Seen for the first time – the frozen tomb she shares with FIVE others
THIS is the final resting place of ‘JS’, the 14-year-old British girl who fought for the right to be frozen after her death.
Inside the 10ft high white fibreglass vat of liquid nitrogen – pictured for the first time – her body is stored upside down, strapped to a wooden plank, wrapped in a sheet and nylon sleeping bag. Alongside her in the tank are five other bodies.
Yesterday I stood next to this frozen grave and shivers ran down my spine. This was the most surreal of cemeteries.
The girl – known only as ‘patient 143’ – arrived at the controversial Cryonics Institute in Clinton Township, Michigan, eight days after her death last month in Britain from a rare form of cancer.
Her ‘grave’ is stamped with the code HSSV-6-18 and stands inside a vast warehouse on a scruffy industrial estate on the outskirts of Detroit. She is the youngest of the 145 bodies stashed in 21 ‘cryostat’ tanks at minus 196 C. The bodies of 15 other Britons who believe one day they could be bought back to life are in adjoining containers.
Smaller tanks contain dogs, cats, birds, an iguana and a hamster belonging to a London woman who also plans to be frozen and stored at the institute.
The tank containing patient 143 has been sealed shut. But operations manager Andy Zawacki checks the cloudy liquid nitrogen levels daily through a peep hole.
Zawacki, a 50-year-old single man who inevitably plans to be frozen at the institute after his death, often sleeps in a side room instead of making the two-hour drive home.
He started as a part-time handyman here 30 years ago – when there was just one frozen body – and helped to design some of the first tanks. In the early days pets were put in alongside humans.
‘We usually have six human bodies to a tank but one only has five because there’s a 32st man in it and he takes up more room,’ said Mr Zawacki.
‘People ask if they can be frozen alongside their loved ones but we can’t do that because once a tank is sealed it is sealed.’
Dogs and cats are treated exactly like humans, with their bodies being slowly cooled down in a mortuary like ‘perfusion room’ before they are put into the tanks.
Mr Zawacki is not allowed to talk about patient 143 and could not say whether her family had visited the premises, which includes a room of filing cabinets full of photos, DVDs and keepsakes belonging to the people frozen there.
Meticulous records – locked in other filing cabinets – are used to identify every frozen body on the premises.
For what is technically a giant freezer, the concrete-floored building is surprisingly warm. A small domestic humidifier hums near ‘patient 143’ and a wall-mounted electric heater is switched on to high.
A small section of the main warehouse is given over to the office kitchen – there’s a regular fridge freezer, microwave, sink and coffee pot.
Some families make yearly pilgrimages or send flowers on anniversaries. These are placed in the ‘memorial room’ where a large TV shows pictures of the departed on a constant loop.
There are three plastic plants, two bouquets of false flower and a fake log fire in the corner.
It was probably the only room in the warehouse that felt like a funeral parlour.
There is a fake log fire in the corner of the room