There are ways of speaking about dying that very much annoy
Peggy Jackson, an affable and rosy-cheeked hospice worker in Arlington, Va. She
doesn’t like the militant cast of “lost her battle with,” as in, “She lost her
battle with cancer.” She is similarly displeased by “We have run out of options”
and “There is nothing left we can do,” when spoken by doctor to patient,
implying as these phrases will that hospice care is not an “option” or a “thing”
that can be done. She doesn’t like these phrases, but she tolerates them. The
one death-related phrase she will not abide, will not let into her house under
any circumstance, is “cryonic preservation,” by which is meant the
low-temperature preservation of human beings in the hope of future
resuscitation. That this will be her husband’s chosen form of bodily disposition
creates, as you might imagine, certain complications in the Jackson household.
“You have to understand,” says Peggy, who at 54 is given to exasperation about
her husband’s more exotic ideas. “I am a hospice social worker. I work with
people who are dying all the time. I see people dying All. The. Time. And what’s
so good about me that I’m going to live forever?”
The provenance of this disagreement remains somewhat hazy, as neither Peggy nor
her husband, Robin Hanson, can remember quite when he first announced his
intention to have his brain surgically removed from his freshly vacated cadaver
and preserved in liquid nitrogen. It would have been decades ago, before the two
were married and before the births of their two teenage sons. With the benefit
of hindsight, Robin, who is 50 and an associate professor of economics at George
Mason University, will acknowledge that he should have foreseen at least some
initial discomfort on the part of his girlfriend, whom he met when they were
both graduate students at the University of Chicago. “I was surprised by her
response,” he recalls, “but that’s because I am a nerd and not good at
predicting these things.”
Robin is the kind of nerd who is very excited about the future, an orientation
evident on his C.V., which lists published articles like “Economic Growth Given
Machine Intelligence” (on why robots will give us growth rates “an order of
magnitude” higher than we’ve currently got), “Burning the Cosmic Commons:
Evolutionary Strategies of Interstellar Colonization” (on what behaviors we can
expect from extraterrestrials) and “Drift-Diffusion in Mangled Worlds Quantum
Mechanics” (it’s very complicated). His enthusiasm is evident in the way he
talks about these ideas, hands in the air, laughing amiably every time he brings
up the distance between his own theories and those of the mainstream. If he is
in a chair, the chair is moving with him.
“I’m just really terribly curious,” Robin told me in January over Skype.
“Cryonics isn’t just living a little longer. It’s also living quite a bit
delayed into the future.” Peggy’s initial response to this ambition, rooted less
in scientific skepticism than in her personal judgments about the quest for
immortality, has changed little in the past 20-odd years. Robin, a deep thinker
most at home in thought experiments, says he believes that there is some small
chance his brain will be resurrected, that its time in cryopreservation will be
merely a brief pause in the course of his life. Peggy finds the quest an act of
cosmic selfishness. And within a particular American subculture, the pair are
practically a cliché.
Among cryonicists, Peggy’s reaction might be referred to as an instance of the
“hostile-wife phenomenon,” as discussed in a 2008 paper by Aschwin de Wolf,
Chana de Wolf and Mike Federowicz.“From its inception in 1964,” they write,
“cryonics has been known to frequently produce intense hostility from spouses
who are not cryonicists.” The opposition of romantic partners, Aschwin told me
last year, is something that “everyone” involved in cryonics knows about but
that he and Chana, his wife, find difficult to understand. To someone who
believes that low-temperature preservation offers a legitimate chance at
extending life, obstructionism can seem as willfully cruel as withholding
medical treatment. Even if you don’t want to join your husband in storage, ask
believers, what is to be lost by respecting a man’s wishes with regard to the
treatment of his own remains? Would-be cryonicists forced to give it all up, the
de Wolfs and Federowicz write, “face certain death.”
Premonitions of this problem can be found in the deepest reaches of cryonicist
history, starting with the prime mover. Robert Ettinger is the father of
cryonics, his 1964 book, “The Prospect of Immortality,” its founding text. “This
is not a hobby or conversation piece,” he wrote in 1968, adding, “it is the
struggle for survival. Drive a used car if the cost of a new one interferes.
Divorce your wife if she will not cooperate.” Today, with just fewer than200
patients preserved within the two major cryonics facilities, the Michigan-based
Cryonics Institute and the Arizona-based Alcor, and with 10 times as many signed
up to be stored upon their legal deaths, cryonicists have created support
networks with which to tackle marital strife. Cryonet, a mailing list on
“cryonics-related issues,” takes as one of its issues the opposition of wives.
(The ratio of men to women among living cyronicists is roughly three to one.)
“She thinks the whole idea is sick, twisted and generally spooky,” wrote one man
newly acquainted with the hostile-wife phenomenon. “She is more intelligent than
me, insatiably curious and lovingly devoted to me and our 2-year-old daughter.
So why is this happening?”
The air of hurt confusion stems, in part, from the intuition among believers
that cryonics is a harmless attempt at preserving data, little different from
stowing a box of photos. Of the nonreligious white males who predominate in the
ranks of cryonicists, many are software engineers, a calling that puts great
faith in the primacy of information. “If you have a hard drive on a computer
with a lot of information that is important to you, you save it,” says J.S., a
39-year-old cryonicist and software engineer who lives in Oregon and who will
not allow his full name to be used out of fear that his wife would divorce him.
“You wouldn’t just throw it into a fire. It’s clear to me that memories are
stored as molecular arrangements. I’m just trying to preserve the memories.”
A small amount of time spent trying to avoid certain death would seem to be well
within the capacity of a healthy marriage to absorb. The checkered marital
history of cryonics suggests instead that a violation beyond nonconformity is at
stake, that something intrinsic to the loner’s quest for a second life agitates
against harmony in the first.
Back when Peggy and Robin were two broke Californians shivering in the Chicago
cold, the university’s law school used to play old movies for $1. They’d go
watch a Cary Grant film and end up back at the dorms for a board game. He taught
her to play backgammon; they spent chilly nights playing cards. “Robin is very
romantic,” Peggy says. “He used to leave notes in my dorm mailbox all the time,
little poems and things, pictures he liked. I still have those.”
Peggy was thinking about those notes because some siblings at the hospice where
she works had just happened upon a cache of love letters written by their father
before World War II, and read them aloud to their ailing mother. During my visit
to the hospice earlier this year, families were gathered in their rooms and in
the large common area, where the TV was on and a box of toys had been pushed
aside to make space for a Christmas tree. Pets are allowed; so is liquor. Guests
might spend some time chatting with a social worker like Peggy, but probably not
much time, because the average stay is seven days.
Peggy describes herself as not religious and “definitely not a Christian,”
though she lacks Robin’s surety that nothing lives on when the body dies. Her
line of work has left her focused on managing the last days of life, partly by
encouraging her charges to stop fixating on medicine. Families come from
hospital to hospice obsessed with numbers: blood count, blood pressure, heart
rate. “Look at his face,” she counsels. “Does he look comfortable? It’s very
common-sensical, but it takes a lot of work to get people to let go of the
hospital stuff.”
A tour guide to the dying process, Peggy tells families what they will see and
how best to reduce discomfort. Feet and hands will turn cold. Senses will fade,
but hearing may remain sharp until the very end; telling secrets within earshot
of an otherwise-unresponsive guest is ill advised. The muscles required to
swallow will go limp in the throat, and the resulting sound will register as a
rattle. In the interest of a smooth transition, families are asked to sign a
form that says “do not resuscitate.” Very rarely, one doesn’t, though to fail to
do so is to violate certain philosophical leanings of a place very much oriented
toward acceptance. “The paramedics come in and they pound on the chest,” Peggy
says. “It breaks bones, causes pain, it’s serious trauma. That always feels like
a failure. I didn’t get through to this poor family.”
The United States is not necessarily an easy place to take up the banner of
letting go; we’re likely to call it “giving up,” and there is of course no purer
expression of this attitude than the pursuit of cryonics. Heads and bodies
stored in steel tanks, awaiting the moment when medicine advances to the point
where tissue can be repaired and bodies revived, are pointedly referred to not
as remains or cadavers but as “patients.” A stopped heart is seen as no good
reason to stop fighting for your life. And so Peggy expends a certain amount of
psychic energy trying to ignore Robin’s cryonics arrangements. Separate bank
accounts prevent her from having to see the money spent on annual dues, and the
two manage to avoid bringing up the subject at home. When he dies (“which he
will,” Peggy adds), it will fall to someone else to call Alcor and explain
Robin’s wishes to the hospital staff. “My husband has said, on numerous
occasions, ‘Choose life at any cost,’ ” Peggy says. “But I’ve seen people in
pain. It’s not worth it.”
Shortly after they met, Peggy and Robin decided to read each other’s favorite
works of literature. Peggy asked Robin to read “The Brothers Karamazov,” and he
asked her to read “The Lord of the Rings.” She hated it. “I asked him why he
loved it, and he said: ‘Because it’s so full of detail. This guy has invented
this whole world.’ He asked me why I hated it, and I said: ‘Because it’s so full
of detail. There was nowhere for the reader to imagine her own interpretation.’
” Robin, less one for telling stories, describes their early days more
succinctly. “There was,” he says not without tenderness, “a personality-type
convergence.”
As an economist with an interest in political institutions, Robin came up with
the concept of futarchy, a form of government in which prediction markets would
be used to determine the viability of various policies. He would like to live in
a futarchy, and an effective cryonic preservation would improve his chances of
seeing one. He also talks about what it means to be the kind of person willing
to do what it takes to survive. “Our ancestors came across the oceans,” he says,
“went across the continent. Many people, most, didn’t do those things. But I
think of myself as the kind of person who is willing to suffer quite a bit of
change in lifestyle, culture and context if it’s a matter of that or
extermination.”
Robin’s expertise extends to the economics of health care, a domain in which
enormous amounts of money are spent on experimental procedures with only a small
chance of extending life. Like many cryonicists, he says he thinks of bodily
preservation as experimental end-of-life medical care, and it is within a
medical context that he typically introduces the subject of cryonics to his
health economics class at George Mason. His students rarely accept this framing.
“We spend most of the semester talking about how people are obsessed with taking
any small chance at living longer,” Robin says. “And then when we get to
cryonics, it’s: Well, who needs to live longer? What’s the point of living
anyway? Why can’t we solve global hunger?”
In other words, while his wife says that medical technology has an unfortunate
stranglehold on the way we die, Robin longs to claim the mantle of medical
science for his attempt to avoid death altogether. But here he doesn’t expect to
succeed, and as with most societal attitudes that contradict his intuitions,
he’s got a theory as to why. “Cryonics,” Robin says, “has the problem of looking
like you’re buying a one-way ticket to a foreign land.” To spend a family
fortune in the quest to defeat cancer is not taken, in the American context, to
be an act of selfishness. But to plan to be rocketed into the future — a future
your family either has no interest in seeing, or believes we’ll never see anyway
— is to begin to plot a life in which your current relationships have little
meaning. Those who seek immortality are plotting an act of leaving, an act, as
Robin puts it, “of betrayal and abandonment.”
Whether or not the human race subconsciously equates attempts to defeat death
with treachery, it’s true that a general air of menace hangs over the quest for
immortality in Western literature. Think Gilgamesh or Voldemort. “There is a lot
of ancient cultural stereotyping about the motives and moral character of people
who pursue life extension,” says James Hughes, the executive director of the
Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, a nonprofit organization
enamored of life extension. Hughes has chosen not to participate in what he
considers a worthy experiment. “Although it’s a rather marginal bet for a
potentially huge payoff,” he says, “I value my relationship with my wife.”
If cryonic preservation does indeed signal betrayal, it does so while asking
much from those who would be betrayed. Alcor’s Patient Care Bay, filled as it is
with 10-foot steel canisters packed with human bodies and connected to monitors,
may appear self-regulating but in fact requires a very human vigilance against
entropy. There is a man charged with topping off the liquid nitrogen. There is a
man who mops the floors. Those in charge of the Patient Care Bay are only the
last in a long chain of people called upon to assist “deanimated” members.
Someone must perform the perfusion, for example, whereby blood is replaced with
an antifreeze-like solution that will harden like glass rather than freeze like
water. Someone must accompany the body from the site of death to the cryonics
facility. Someone must deal with flight schedules, local coroners and byzantine
hospital bureaucracies generally unfriendly to those who would march into the
hospital and whisk away the freshly dead. This is all vastly more likely to
succeed if the legal guardian of the remains is willing to help. “If you don’t
tell your wife you’re involved with cryonics, you don’t really love her,” says
S.B., a cryonicist from Indianapolis who reports that his marriage is suffering
and that two of his previous relationships failed because of cryonics. “And when
I die, I want my wife to call Alcor.”
It has not escaped the members of the often sappily life-affirming cryonics
community that their practice, so often thought to be the province of either
misfit loners or rugged individualists, involves great faith in the competent
benevolence of other people. Nor is Robin Hanson blind to the extent to which he
depends on his tribe. Marriage, despite its lack of clean edges and predictable
outcomes, is one of the few institutions he seems to have no interest in
reforming. Peggy describes their conflict as akin to a deep religious
difference, bridgeable by some core shared belief. “Robin and I have been
together for 28 years,” Peggy says. “We’ve always loved spending time together.
He is an excellent father. He devotes an enormous amount of time and energy to
family life. And that has to be there.”
Robin and Peggy remain silent on the issue of how, exactly, death will part
them, but earlier this year a stray bit of chatter glanced past the
conversational barricade. Sitting at their kitchen table, Peggy told Robin about
a funeral tradition she’d heard about: after a cremation, the ashes of the dead
are separated among family members. The children and surviving spouse each get a
handful, to save or dispose of as they see fit.
“You’re not getting any part of me,” Robin said. “I’m being frozen.”
“No.” Peggy said. “Your head is being frozen. I get the rest of you.”
Kerry Howley is an arts fellow
in the University of Iowa’s literary nonfiction
program.
