Ripped and discarded tyres litter the scrubland. Among them, a microwave, a blown-out TV. An old antenna juts from the weeds by a collapsed chain-link fence. It’s January, it’s freezing, and the trees look like black bones against an overlit backdrop, a side-effect of the new LED streetlights distracting from the ruin around us by illuminating other things. Turn off a bright street where the restaurants and people are and the darkness is near total, like falling off the edge of the world, as if the game designer didn’t reach this far. The car rolls to a stop and we look out at another abandoned house. The windows droop like tired eyes. Snow is beginning to fall on the banister to the second floor, roof yawning open to the electric glow of the sky.
Detroit is – or was, depending on how optimistic you are about its future – a city of dead American dreams. At its peak in 1950, it was the fourth most populated city in the country, the numbers lured here by a booming automobile industry and the promises that came with it. Since then, the city has been in decline, a diorama of America’s rotten heart: deep-seated racism, corruption, the largest municipal bankruptcy filed in US history, the gulf between rich white people and everyone else – a striking city-wide example of the consequences of capitalism. The 1967 riots alone – by no means the first – left forty-three people dead, 7,231 arrested and 412 buildings destroyed. As the rich middle class bailed on the city, taxes went unpaid, ruins stayed ruins and time only added more: houses were burned in arson attacks the night before every Halloween. People continued to leave. The mayor tried to get those that stayed to move further in: they were living apart, in the last of the lone-standing houses on sprawling empty blocks.
Clint and I drive around in the dark, in another shitty rental car, looking for dinner, staring out at a John Carpenter set. A dirty black Dodge Challenger – an iconic car from the city’s days as a formidable motor manufacturer – rumbles past us, over cracks in the road surface that look like an earthquake shook this postcode alone. We resolve that next time I convince him to drive me across America to interview somebody, I will rent a cooler car.
In 1995, Camilo José Vergara, a Chilean photographer who would take pictures of the same buildings year after year to chart their slow decay, had suggested that the city should be celebrated, that twelve blocks in downtown Detroit should be left to disintegrate, a monument to what happens if we let things die and decompose, if we allow other life to take over. The idea was met coldly by the people who still lived there – this was a living city in need of help, not a monument to death. Now, the MotorCity Casino Hotel rises high out of the dark, shooting multicoloured neon across its facade in green-red-purple-yellow streaks; a block away, homeless people warm themselves over a bin fire. Formerly grand skyscrapers turned spectacular ruins have been demolished to make way for car parks or empty lots. The bones of old office buildings have been cleared of birds and trees and turned into hotels. While it can, in places, feel like a city that is quietly resigned to its own dying, there is heartbreakingly conspicuous hope here.
In the early 1960s, there was a different kind of hope. Motown Records were all over the Billboard Charts and the label hadn’t yet abandoned the place. Zoom out on the map and Neil Armstrong had not yet walked on the moon, but it was within reach. Zoom back in and a physics teacher called Robert Ettinger – then in his forties and increasingly aware of his own mortality, like anyone in their forties – wrote a book about how you could live forever. It was called The Prospect of Immortality and it made him, for a time, famous. He appeared on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show alongside Zsa Zsa Gabor.
The book wasn’t a promise or a guarantee, it was exactly what it said on the cover: a prospect. It’s a book about an idea – that death was a disease, and one not necessarily fatal – that began as a self-published pamphlet he believed might spark a movement if only he could get it into the right hands. His suggestion was to freeze a person at the moment of death and keep them from rot and decay until science caught up with whatever it was that killed them, reversing the damage to the point of life. The book is heavy on the science of freezing, light on how exactly the reversal of death could happen, but that’s the hope: that someone else will sort this out in the future, some greater minds in a more technologically evolved version of what we are now. The pace of scientific discovery was rapid – in Ettinger’s own lifetime, human beings went from steam trains to space travel – and he had no reason to believe it would not continue at the same speed. He was not even the first to put forth the idea that death was not as permanent as it seemed – religions, of course, have been doing that for millennia, and even Benjamin Franklin suggested something similar in 1773, wishing there was some way of embalming a dead person, maybe in a cask of Madeira, so that they might be revived a hundred years later to observe the state of America. But Ettinger was the first to take it so seriously and apply practical science to it outside of fiction. Fiction was, after all, where he had come across the idea originally, at twelve years old, in a short story by Neil R. Jones called The Jameson Satellite, published in 1931. In the story, a professor requests that after his death his body be fired into orbit, where it would be preserved indefinitely by the cold vacuum of space until it was awoken, millions of years later, by a race of mechanical men.
‘Only those embrace death who are half dead already,’ wrote Ettinger decades later, in the book that made him famous. ‘The ones who surrender are those who are already in retreat.’
Ettinger is the reason I’m in Detroit. His frozen body hangs upside down, bat-like, in a ‘cryostat’ tank inside a squat beige building a twenty-minute drive north of the unheated hotel room I froze in, horizontally, while a polar vortex blasted Michigan with arctic cold. In tanks alongside him hang his first wife, his second wife, and the first patient at the Cryonics Institute: his mother, Rhea.
Dennis Kowalski, president of the Cryonics Institute, is having a hard time trying to get his Skype to work. ‘You don’t need to see my ugly face anyhow,’ he laughs. From their website I know he’s about fifty, dark hair, a thick black moustache.
‘I think it’s kind of funny that you’re hanging all your hope on technology reviving your corpse, but it’s not even letting us do a video call without failing,’ I say as I sit back, having given up on faffing around with settings.
‘Well, I’ve always been an optimist,’ says a voice from a screen that only has me on it.
I’m speaking to Dennis to find out what it’s like to believe that death is not a permanent end, and why someone might devote this life to trying to get another one – it seems, to me, a waste of the first one. The cryonics people tend to get a bad rap in the press – they’re painted as insane, delusional, a device for comedic farce: Fry from Futurama and Austin Powers were both awakened from their pods to futures they didn’t understand, and Woody Allen’s character in Sleeper was aghast to discover all of his friends had been dead for 200 years despite eating organic rice. (It’s also because of these appearances in pop culture that ‘cryogenics’ gets confused with ‘cryonics’ – the former is a branch of physics that deals with the production and effects of very low temperatures, while it’s only the latter that preserves corpses for later revival. The confusion annoys both parties.) Reading Ettinger’s book, there’s some nutty stuff in there – mostly about women and what to do with your multiple unfrozen wives – and by the end he has convinced himself so entirely that this is possible that he is certain that ‘only a few eccentrics will insist on their right to rot’. But on the whole it seems optimistic and, above all, questioning. I wondered what kind of people in reality sign up to have their bodies frozen. When I called to find out, what I got, on the end of the line, was someone who seemed like a gentle nerd.
The Cryonics Institute has been running since 1976 and, at the time Dennis failed to get his Skype to work, had around 2,000 members, with 173 already frozen. He says there’s no one ‘type’ of person who signs up, no one religion or political leaning, but if he had to pick a majority he’d say it was probably men, probably agnostic and probably Libertarian. They skew wealthier, but with the price tag of $28,000, which can be covered by life insurance (and is considerably lower than other cryonics companies, like Alcor in Arizona, at $200,000), they have poorer people too. This was important to Ettinger; in his book he said he didn’t want his vision of the future to be so expensive that it would serve as a ‘eugenic sieve’. I tell Dennis my theory that the transhumanist movement, into which cryonics tends to get lumped, seems to be mostly men because women watch their bodies start to fail earlier, in predictable stages, and that with their closer relationship to blood and birth, they’re maybe more accepting of death and therefore less afraid – which might explain the numbers now weighted towards women working in the funeral industry. He’s not so sure, but says maybe. He says it’s not really about fearing death at all.
Young science-fiction fans, in my experience, tend to start out with a belief in a utopian future, and it’s only later, when the real world creeps in, that dystopian ideas take root in the folds of their brains. With their toy rockets in their hands they think everything will be better one day because they have no reason yet to believe otherwise. It was around this utopian bubble period, in the mid-seventies, when Dennis was around seven or eight, that he caught an episode of The Phil Donahue Show. Bob Nelson, a former TV repairman, was on the show talking about the science of cryonics and how he had, back in 1967, frozen the first man. Nelson had been a fan of Ettinger’s book, and was a leader of one of the handful of cryonics groups that had sprung up around the country. The enthusiasts had taken Ettinger’s theory and attempted to run with it.
The interview on Donahue wasn’t enough to sell Dennis on cryonics wholesale, and as spokesman for the movement Nelson didn’t mention how wrong it was all going – how the bodies of his frozen clients were stored in a garage behind a mortuary, the coolant in their failing capsules topped up ever more infrequently as the money ran out and his own personal checks bounced, before the bodies were ultimately abandoned – but it sowed a seed.
‘Then, when I was sixteen or seventeen, I would read Omni magazine, which took a lot of very deep science-fiction philosophy and brought it down to the layman’s perspective,’ says Dennis. ‘They did an article about molecular nanotechnology and the reverse engineering of life. That was the blueprint.’
Dennis has been signed up at the Cryonics Institute for the last twenty years, and has been president of the organisation – a democratically run non-profit – for the last six. It’s not his full-time job: outside of this, he’s a paramedic in Milwaukee. ‘I joke that in my day job I work in an ambulance saving lives, and in my night job I work in an ambulance to the future, should that hospital exist,’ he says. ‘It’s the same thing in both ambulances: there’s no guarantee that when you get in there we’re going to save you.’
Before I spoke to Dennis, I had assumed he would be more convinced of the idea that he himself is now a spokesperson for. He keeps saying that nobody knows this will definitely work, but crucially nobody knows it definitely won’t. ‘Anyone that says cryonics is absolutely going to work is not a scientist. Anyone who says that it absolutely won’t happen is not a scientist,’ he says. ‘The only way to find these things out is through the scientific method, which is running the experiment. We’re basically all in a collective experiment in cryonics. Self-funded, no federal funding, no outside funding. Anyone else who is getting buried or burned is in the control group. Me, I’d rather be in the experimental group than the control group.’
He does, however, say there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that cryonics isn’t as mad as it might look, that chances are leaning towards it actually working one day. He cites therapeutic hypothermia as something that is following the same line of reasoning as cryonics: lowering the temperature of the body (in this case after cardiac arrest) to slow things down and temporarily reduce the brain’s need for nutrients and oxygen, because if those needs aren’t met consciousness might never be regained. In The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future, David Wallace-Wells lists recently reanimated organisms: a 32,000-year-old bacterium in 2005, an 8-million-year-old bug in 2007, and in 2018, a worm that had been frozen in permafrost for 42,000 years. The New York Times reported that researchers had, in 2019, taken the brains out of the heads of thirty-two dead pigs and restored cellular activity to some of them. ‘Stories seem to be coming out that are slowly but surely vindicating the logic of cryonics,’ Dennis says. ‘And if cryonics doesn’t work, we’re still advancing science by proving what’s not possible. We’re also helping out in other areas: we’re dumping money into organ cryopreservation research because not only does it intrinsically benefit organ recipients, it also gets us one step closer to whole-body cryopreservation.’
Dennis says he doesn’t want to prophesy and sell cryonics like it’s some kind of religion, because that turns people off. He says the hardest thing is to get people to grasp the idea of being brought back from the dead – but we do that already, it just depends on what your definition of death is.
‘A hundred years ago, when your heart stopped, you were done,’ he says. ‘You were dead. But today we routinely “bring people back to life”. We shock them with defibrillators. We do CPR. We give them cardiac drugs. Sometimes those people walk out of the hospital, many times they don’t. Electricity sounds like Frankenstein, but it’s a big part of emergency medicine. Where would we be if we’d stuck with the notion that you can’t ever bring people back to life?’
I always found the dystopian visions of the future more convincing in science fiction. Maybe it’s all tied up in that one moment where I questioned the priest’s story about God and the light bulb, perhaps my suspicion about an entity inhabiting machinery stretched to a general distrust of robots (and priests). To me, the brutal wasteland in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road feels closer to a potential future reality, or the shining utopian facades that have rot under the surface, like ending lives at the ripe old age of thirty in Logan’s Run (in the novel it was worse – you were finished at twenty-one). Any Philip K. Dick. To read the news and not despair at the projected graph of death and burning planetary destruction seems like a nice but alien idea to me. But Dennis never reached the dystopian phase; he is still planted wide-eyed and hopeful in the belief in a possible utopia, that there will be something worth coming back for – that not only is it possible he could live forever, but that the option is desirable.
‘It might sound like I’m one of those people who can’t face death, that I have to conjure up some sort of way out,’ says the faceless voice from my speakers. ‘But as a paramedic, I have seen people with do-not-resuscitate orders, and their family members are screaming at us to do something, to bring them back to a life of painful suffering when they didn’t want to be brought back. That’s the most extreme level of death denial. You need to understand death.’
The brain that hatched this plan of corpse reanimation remains inside Robert Ettinger’s skull near the bottom of an insulated tank. The bodies are hung upside down because if there’s ever a liquid nitrogen leak they want the most important part of you to be the last thing to thaw. It’s likely they can grow you a new toe in the future, but probably not a brain – not the blueprint of who you are.
Outside of the building, Ettinger’s neighbours include a door security system store, a lighting company headquarters, an auto repair shop and a heating induction service, all surrounded by neatly trimmed lawns and an occasional sad winter tree. A parked truck sits in the lot on its own, its side bearing the promise ‘GREAT TIME PARTY RENTAL WE HAVE ALL OF YOUR PARTY NEEDS’. To get to the Cryonics Institute, you drive into this little cul-de-sac; you pass the party truck and follow the sign to the dead end.
I arrive at 10 a.m. on a snowy morning, Clint having driven through the manhole steam of Detroit to drop me off at the least space-age-looking building in town. A man in a big Midwestern puffer jacket waves his mitten at us through the glass door as we pull into the car park.
Before they moved here, the Cryonics Institute was closer to the city until they ran out of space. They don’t plan on moving again; everyone that is here will stay here, they’ll just buy up the buildings around them as the population grows. The frozen dead, slowly annexing the lighting company, the home security system head office, edging the party truck off the lot. This building is almost full, but there’s one two doors down they’ve already bought, waiting to be set up for future cryonauts.
Hillary, twenty-seven, in her purple hoodie, jeans and Ugg boots, is going to take me on a tour of the facility. It’s cold in here, but not freezing. It just feels like heating is not a thing they think about too much. Dennis mostly does his job remotely but says I’m in good hands: it’s here that the three staff members deal with the practical business of storing the dead. Along with Hillary, there’s Mike, the man with the mitten. He’s Hillary’s dad – she got him this job here, taking care of anything maintenance-related. Then there’s Andy, shaved head with glasses, wearing a green sweatshirt, who quickly shakes my hand before getting back to work in the office at the front of the building with the window that looks out on the neat lawn. Most of the day-to-day jobs here, things like patient sign-ups and membership database entries, are a toss-up between Hillary and Andy; before she started here, Andy worked alone.
Hillary has shoulder-length brown hair and a delicate face; she’s tiny, but for the last three years it has been she who deals most directly with the receiving and storing of the bodies. I drop my bag in the office and she takes me into a room not unlike the embalming room I saw in London, just emptier, tidier. Hillary herself is a trained embalmer, performing the ‘perfusions’ here, before the bodies are suspended in the tanks. (Perfusion is not a cryonics term: it broadly refers to the passage of blood – or a blood substitute – through the vessels or other natural channels in an organ or tissue. Chemotherapy drugs can be introduced to the body through perfusion. Embalming is perfusion. They just don’t call it embalming here because what they’re injecting is a different thing altogether.) There’s a white porcelain table in the middle with a lip along the edge to stop fluids hitting the floor, space around it to manoeuvre bodies and gurneys, and endless cupboards of supplies all neatly tucked away. She moves to the corner and places her hand on the side of a tarpaulin bath resting on a gurney with half a CPR doll lying inside it, explaining that this is how the body of the recently dead is stabilised and transported to the facility: submerged in a portable ice bath, with blood circulation and breathing artificially restored by a heart-lung resuscitator. The machine keeps the blood circulating while the body is in the ice water, making it cool even faster by using the body’s own machinery: its own pump, its own distribution service. They call it a ‘thumper’, like the rabbit. It looks like a toilet plunger suspended above a human chest. ‘We’ve also got the mask, which gives them oxygen, so it keeps the blood oxygenated,’ she says, pointing at the dummy’s face. ‘We try to keep as many cells alive as possible.’
If you die in America, you have to get to the Cryonics Institute within seventy-two hours if you want a perfusion – beyond that, your chances of a ‘good’ perfusion are lower – and many patients recorded on the website, where they publicly report the condition of every body, do not have a perfusion at all. To maximise your chances of making it in time, a company called Suspended Animation will (for a fee of between $60,000 and $102,000, depending on which services you select from the options menu) come and wait by your deathbed – any time wasted between death and ice will affect how well the next part of the process goes because any degeneration of the body will lessen the ability of the vascular system to distribute the solution. As soon as death is confirmed, they will place you in this bath, start the pump and bring you here. For less than $10,000 you can skip this bit, and rely solely on your local funeral director transporting your body to Hillary.
People who die in the UK have their perfusions done by embalmers trained by CI, before being shipped to the US for storage. (Kevin Sinclair, from the embalming room in London, is one of them. He said it was amazing to think that in several hundred years these people will be up and walking around again. When I asked him if he believed that to be true, he raised an eyebrow and said, ‘No comment.’) Pets, who are also frozen by CI if you’d like them to be – dogs, cats, birds, iguanas, whoever it is you want to bring with you to the future – generally get a better perfusion because the vet surgery is on the corner of this street. They go straight from being euthanised to here, arriving while they are still warm, when their blood hasn’t been given a chance to settle or clot. It’s for this reason that both Hillary and Dennis think euthanasia should be legalised for humans, but CI stays out of the conversation publicly, and at this point they do not accept any suicides, whatever the method – they don’t want the possibility of another, better life to be the reason you ended this one.
By the sink are about sixteen bottles of clear liquid. Part of Hillary’s job is to mix this liquid that takes the place of the salmon-pink embalming fluid. ‘It prevents against freezing damage,’ she says, picking up a bottle sort of apologetically, like she wished it was more interesting to look at. The way Dennis described the fluid, called CI-VM-1 (CI Vitrification Mixture One), to me over Skype, weeks ago, was that originally they would just ‘straight-freeze’ a person to liquid nitrogen temperatures and that was it – and they still do, to those people who missed the time window, or for whatever reason don’t want this part of the process to happen. But they found that water freezing in the cells causes them to rupture, and the outside of the body freezing faster than the inside of the body causes interstitial damage – ice crystals forming in the spaces between things. So they hired a cryobiologist, who came up with a fluid that would allow them to freeze a body but leave its cells undamaged: a biological antifreeze that took its inspiration from the animal kingdom, from arctic frogs that freeze in the winter and come back in the spring, hearts beating, lungs breathing. In the frogs, as the temperature drops, special proteins in their blood suck the water out of the cells, while their liver pumps out huge amounts of glucose to prop up the cell walls. Humans don’t have these proteins: when we freeze, we get frostbite and our cells collapse. This is what the liquid is trying to avoid. (For the straight-frozen patients, CI hopes that this is a problem the people in the future will have figured out. This is generally the answer to most questions.)
To inject the fluid into the body, they use a machine ordinarily used in open-heart surgery, mechanically reanimating the muscle so it performs its function as a pump and moves the chemicals around the vascular system. Hillary says it’s a more accurate method than the traditional embalming machine I saw in London, simply because the pressure is easier to control – they keep the beat of the heart around 120 bpm, a moderate exercise level in a healthy adult, so that the liquid doesn’t shoot through too fast and damage any of the vessels that are supposed to carry it. Though in principle it’s a lot like embalming, the point of the fluid here is not to swell the bodies; it doesn’t rehydrate the flesh or change the colour to make the person look alive, nor does it bloat them as they do in anatomy schools because they over-preserve them. Here, the fluid sucks the water out of the cells, dehydrating the whole body. Hillary says they look bronzed, sort of mummified. Shrunken. They take a grape and make a raisin.
The perfused body is then wheeled down the hall into the computer-controlled cooling room, where it lies in a cot at the bottom of what looks like a large chest freezer, wrapped in a shroud and insulating material similar to a sleeping bag, and strapped to a white backboard with ID tags attached – three per person. Over five and a half days it will be cooled slowly, in increments, to liquid nitrogen temperature – minus 196 degrees Celsius – the freezer spraying the body with liquid nitrogen whenever the computer tells it to. There is a laptop hooked up to it monitoring the process, and a battery backup in case the building loses power. Nothing that happens out here will affect the person cooling inside it. From there, they are lifted by the backboard out of the cooling tank via a system of ropes and chains attached to steel runners on the ceiling and lowered head first into one of the twenty-eight cryostats, the huge white cylinders that tower above us as we walk out of the perfusion room.
Hillary stops by a large rectangular container: a homemade-looking thing standing almost six feet tall with recesses in its outer walls like it was moulded in a waffle iron. White paint has dried in thick drips on the surface. She tells me that these were the first cryostats, made by hand out of fibreglass and resin by Andy, the man I met briefly in the office, who has been working here since 1985 and was there when they froze their first patient. ‘As you can imagine, it took a very long time to make, and they’re expensive, so they switched to these cylinders,’ she says, looking up at what she describes as a giant thermos bottle. These rely on no electricity to keep them cold, it all comes from within. Inside, holding up to six patients, there is a smaller cylinder, perlite insulation and a giant cork made of foam about two feet thick. Once a week, Hillary climbs the black steel ladder and spends four hours walking along the metal catwalk with a hose attached to pipes in the ceiling, topping up the level of the evaporating liquid nitrogen through a small hole in the lid of each tank.
We walk alongside them, each identical, no names anywhere. Hillary points at one of the cryostats where five small stones are lined up around the base. ‘There is a dog of a Jewish family in there,’ she says. ‘Winston was his name, and he was their service dog. They live nearby and visit every couple of months.’ It’s a Jewish tradition to place a small stone by the grave every time you visit. A rabbi told me it’s because, unlike flowers, stones do not fade. It’s about the permanence of memory, of things lasting beyond their given time on earth.
It doesn’t happen often, but people treat this place like a cemetery. Some bring stones, others bring birthday cards. You can visit as much as you like. You’re just looking at a white tank with a logo instead of a headstone with a name. ‘With funeral directing, you’re with one person and then you move on. But with these people, we’re here every day,’ she says. ‘We hear from the same family members that visit year after year. We’re taking care of these people continuously.’
A couple of tanks down the line and on the left, Hillary stops and looks up at another white cylinder, as faceless and uniform as the rest. ‘We have a young girl in here from the UK.’ This girl made the news: she was only fourteen when she died, too young to make a will, and had written a letter to the High Court in England requesting that her body be frozen after her death – she knew she was dying of cancer, had discovered cryonics on the internet and wanted a chance of a cure in the future. Reporters climbed fences to try and get photographs of the facility, they rang the phones and the doorbell to try and speak to Hillary. She hid inside until they all went home.
Robert Ettinger, who died in 2011 at the age of ninety-two, is in the tank by the door of the boardroom. He was CI’s 106th patient, his body put on ice within a minute of his last breath. Andy performed the perfusion. Despite the fact that it was his book that launched this whole thing, there is nothing to suggest he is here, and no mention of him anywhere on the walls bar one image. Ten feet away from where his body is stored, a black-and-white photo printed on canvas hangs at the head of the long boardroom table. He’s wearing a suit and tie, he’s a teacher smiling in front of a blackboard where algebraic equations are scrawled in chalk behind him. ‘With a little bit of luck,’ reads the quote on his photograph, ‘we will taste the wine of centuries unborn.’
There is maths and science here, but it’s not to dazzle, and none of it is certainty – all of it is a shrug and a maybe. There are no neon lights or promises of living forever on the walls – this meeting room looks no more technologically advanced than any other, they just have more inspirational quotes by Arthur C. Clarke. ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ The lights here are a little brighter, the indoor plants a little less funereal. There are no boxes of tissues placed on tables or on the arms of sofas. They’ve tried to make it a hopeful place.
This is the room where people come to ask any questions they want about the process before they sign up to have their bodies frozen. Hillary is the one who answers most of them. We sit and watch the memorial video, the pictures of some of the 155 pets in the building looping on the widescreen TV at the other end of the table. There goes Winston the service dog, a fluffy black poodle thing with ears that curl out like bunches. Angel, Thor, Misty, Shadow, Bunny, Rutgar. A black Labrador holds the screen just long enough for me to notice her red varnished nails. Then there’s the people: old people, young people, Edgar W. Swank – president and last surviving founder of the American Cryonics Society, the oldest cryonics organisation still in existence – wearing the kind of glasses that only exist in science-fiction authors’ photos. There are too many smiling young women who have died of incurable cancers. There’s a lady from Hong Kong. Hillary remembers the ones she was there for, points them out as they flash by. ‘She was young, I think she was in an accident. Linda, she was young too – cancer. He was recent – a heart attack.’
The Cryonics Institute’s busiest year was 2018, with sixteen patients entering their cryostats. A lot of them were post-mortem sign-ups by their families, which Hillary thinks is probably down to the fact that word is spreading. Most of the new sign-ups are younger people – twenties, thirties. ‘I think our age group sees a lot of potential with the technology,’ she says. I ask if it’s really about the trust in technology, or if it has something to do with the fear of death.
‘Maybe a little of both,’ she says. ‘But I feel like, most of the time, it is more about just extending their life, and they see that possibility in the technology. People don’t very often say that they’re afraid of death and that’s why they’re doing this, but I do think it’s part of it. I don’t really think anybody wants to die.’
I assumed that someone who works here every day freezing the dead would have signed up to be one of them. But so far Hillary has not. ‘It’s not that I don’t see the technology or believe in it, because I do. It’s just a personal choice for me – I don’t know if I want to come back,’ she says, sounding not sad but pragmatic. ‘I mean, life’s hard. It’s a struggle.’ Her family aren’t interested in cryonics, and she sees no point in coming back without them. She met her husband in mortuary school, and his family run six funeral homes in the area – she worked for them for a time, before she came here. Death has always been a certainty for him and he sees no need to change it. But I wondered when it became one for her.
‘My mum got sick when I was fourteen,’ she says. ‘That was the wake-up call, because she had brain cancer and we knew she was going to die. I grew up very fast.’ Two years later, her mother died, and because it had been a last request, her coffin lid was closed at the funeral; she didn’t want people to see where part of her skull had been removed in surgeries, she didn’t want them to see the weight gain from the steroids, she didn’t want people to see her looking completely unlike herself. ‘I understand her reasoning. But it bothered me,’ says Hillary. ‘I sat there looking at the coffin thinking, Did they really put her in there? What did they do with her?’ It’s Hillary’s story, but it feels like I could have told it. In mine, I was twelve, and it was my friend in the coffin, but the scene is the same. How many people, especially children trying to understand, have, like us, sat in a church looking at a closed lid, thinking exactly the same things?
Something she misses now about funereal embalming is making a person look normal for their family again – she misses plumping up the withered shell of cancer patients, returning the colour to pallid cheeks. Because ultimately, all of this, for Hillary, is about caring for people. She had been the family of the sick person, she knew the strain and the anguish, and she learned from that experience what could be done better. She tried nursing school, but discovered sick people can be mean. She switched to mortuary school, worked in a funeral home, and liked everything about it except for speaking in front of the living – she’s shy and quiet, and preferred being in the back room, on her own, with the body. And that’s exactly what she does here.
She sounds apologetic again, like she should be more upbeat about the possibility of more life. ‘I’m happy to be involved in this,’ she says, the pictures of faces still flashing by on the screen at the end of the table. ‘I feel like I’m doing something good. We don’t know if it’s for sure going to work, but I feel like I’m helping people get a chance.’
I’ll be honest, I thought I was going to come here and find crazy people. I’ve spent so much time around those who work with death, who never question the finality of it, who work within the bounds of nature to make it less frightening than it feels, or show that it has worth. I thought I was going to meet people here who were certain of their ability to be revived, sure in their belief that it was also a good idea. I thought I would have to put on a reporter poker face, refrain from rolling my eyes at the idea that death was something that could be obliterated, that grief might be something you could avoid because the person wasn’t really dead. But the people who visit this facility, who treat these cryostats as they would a grave, know grief all too well. For some, I’m sure, cryonics is the subconscious denial of death made conscious and ridiculous. But for others, this isn’t the denial of death so much as humans allowing hope to glint in a night of despair. Hillary has thought about death to the point of zeroing in on the loneliness of eternal life – what is worth coming back for if everyone you love is gone? Then there is Dennis’s qualified optimism, hedging his bets, preferring to be the experimental patient and not the control, while accepting none of this might work. There is more consideration here, more empathy than I expected to find in an institute founded on the belief that they could one day cheat the most fundamental fact of life. I came here to find out what it’s like to live believing you won’t die – that you won’t ever meet the kind of death workers I have met – but that answer just isn’t here.
Ultimately, I think, whether or not cryonics actually works may be a moot point. With climate change and the outlook for our continued existence on this planet looking bleak, there may never come a chance to find out. I personally don’t think it will work, nor do I think it would be desirable if it did: Toni Morrison wrote that anything coming back to life hurts, and I believe her. Life is meaningful because it ends; we are brief blips on a long timeline colliding with other people, other unlikely collections of atoms and energy that somehow existed at the same time we did. Even in the best of circumstances, being reanimated could result in a permanent homesickness for a time and a place you cannot return to, a time and a place that no longer exist. But if none of this is hurting anybody – if it helps these people live, and if it helps them die – I see no reason to deprive them of their experiment, or to mock it. I like their optimism, but I do not share it. We do what we can to get by. It’s a lullaby on a deathbed.
The next day, as my plane leaves Detroit Metro Airport, the same airport that receives the bodies destined for the cryostats, I look down at the snow and ice. Down there, somewhere, is the Cryonics Institute, where someone is on call at any hour of the day, any day of the year, ready to receive the hopeful dead. Maybe Hillary is walking the catwalk, filling up the tanks of people who hung those hopes on an ever-replenishing board of members who will advocate for them while they sleep, if they wake. From up here the snow brings out the footprints of the long-dead houses of Detroit like bark rubbings. The remaining houses stand frozen and alone, among the ghosts.