Chapter 13

Even with Cryonics, There Is No Escaping Hell

Life intervened with horrific timing. My brother called and said my mother was in critical condition in Boston City Hospital. My mom’s leg was black with gangrene and would kill her within forty-eight hours if the hospital didn’t amputate. My brother John refused to give permission without me. I made arrangements with Joe Mendoza, the grounds­keeper at Chatsworth, to look after the capsule and flew to Boston to sign the hospital’s papers. Mom’s recovery from the operation was remarkable, considering all her problems. She’d had crippling asthma and serious heart problems since childhood. She was also a lifelong smoker and a breast cancer survivor. She had no business being alive at all, but her will was stronger than the hurricane-force winds she’d battled for decades.

At the Boston airport, a fat man came up to me, an inquisitive look shadowing his face. “Isn’t your name Buccelli?” That was Big John’s name, which I had abandoned years earlier after my stepfather’s murder.

I said, “Yes, it . . . is.”

He stuck out his hand. “Mine’s Sheehy.”

His name clicked; this man was the brother of a cherished childhood friend. “Richard!” I yelled. “My God, where is John?” We had lived in the same neighborhood, but I had lost track of him a decade earlier. My long-lost friend now lived in Maine and spent most of his time on his lobster boat. John’s life goal had been a lobster-fishing business, and I felt elated to hear he had achieved his dream.

“Richard,” I said as the line inched forward to board the plane, “please tell me how to reach him.”

“I’m a cop,” he answered, “so I can’t do that without his permission. Give me your address, and he’ll be in touch with you, I promise.”

I was thrilled for this chance encounter. What a good trip!

Three days later I received a letter from John. Dear Bob, am I surprised? Not really; a friendship such as ours was destined to come full circle. Please visit me whenever you can. A pot of lobsters will be waiting for you.

It was two months before I could get to Maine and hug my old friend. Like he promised, the lobsters were waiting. The evening I arrived, John sat me down and covered my plate with three of them.

When I began to protest, he informed me the Maine record was held by a lumberjack who had devoured twenty-six lobsters at a single sitting. “So shut up and eat!” he ordered.

Thirty minutes later I could not eat another bite. I had eaten six lobsters and was officially declared the West Coast Lobster-Eating Sissy.

After dinner I received a call from Joe Mendoza, the Chatsworth groundskeeper who was watching the capsule for me along with his usual maintenance work.

The pump on the capsule had failed, he said, but had been fixed and all was okay again. Actually the pump had been replaced by our nitrogen supplier. Still, I was worried. I knew this trip was dangerous, since that capsule was functioning on borrowed time.

I flew home to California five days later. During the long flight, I looked out the window at blackness everywhere below, feeling lucky for the rare chance to reflect on our progress. I was soaring from visiting my friend, but the trip reminded me of how much I had sacrificed for the capsule: no vacations, no time that I wasn’t free from obligations. The whole world was on my shoulders. I had accomplished so much with the cryonics program, but we had no money to improve the capsules and keep them safe.

I was too sentimental and made bad decisions; I could never say no to my friends because “no” meant I would be killing their future, their hope, and their possibility of a tomorrow. I still believed in hope and possibility, but those lofty concepts didn’t matter, since I had created a nightmare of responsibility. I knew CSC would be flourishing if I had not frozen and maintained people who did not make proper financial arrangements. How could I have let this happen? There was no one else to blame.

I smiled at a little girl across the aisle. She reminded me of Genevieve; she had the same brown pixie haircut and bounced a Mickey Mouse doll on her tray table, sending my mind back to the wonderful day I had spent with my young friend at Disneyland. What could I do now for Genevieve? It seemed everything I did was never enough. The problems weren’t lack of time, devotion, or courage; the problem was money. I remembered my dad’s mob friends tossing money around recklessly—a thousand bucks for dinner, another grand for a suit. But for me, money was life and breath and liquid nitrogen.

My primary worry now was that the vacuum leak in the capsule would get worse. Somehow I had to find the money to purchase a better capsule; somehow I had to make it happen. . . .

I drove directly home and fell into bed, exhausted. I spent a few hours the next morning with my family, after not seeing them for two weeks. I made breakfast, giving Elaine a break, and ran lines with Lori for her school play. I was nervous about the capsule. Surely, I thought, since I hadn’t heard from Joe again, everything was fine. But the butterflies in my stomach brought a pervasive worry.

I entered the cemetery grounds just after ten o’clock. It was a beautiful morning. The pristine, lush park and the smell of fresh-cut grass transformed my trepidations into optimism as I drove to the capsule at the back of the cemetery. The sunshine altered my mood. But when I approached the yard, I noticed an eerie silence when I turned off the car engine. At first I couldn’t identify what was different. Hideous realization washed over me; the vacuum pump was not running!

I stood there for a few minutes in stunned disbelief before sprinting up to the capsule. I studied the vent pipe, knowing it should have a slight fog from the evaporating liquid nitrogen. I saw nothing.

I paced around the capsule for several minutes, trying to muster the courage to touch the vent. If it was cold then things were okay. But if it wasn’t . . . I could not bear even to think about it! My mind tumbled over the consequences if it felt warm, imagining scenes of distraught families screaming and crying that I had failed them. If the vent was warm, my entire life would come crashing down on me.

Five minutes passed before I finally touched the vent. The vent was not just warm. It was hot! That heat penetrated straight to my heart and singed my soul. How long had it been this way? Then Genevieve’s face appeared in my mind. The thought of her decaying deep inside this fifteen-hundred-pound pressure cooker drove me to my knees, and I cried. I cried harder and longer than ever before, until my face was wet from the flow of tears and snot, and my chest pained from relentless heaving. The meticulously manicured cemetery grass beneath me was a green blur, and in that blur I saw the faces of those lost after so much passion and effort expended to save them.

After what seemed like a very long time, I stood back up on wobbly legs. My emotions rapidly passed from devastation and despair to anger, and then to rage. What the fuck happened? I had to find Joe. I would tear him apart! I would . . . no. I could do nothing to him. He was not an engineer; he was a groundskeeper. I chose him to look after things. This catastrophe was my fault, not his.

As I careened around the winding roads like I was escaping hell, people attending funerals all turned toward me. I sped through the park looking for Joe, and I finally found him fixing a sprinkler on the north end of the grounds. I pulled up and I could see his face turn beet-red as I approached. He knew I was pissed.

I screamed, “Joe, what in the hell happened!”

“Well,” he said in a thick accent, “several days ago after I call you I see the pump, she’s a-stop again, so I call the number you give me. I tell them three times; they say what? what? I’m tell them, come, come. They never come. I don’t know what to do.”

“Why didn’t you call me?” I fumed.

“I don-a know. I call them. They don-a come back.”

Still livid, I shoved him toward the sprinkler and got him wet, but then I calmed down. Yelling at him accomplished nothing. I turned around, disgusted, and walked away. I barged into the cemetery office, parked myself at Joe’s desk, and jerked the rotary dial on the telephone as I spun each number to call Gilmore Liquid Air. “I made full arrangements for your company to come to Chatsworth and deal with emergencies. We called with an emergency and nobody came.” I was yelling but didn’t care. “Do you know the consequences—the ramifications—of this?”

“Please hold.” The singsong reply of the operator made me more upset. A minute later I was talking to the owner of the company, Mrs. Gilmore herself.

Trying not to cry, I again explained what happened.

The owner’s response was measured but sympathetic. “We received a call from someone who couldn’t speak English very well. He kept saying something about fixing a pump. I finally spoke to him and told him we didn’t fix pumps. Then he just kept repeating himself over and over; he finally hung up. I had no idea he was talking about cryonics or had any connection with your company.”

Well there it was—the dumbest explanation ever given for condemning three human beings. I had made all the arrangements, hired all the actors, and directed the entire scenario. Yet I failed to consider that the man I had charged with looking after the heart of the operation barely spoke English. I was solely responsible for the death of these three lost friends. We had tried so hard, but I had failed them even though I had spent so much time, energy, and money.

All for nothing.

Dropping into Joe’s office chair, I had to figure out a plan. I called Gilmore back and asked them to deliver liquid nitrogen to the capsule site. I knew it was useless to keep feeding nitrogen into the capsule. The damage was done. They were dead—not just clinically dead but irrevocably gone—killed by my mistakes and the California sun. I needed time to think about the events that had created this tragedy.

I returned to the vault, hoping for some altered reality. I placed a tentative finger on the vent pipe; it was hot of course. I sank to the earth and sat on the ground. The entire day, my body was splayed against the sweltering-hot stainless steel of the outer capsule. I couldn’t move from the scorching metal. I considered it penance—my punishment for failing my three patients. I wanted to share their fate; the waning sun spared me, but not them.

After several hours I allowed myself the undeserved luxury of standing up and stretching. I wished I hadn’t, for I saw the dark shadow of the surrounding fence creeping slowly across the capsule, inexorably shrouding its inhabitants in darkness. The shadow of death that I had always feared came that day. For years I had stood ready to do battle with the Grim Reaper, poised with dry ice and liquid nitrogen instead of a cold steel sword. My failure was irrevocable and absolute.

In the late afternoon, a delivery truck from Gilmore arrived with more nitrogen. I poured the liquid nitrogen into the capsule; the backsplash felt like hundreds of tiny needles on my arm. Finally I was relieved to see the capsule’s shroud of fog; I trudged to my car to head home.

My daughters tackled me with hugs when I arrived. Elaine saw my beaten face, noticed me wince, and sent the girls off to watch television. This amazing woman who knew me so well knew instantly that my world had somehow crumbled.

During many of our relationship’s dramatic moments, she had been the one crying or about to cry; now it was my turn. She grabbed a bottle of aloe and smeared it onto the burns where I’d pressed against the hot metal.

“I lost them. They’re gone.” I said. We didn’t speak again that night, she just held me in her arms, smoothed my hair, and tried with love to ease the pain.

After a week of dwelling on the capsule loss, I knew I had to inform the families directly. If their relatives wanted to beat me up, then so be it. Remembering all the thrashings from my childhood, I figured this probably would be the first one I truly deserved.

It was now 1974, the better part of a decade since I had taken the reins with such lofty dreams, guiding CSC toward developing facilities for cryonic suspension. Now I confronted the most god-awful task of my entire life. I must tell Guy de la Poterie that I had failed to keep his daughter safe and preserved. After all his effort and mine, his daughter’s capsule failed when I was far away visiting my friend.

I also needed to face Mildred’s sons and inform them of their mother’s loss in the same capsule. I had lost touch with Pauline Mandell, Steven’s mother, and didn’t know how to contact her.

I called Guy from my mom’s home in Boston before I left for Montreal to confirm our visit.

He agreed to meet me at the airport but asked, “Why the sudden visit?”

I avoided answering, asking instead, “Can we meet for coffee?”

“A cup of coffee? You’re always telling me how tight money is, and now you want to fly to Montreal for a cup of coffee?” I could hear the panic in his voice as his French accent grew stronger. “What’s happening with my Genevieve?”

He sounded frantic, but I still didn’t want to answer. I looked around my mom’s house. It felt strange being here and being yelled at. I was a kid again—a twelve-year-old screw-up.

I couldn’t stall any longer, making him wait and worry just so that my confession could match the script I had played out in my mind.

There was such agony in my heart as I cleared my throat and shakily began. I told him about my trip and how the capsule had failed while I was away. “I had made arrangements for the capsule, but it still happened. The responsibility is mine.”

Guy listened silently; then after a long pause he asked, “How long was the capsule without liquid nitrogen?”

“My best guess is five days. I am so sorry, Guy.”

I waited in silence for a few minutes before Guy asked, “Does the capsule have liquid nitrogen now?”

“Yes, I refilled it, and it’s being checked daily by my assistant Frank Farrell.”

“Well that’s good,” he said. “I guess there is nothing we can do but continue storing her.”

It was a reaction I had not anticipated. Several days of decomposition seemed like an eternity. Numb with disbelief but not wanting to inflict additional pain, I cowardly replied, “I’ll do that if it’s what you want.”

After this brief conversation, Guy said he was not feeling well and hung up.

I was tempted to call Guy back and fully explain the ramifications of the capsule failure, but I never did—and I never went to Canada.

My next stop was cold and rainy Des Moines, Iowa. Terry Harrington was standing by the gate with a masculine-looking woman. She was dressed all in black, carrying a black umbrella and clutching Terry’s arm. We went to a nearby restaurant, and Terry introduced her as his wife. Now I felt sure I’d entered some alternate reality. The last time I saw Terry and his brother, I felt convinced they were gay, and now he was married.

I raised my eyebrows and shook my head, but I needed to focus on my difficult task of telling Terry the truth. His brother, Dennis, didn’t meet us, and I felt less stressed facing Terry since I had already spoken to Guy. I told Terry that the capsule had failed for several days. To my surprise he did not appear at all upset. Like Guy, he did not realize the consequences of that capsule failure.

He repeated what Guy had said. “I guess the only thing we can do is fill it up and keep on going.”

I sat there stunned, my coffee cup poised in midair. Years earlier I had carefully educated both Guy and the Harrington brothers about cryonics, yet both seemed completely unfazed by those days of soaring temperatures. I opened my mouth to object, but again I took the coward’s way and didn’t correct his assumptions.

Without much more to say, our meeting quickly ended. I flew to Michigan, where Professor Ettinger met me in the waiting area at the Detroit airport. We sat down in the lounge, and I told him about the capsule failure.

He was saddened by the news, but he had always been a wise, incredibly perceptive man. He patted my hand. “Disappointments on our path are the price we sometimes pay for success.” He was reassuring and offered his condolences.

I couldn’t let it go that easily. “All my grand ideas and lofty goals, all the excitement from those early heady days reduced to this. . . . Everything seems impossible now.”

My voice trailed off. I hated this realization, because I had begun this journey with such overwhelming certainty. All those early hopes, those early feelings that I was creating a monumental shift in humanity, had been reduced to this capsule failure—my utter failure. That shift—that death of a dream—was just as painful as the death of these three people. I couldn’t acknowledge the death of my dream. I had to persevere.

Professor Ettinger put his arm over my shoulder. “The purpose of life is to discover the purpose of life. This is a tragedy, but a bigger tragedy would be if you lost your faith.”

I melted into an embrace and stayed like that for a long while, just rocking back and forth on the airport couch. He understood my heartbreak and held me for a long time. With him I didn’t have to be strong or the man with all the answers. He truly was the father I had always needed. Eventually I pulled back and steeled myself to say good-bye to this wonderful man.

I arrived home in California thoroughly confused. What had just happened? To know what to do next, I had to understand the reactions of Guy de la Poterie and Terry Harrington.

My far-fetched conclusion was that there might be some hope left for those in the capsule. Although neither my heart nor my mind could believe it, I decided to keep the capsule operating for as long I could manage.

And so began three more years of filling the capsule with liquid nitrogen. I rarely dwelled on the one-week failure and certainly never mentioned it to other CSC members; I had learned well from the Mafia not to tell people more than necessary. During that time I spent thousands of dollars of my own money on my fool’s errand—I knew the one week at hot temperatures had ended everything for my three heroes. It was the most basic lesson of low-temperature biology.

One day in early October 1974, I was at the CSC office in Santa Monica when I received a phone call from Tom Porter. His six-year-old son Sam was dying of leukemia, and he wanted to discuss placing him in suspension. I scheduled a meeting for nine the next morning at Klockgether’s mortuary. When I arrived and introduced myself, Tom explained that doctors had given his son a week or two.

Tom had investigated cryonics and wanted to obtain information about storing his son’s capsule at the Chatsworth vault. He had already purchased a new upright capsule manufactured by Andonian Cryogenics, a competitor of MVE. I did a quick calculation in my head; the capsule would fit inside the vault with its lid one foot below the ceiling. All he needed was a safe, legal place to store, service, and monitor his son’s capsule.

Tom had gray hair and was very overweight, probably from overworking and dealing with his son’s illness. I agreed to meet him later that week to finalize our deal. He was an assistant district attorney, and since he already had a capsule, those two factors increased my confidence that he would keep his word and not disappoint me like so many had before. I tried asking him about his son Sam, but Tom merely described him as a sweet boy. Although quite articulate, Tom never divulged his personal turmoil.

He promised he would make all arrangements and payments to fill the capsule with liquid nitrogen each month. He also wanted to monitor all the steps of safe storage and maintenance. He trusted no one else. “The perfusion, capsule space, and security will cost ten thousand dollars, and that’s on top of the monthly liquid nitrogen replacement.” I paused and breathed loudly for emphasis. “However, if you allow another person in that capsule with your son, I’ll do it for three thousand dollars.”

He didn’t hesitate. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a wad of cash, counted off three thousand dollars, and asked, “When can I have the capsule delivered?”

I thumbed the bills and answered, “In two days.”

“Would 1:00 p.m. be okay?”

I agreed but was somewhat taken aback by the speed at which all this was transpiring. “Tom, you sure don’t waste time.”

“I can’t afford to,” he answered. “Between my job and my son being so close to death, time is invaluable to me.”

It bothered me that there was no documentation of these decisions, but Tom wanted no paperwork; he didn’t want any word of his son’s cryonic suspension getting out. He knew that his extended family would have had fierce objections. I figured an assistant DA would want a record of his agreements, but this one didn’t.

I was waiting at the vault on Thursday when the new upright capsule arrived, accompanied by a crane. I couldn’t resist touching the shiny metallic container; it already felt hot from the sun’s radiation, and I was amazed again at the temperature drop between the inside and outside of the cylinder—a 400°F difference across six inches. If I had had something like this capsule for my other patients, they would still have been with us.

Afterwards we developed a mutual trust, and he allowed me to monitor the liquid nitrogen delivery for him. Tom was dependable and always did exactly what he promised.

About a week later, on October 11, his little son passed away. After Joseph Klockgether completed the perfusion, the boy was placed into the stainless-steel capsule to await the future. Over the next three years, Tom and his wife came out several times to visit their son. And as Tom had promised, he was at the cemetery each month when the liquid nitrogen truck arrived.

On two occasions they wanted to open the capsule and view their son. Although I didn’t want to intrude on such intensely personal moments, it amazed me to see how much it meant to Tom and his wife to see their son as he appeared when he died—still young and still very much their little boy. The nitrogen hadn’t been refilled yet that day, so the liquid level was low enough that they could touch Sam’s cold face. His wife reached into the capsule with a tentative hand and fingered her precious son’s hair. She continued for several minutes, biting her lip to ward off tears. I could tell that the memories overwhelmed her. She brought back her hand as though the cold capsule had turned hot, and she buried her face into Tom’s shoulder to muffle her crying.

I had been involved with cryonics for many years, almost a decade at that point, and had been witness to some of the most tumultuous moments in people’s lives. However, I realized that cryonics provided another benefit over normal burial techniques. When a person, especially a child, dies, there are so many emotions with the first fiery flood of grief, but also so many responsibilities with the funeral and arrangements. With burial or cremation, those horrific and hectic days are the only opportunity for parents to see their child for the last time before that chance is gone forever. With cryonics, that final good-bye, that last moment of seeing their child, is delayed into the future, when parents are better able to cope with the tragedy of their child’s death. As difficult as it was for Tom and his wife to see their son, I watched the profound comfort they gained from the two visits.

I had received no money from Pauline Mandell or the Harrington brothers. Occasionally Guy de la Poterie sent me fifty or a hundred dollars. The vault was no longer a joy or my great legacy; instead it was an untenable burden pushing me into early residence at the Chatsworth cemetery. I had run out of money, energy, and the expectation that the CSC could be saved. Once I lost the hope of some guardian angel or miraculous benefactor coming to our aid, I caved. The battle was over, and I could carry the load no longer. I had nothing more to offer the cryonics program.

Three years after the capsule failure, I wrote Guy de la Poterie, explaining that due to the constantly failing capsule, lack of funds, along with my own physical and mental state, I was unable to continue. My wife had divorced me since the capsule failure, and I had neglected my children. I wrote a similar letter to the Harrington brothers. For several years I had been unable to contact Pauline Mandell, so I did not write to her.

I was broken and impoverished. Starting life over again was like climbing a mountain as a sick and naked man. Somehow, I thought, I would survive. It was late fall in 1977, and I still worked as a big-screen repairman. Almost half my salary had gone into the vault.

In that moment I felt like Sisyphus, the mythological Greek king who was punished with the task of forever rolling a rock up a steep hill, only to watch it roll back down and then have to repeat the procedure forever. Was I guilty of hubris or of too-great optimism? What was my fatal flaw?

I had taken my last step in my walk across the desert. I was barely a step away from my own demise. I had to let go, but my heart kept screaming, No! No! Don’t let go; hold on just a little longer. I could not, and as my hand slipped from the vault handle, I wept my final tear and braced myself for my life yet to come.