THE ZOMBIFIED EXPLOITATION OF CRYONICS IS JUST REPELLENT LIBBY PURVES

Yes, it’s a heartbreaking case. But LIBBY PURVES, who knows the agony of losing a child, says that for a firm to promise a dying girl the chance of returning to life is...

IT IS almost too sad, grim and gruesome to think about: a girl of 14 on her deathbed wins the right to have her body cryonically frozen. In defiance of all experience and science, she believed that in 200 years she would be resurrected. Her mother supported her and a Family Court judge finally ruled in her favour, with legal correctness but obvious doubt. It was a fractured family: the father, ill himself, was prevented over years from seeing his daughter and did not even know he was on another floor of the same hospital. He later said: ‘I have been trying so desperately to see her. I am so sad.’

An uncle wanted to help but got only a phone conversation, in which the girl said, ‘I’m dying but I’m going to come back again in 200 years’, before asking for £50,000. The eventual cost was apparently £37,000, met by her grandparents.

So this defiant, hopeful, hopeless thing happened.

With modern palliative care, death can be a quiet thing, the hours before it loving and thoughtful, care of the body respectful. Not in this case. In cryogenics everything must be done rapidly, and amid the bustle of the last hours we are told that the mother was distracted from being fully alongside her child. Nursing and mortuary staff at the hospital expressed real concern at the rapid arrival of ‘under-equipped and disorganised’ volunteers to drain and ‘vitrify’ the body and brain for transport to America.

The remains will be preserved, head downward, in liquid nitrogen, in a steel cylinder at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Until, as their publicity breezily puts it, medical technology will enable ‘full physical and mental health’ to be restored.

The girl will have read that promise online. The idea took strong hold, as a note she wrote to the court makes clear.

A part of me even admires the bravura teenage obstinacy willing to return in an unrecognisable technological world, in another country, with everyone she knew long dead. And, of course, to awaken in a body at the point of death, needing cancer treatment by some imaginary future miracle. Only a child could say breezily: ‘I’m coming back in 200 years.’

The one cheering hope is that having got her judgment and calling the judge her ‘hero’, the delusion helped her drift peacefully to the end. But face it: such resurrections have never happened. No reputable scientist thinks a body – still less a brain, with its intensely delicate structures of consciousness, memory and personality, its fleeting neurosignals – can function as it once did.

Should we not just wish this poor girl peace, and pass on?

I have tried, but sad horror persists. Physical death is real, not something we can spend our way out of. It waits for us all.

When you see a dead body, what strikes you most powerfully even through sorrow is that this is a fact: the most powerful, unarguable fact you will ever confront. Even young children understand this, stroking a dead cat or hamster in a cardboard box. They feel how different, how inanimate is this thing: dead clay with no ripple of muscle or breath. It is almost absurd: King Lear cradles his daughter Cordelia and says: ‘Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and thou no breath at all?’

The words of a funeral service begin with great Christian hope – ‘I am the resurrection and the life’ – but take a very firm line on what the body becomes: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. We are remembered, we are replaced, the world goes on. That most modern of thinkers, the late Steve Jobs of Apple, said: ‘Death is the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.’

He is right. Cruel when a life is cut too short, but death itself is non-negotiable.

Yet we are not rubbish, and respect for the corpse is traditionally deep. Some go to great lengths to retrieve a body; when there is no chance memorials are erected. The Unknown Warrior, an anonymous soldier of the First World War, was brought in ceremony to lie within the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey. Nobody may walk over that marble tomb, and royal brides since the Queen Mother have laid their bouquets on it in tribute.

WHEN our loved ones die, we treat the body with reverence because it was the home of their spirit – or personality, or identity, whatever you like to call it. With all due rites and gentleness we lay it in the earth or scatter its dust, and in doing so accept our own mortality. Then we gather and talk of the lost one, quote them, even laugh.

That’s death. As to the afterlife, people of faith believe but none of us knows for sure. That too is good. Human arrogance needs an occasional takedown. All we can do is behave well, accept responsibility for others and the world without knowing what, if anything, we will perceive after our bodies die. The one sure thing is that they will. So the zombified exploitation of cryonics, its promises of an imaginary medical future, is just repellent. Arrogant, inhuman, spoilt. Most of those in Alcor’s cylinders are not children but old rich people rejecting reality. The grimness of the present case, a poor child demanding two centuries in liquid nitrogen, is that she was duped and persuaded, conned into denial.

For children, strangely, are often better at accepting the reality of death than adults. Workers in children’s hospices, or those who had a child who knew the end was approaching, often report remarkable strength. Some children make bucket lists, and seek experiences. Wyatt Gillette wanted to be inducted as a US Marine like his father: dying at seven years old, they made him an honorary Marine, and he smiled. Jerika Bolen, opting at 14 to end painful treatment, was crowned Prom Queen in her wheelchair.

Others throw themselves into charity work: remember Kirsty Howard, desperately ill and frail all her short life, who raised money for a children’s hospice and walked out on to the pitch as an England football mascot in 2002 alongside David Beckham, with her oxygen tank. Stephen Sutton, diagnosed terminal at 15, raised more than £3million for charity on social media.

Not everyone facing early death needs to be gung-ho or charitable. Some children write letters for their siblings, or make detailed lists leaving possessions to friends. Others want explicit reassurance that their family will be OK without them: ‘permission’ to die.

But as weariness increases and resentment fades, people of all ages usually understand that death is real. The body cannot return, but memory endures and every life leaves traces.

Indeed, ten years on from our own greatest loss – when our son Nicholas died at the age of 23 – it was a small joy this year when his book was made into a play at the Edinburgh Fringe, by schoolchildren who never met him but loved his words. As he wrote himself: ‘Remember how the streets ring out for every soul that thought and felt and walked through them, in weakness and in strength.’ That has to be enough.

Death is real – we can’t spend our way out of it