not want to leave her children, disappear from their future or think about the morning that will one day come without her. The Ellipsis Foundation does not promise to take that fear away, nor should it.
But alongside the fear of losing her life, another fear begins to emerge. Monica starts to imagine what exactly awaits her: a morgue, closed doors, a funeral home, a coffin, a few hours to say goodbye, a cemetery somewhere outside the city, dark earth and a stone where an entire human life is reduced to a name and two dates.
Then the years will pass, and perhaps one day someone will say her name for the very last time.
The fear of death is joined by the fear of disappearing and being forgotten. And while the first is inseparable from life itself, the second is shaped, at least in part, by the world we have built around death.
But what if an entirely different world awaits Monica?