Disclaimer: If I owned the fandom, Gothel wouldn't have died, end of story.
Gothel had never been like the other girls in her village. They were all of a darker complexion, with hair ranging in varying shades of chestnut to honey blonde that fell straight; she was pale with hair as black as midnight that curled into tight ringlets. While the whole lot of them were stick thin, Gothel included, as there wasn't always much to eat, as they grew older, she was the only one to develop that hourglass figure that had all male eyes turning her way.
The others hated her as a result, ostracized her in whatever ways they could, but she didn't care. They were poor farmers' daughters who didn't know how to read or write and had no future ahead of them. She never admitted to herself that she would've been no better off if her parents had no connections to the city. But her father did regular business with a wool merchant and her mother a midwife; both regularly traveled to the city on business and were able to procure books and the like for Gothel and her five siblings that the other families lacked.
When she was fifteen, there was talk about the possibility of a match with the son of the merchant her father did business with. It looked as if the boy would have a fairly hefty inheritance awaiting him upon his father's death, and he needed a pretty wife to match. Before negotiations could be finished and the wedding bells rung, however, disaster struck when the whole region was brought down by plague.
Men, women, and children alike were dropping dead all around; Gothel's parents, her betrothed, and all but one of her siblings among them. Petrified, she locked herself and her younger sister up in the house, using every herb and spice her mother had taught her to keep the sickness at bay. It would be the start of a centuries-long fight against the forces of decay and death.
When the plague finally faded away, the entire village had been wiped out with the exception of Gothel and her sister. Determined to get away from the memories and any remaining traces of illness, she packed up their things and set off for the city, only to find that it, too, had been hit hard, rotting corpses everywhere she looked. Every place she went, she would encounter the same gruesome sights as what was left of the country banded together to rebuild their society. Grim-faced, she made a solemn oath to herself that somehow, some way, she'd escape this fate, no matter what the price may be.
Decades passed and Gothel took up the position of midwife and apothecary as her mother had done before her to survive. She moved around constantly, her sister her only companion until the girl's sudden death at age twenty-the cause of which Gothel could not determine, a fact that would forever haunt her and deepen her fear. She never married, never had children, and in fact had few friends. Very rarely did she interact with others outside of her work at all; contact and interaction were methods of contamination, she realized, and must be avoided at all available opportunities.
She was well into her eighties when she discovered the golden flower. It had been by chance-or, as she liked to think it, an accidental encounter with the divine-just when she was beginning to get desperate. Oh, how her joints ached and her bones creaked with even the slightest move she made. It was torture. But nothing, nothing at all, was worse than looking in her mirror and seeing that her once striking beauty had been transformed by wrinkles and shriveling, spotting skin into the very visage of death itself. It eventually got to the point where she could no longer bear to look at herself and covered the mirror with cloth.
That first warm, tingling sensation as the magic of the flower flooded her veins, all but bringing her back from the dead, was something she'd never forget. She had heard rumors of the flower, everyone had ever since it was first said to have been spotted, but she had never imagined that it would be just beyond the village she had selected to be her final resting place. No one would've suspected it, and for centuries afterwards, Gothel made certain that no one ever would. She had found it, her way to cheat death, to cheat the fates, just as she had always sworn she would, and she wasn't about to share it with anyone else.
When, by another, crueler, twist of fate an infant babe with golden hair took the place of the flower, this resolve only strengthened, and she knew right then that she would do anything to protect that little girl, her little girl by right if not by birth. So when the girl was all grown up and a man dared to come between them, Gothel did not hesitate in driving the blade of her dagger into his abdomen, hissing "She's mine" into his ear. She had lost enough in her long life; to lose this battle would be the death of her.