Like all of you, I have no special knowledge about what lies beyond death. I do know that when you freeze body tissue, it destroys the cells. It rips them apart. Lifeless, shredded icicles, those cells. Cryogenic suspension is but a euphemism. I can, however, foresee several situations where freezing one’s body becomes a fitting choice.
Salesmanship can make this seem an attractive choice. Joints that freeze (different from aging knees) want you to think that eventually science will catch up to them and repair your frozen cells, one by one, and make all things right again. My expert friends tell me it’s never gonna happen—strictly sci-fi reanimation lore. They want your money. But if it were possible, I want to have only my head frozen, because my eyes, voice, and brain are my best features, and the savings would be substantial.
On occasion, your relatives will decide to freeze you, but apparently this applies only to famous and/or rich folks. Ted Williams is trembling in his grave, and it’s not from the cold. I bet he finds all the decisions his family made on his behalf disconcerting. Can dead people feel disconcerted? I want to donate my body to the OU College of Medicine and just before I die I want to swallow some notes like, “You will soon have a new and interesting experience” and “Get back to work, you plebe!” then have some first year medical student open me up in Anatomy lab, like a human fortune cookie. Now, that thought comforts me.
The third scenario is that you want to be frozen, have enough money to do so, but you are demented. This means that your family must despise you, because you are going to ice over their inheritance, right? I had a “demented” great uncle who was worth many millions. While alive, he spent none of it. When he died, he donated the entire sum to the Botanical Gardens in New York. This really pissed his family off. They had waited like jackals for his passing, believing he was keeping them from nirvana. The steam emanating from their ears at the reading of his will must have resembled the fog rising from a thawing corpse. I wonder if their hostility for him while he was alive caused his dementia to worsen, perhaps even creating their most terrible fear. In the meantime, they were consumed by their own hatred.We tend to create our own realities.
Sometimes control freaks want the deep freeze. These individuals are calmed by the notion that they really won’t die after all; they’ll just take a long, cold nap. And they get to call all the shots, even while resting in a tube. This of course involves some self-deception. People with control issues are full of self-deception. They run through their lives hoping that their fear of losing control, and beneath it their low self-appraisal, will be undetectable by anyone else. They are generally very unhappy, at a deep level, because their fears push all but the most passive away from them. Once in a while, those with control issues and self-freeze plans have a near-death experience, and this knocks them to their senses, making them cancel their rendezvous with liquid nitrogen. This is particularly true when the experience involves falling through thin ice on a Vermont lake in February.
(this was first used as an article in a weekly paper, written by the author of this blog)
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