Death and Cryonics: A Case for Immortality

by Sara Olson

Sara is currently living with her fiancée while studying English at Newman University in Wichita, Kansas. She's originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota and the couple plan to return there after she completes her education. She has an extensive interest in anthropology, the arts and literature, and looks forward to "studying them even more extensively in the centuries to come." She recently signed a suspension contract with CI, after getting a life insurance policy through Rudi Hoffman.

At the age of seven, I was given the best argument for life extension and immortality that I could ever experience. My grandfather died the January after my seventh birthday, and though I remember very little about the entire ordeal, I still very vividly remember one short moment from that mortifying weekend.

The surroundings are blurred out in my memory, as if the camera of my mind's eye carried a heavy diffusion of all but the most important people present with me that day. And of course my mind recalls with acute clarity the most important person of all present, but simultaneously not present, in that room: My grandfather. My Uncle Terry picked me up, his eyes filled with tears (I believe that he was the first man I had ever seen cry). We both stared, disbelieving, into the coffin, gazing for the last time upon the empty death pallor of my grandfather.

"You can touch him if you want to," My uncle offered. I had never touched the dead body of any creature before, let alone a human. I was curious and frightened by the idea, but overcame my momentary revulsion enough to reach out and touch death with the innocent curiosity of a child.

It is easily the worst thing my hands have perceived. The flesh didn't feel human. Devoid of any heat or even the ghost of life, this was truly death incarnate. Even the chair I had been sitting in while waiting for the viewing to start seemed to hold within it more life than this frightfully frigid husk of flesh and bone that lay before me. At least the antique piece of furniture I had previously occupied felt as if it resonated with a piece of those who had occupied it in the days and decades before me. But when I touched his fragile shell, there was nothing. Nothing was left there of the man I had loved and played with for the first seven years of my life.

Fifteen years later, all I have to do to rekindle my desire for a life without death is take myself back to that warmly formal room, stand again in front of that repulsive metal box, and reach out and once again touch the antithesis to life that lay before me that snowy January evening. I know that if it comes to it, I will not abide even the idea that I could spend eternity in a coffin slowly decomposing into dust, or, even worse, transforming to dust in a matter of hours in a mortifyingly violent kiln. Neither of them offer me even the faintest hope of ever emerging from that terrible state that I experienced that day.

When I learned about cryonics, I knew I had found my lifeboat. If, heaven forbid, it comes to the point where this body fails me before medical technology allows me to extend my life, I knew that cryonics would buy me the time I need to get my body to the time when my survival will be able to be guaranteed.

Though cryonics may not be the ultimate answer, it gives hope that my grandfather no longer has. Cryonics offers me the opportunity to someday emerge, victorious, over that abhorrent state of notbeing that I experienced through my grandfather so early in life. My grandfather's last lesson to me was, by far, the longest lasting and most important. Life is a gift to be held and treasured as often as possible. The alternative is inconceivable and irrevocable.

For me, there is no alternative.