Speaker 1: Pushkin Alas Archive listeners. Welcome to our new six episode
Speaker 1: series called The Deadline. Last year, Jill Lapour, the acclaimed
Speaker 1: New York writer, American historian, and founding host of the show,
Speaker 1: published a book called The Deadline. It's a compilation of
Speaker 1: year's worth of beautiful essays Jill's written. We've chosen six
Speaker 1: to bring you in this series, and each week for
Speaker 1: the next six weeks, Jill's going to read one of
Speaker 1: her essays and then stick around after to talk about
Speaker 1: its craft and themes. To start, we have one of
Speaker 1: my personal favorite essays by Jill the Iceman about the
Speaker 1: history of cryogenic freezing and the perils of being unable
Speaker 1: to let go of the past. In our conversation, Jill
Speaker 1: and I talked a bit about where this very strange
Speaker 1: essay began and the moral challenges of writing about a
Speaker 1: living person.
Speaker 2: This is a crazy origin. Sorry, I don't think I've
Speaker 2: ever told this before, but I had been writing for
Speaker 2: The New Yorker for a bunch of years and just
Speaker 2: doing book reviews. Not just I mean, I love that work.
Speaker 2: But my editor said, do you want to profile somebody?
Speaker 2: And I was like, like a living person, Okay, here's
Speaker 2: the essay.
Speaker 1: Stick around after for our conversation.
Speaker 3: The iceman Robert C.
Speaker 2: W Ettinger, who thinks death is for chumps, drives a
Speaker 2: rusty white Chevy Lumina with a bumper sticker on the
Speaker 2: rear that reads Choose life. Edinger is ninety one years old,
Speaker 2: bent and crooked. His face is splotched, his goatee grizzled,
Speaker 2: his gray hair wispy and unkempt. He leans on a
Speaker 2: worn wooden cane and wears a thick orthopedic shoe on
Speaker 2: his left foot. His legs were smashed when he was
Speaker 2: hit by German mortar fire in November nineteen forty four,
Speaker 2: just before the Battle of the Bulge. He spent four
Speaker 2: years in an Army hospital where he had bone grafts
Speaker 2: and skin grafts and diabiotics saved his life. More recently,
Speaker 2: he has undergone angioplasty, cataract surgery, a hemorrhoid dectomy, and
Speaker 2: prostate surgery twice. That Edinger endures is a miracle of science. Actuarily,
Speaker 2: chances are good they'll be dying soon, and if the
Speaker 2: going gets much tougher, he'll kill himself. He's planned that
Speaker 2: down to the last detail. He has one concern. The problem,
Speaker 2: of course with suicide is that if he don't do
Speaker 2: it right, you face autopsy, he told me, and then
Speaker 2: you're no good for freezing.
Speaker 3: Edinger is a.
Speaker 2: Founder of the cryonics movement. When he dies, the blood
Speaker 2: will be drained from his body, anti freeze will be
Speaker 2: pumped into his arteries, and holes will be drilled into
Speaker 2: his skull, after which he'll be stored in a vat
Speaker 2: of liquid nitrogen at minus three hundred and twenty degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 2: He expects to be defrosted some time between fifty and
Speaker 2: two hundred years from now by scientists who will make
Speaker 2: him young and strong and tireless. Edinger has already frozen
Speaker 2: his mother and his two wives, along with ninety two
Speaker 2: other people who await resurrect inside giant freezers and a
Speaker 2: building five minutes away from his house in Clinton Township, Michigan.
Speaker 2: I went out to Michigan to meet Edger one May.
Speaker 2: Clinton Township population ninety five thousand, six hundred and forty
Speaker 2: eight at the last census ninety five thousand, seven hundred
Speaker 2: and forty three if you count the corpses at the
Speaker 2: Cryonics Institute. Our patients are not truly dead in any
Speaker 2: fundamental sense, Edinger says, lies twenty miles northeast of Detroit.
Speaker 2: The township is named for New York's Erie Canal Building
Speaker 2: Governor DeWitt Clinton. Eastern Nurse began arriving in droves soon
Speaker 2: after the canal was completed in eighteen twenty five. Ground
Speaker 2: was broken for a canal to Kalamazoo in eighteen thirty eight,
Speaker 2: a year after Michigan joined the Union. But then the
Speaker 2: railroad came at the Clinton Township historic village, which consists
Speaker 2: of a log cabin, an old meetinghouse, and a wishing well.
Speaker 2: The grass was squishy, as if someone had left the
Speaker 2: sprinklers on too long. Actually it was the old abandoned
Speaker 2: Clinton Kalamazoo Canal Oozing up the past has a way
Speaker 2: of doing that. There are only three ways to go
Speaker 2: when you die. You can be buried, burned, or frozen.
Speaker 2: If there is no God, Edinger says, your only chance
Speaker 2: at an afterlife is option three. I decided to take
Speaker 2: a closer look at options one and two. Driving along
Speaker 2: Cass Avenue, I passed the first Presbyterian Church, where a
Speaker 2: sign out front read life is short. So pray hard
Speaker 2: Down the road, I stopped at Clinton Grove Memorial Park,
Speaker 2: which was established in eighteen fifty five and is the
Speaker 2: oldest burial ground around. A canopy of oaks and elms
Speaker 2: shelters six thousand nineteenth century dead vacancies remain. A flashing
Speaker 2: sign cycled through three messages Cremations Base three hundred and
Speaker 2: ninety five dollars monuments sold here thanks Spring. Across the
Speaker 2: street are two tombstone firms, Lincoln Granite Family owned and
Speaker 2: operated since nineteen o three and Clinton Grove Granite Works,
Speaker 2: established nineteen twenty nine.
Speaker 3: Both offices were.
Speaker 2: Closed, so I browsed through the outdoor displays gravestones of
Speaker 2: pink and gray granite, their borders engraved with stock sentiments
Speaker 2: Forever in our Hearts. Inside two valentines in God's Care
Speaker 2: on a banner beneath a cross in the middle of
Speaker 2: each stone, A polished empty space awaits only a pair
Speaker 2: of dates and someone's name. I tried to think Spring.
Speaker 2: The Cryonics Institute occupies a seven thousand square foot brick
Speaker 2: fronted warehouse in an industrial park behind the township's water
Speaker 2: and sewerage building. Past a shabby waiting room is the
Speaker 2: small office of Andy's a wacky Andy constitutes half of
Speaker 2: Sea's full time staff. He is also one of Sea
Speaker 2: Eye's more than eight hundred members, which means that he
Speaker 2: plans to be frozen when he dies. Lifetime members pay
Speaker 2: twelve hundred and fifty dollars to join and twenty eight
Speaker 2: thousand dollars upon death. They are encouraged to pay by
Speaker 2: making the institute the beneficiary of their life insurance policies.
Speaker 2: On site, Andy wears a lab coat as if he
Speaker 2: were a scientist or a doctor, but mostly he's a handyman.
Speaker 2: He's been working for c I since he graduated from
Speaker 2: high school. He's lumpy and balding and soft spoken, but
Speaker 2: other than that, not a bit like Peter Lorie. He
Speaker 2: answered the door and took me into the office where
Speaker 2: Robert Edinger was waiting. I started to say, hello, you
Speaker 2: want to see it? Edinger asked. Andy let us down
Speaker 2: the hall and through a door into a storage area
Speaker 2: with fluorescent lights and sixteen foot high ceilings. Almost everything
Speaker 2: in the room was white or silver, like the inside
Speaker 2: of a refrigerator just off the truck from Sears. It
Speaker 2: sounded like a refrigerator too. A faintly throbbing. Oh. There
Speaker 2: were fourteen cylindrical freezers. They looked like propeene tanks, the
Speaker 2: kind you attached to your gas grille, except that they
Speaker 2: were about ten feet tall and six feet wide. Each
Speaker 2: held six patients. All but four were filled. There were
Speaker 2: also three older rectangular freezers. And then there was a
Speaker 2: stainless steel thermis about out the size of a rain barrel,
Speaker 2: and that's where Edinger was headed. He lifted the lid.
Speaker 2: Liquid nitrogen wafted out. Cats, he said. He blew into
Speaker 2: the container and waved his hand trying to clear the vapor.
Speaker 2: Can't see much, I guess. I peered in, I blew,
Speaker 2: we blew together. I couldn't see a thing. Cats in there,
Speaker 2: I asked, peering blowing.
Speaker 3: Yep, how many? Don'nut?
Speaker 2: Andy interjected, We've got about sixty pets, mostly dogs and cats,
Speaker 2: a few birds, Edinger added. He closed the lid. I
Speaker 2: stared at the giant freezers. Are they upside down? Better
Speaker 2: for the brain on thawing? I guess I pictured hibernating bats. Well,
Speaker 2: not the first ones, Edinger explained. We put them in horizontally.
Speaker 2: Everyone else in the cylinders is upside down and the
Speaker 2: canisters or something within the cylinders.
Speaker 3: Nope, he shook his head.
Speaker 2: Sleeping bags, just regular sleeping bags like from Kmart, No, Andy,
Speaker 2: said Walmart. Edinger, leaning on his cane, surveyed the room.
Speaker 2: Your mother and your two wives, I began, hesitantly. Are
Speaker 2: they all in this room?
Speaker 1: Yep?
Speaker 2: And where?
Speaker 3: No idea? He shrugged. My mother and my.
Speaker 2: First wife used to be over there, he said, pointing
Speaker 2: to one corner of the room, but we moved them
Speaker 2: over there. He pointed to the cylinders, Andy, do.
Speaker 3: You know where they are? That one?
Speaker 2: Andy indicated one of the cylinders with his chin. Or
Speaker 2: maybe that one one of those two I can check,
Speaker 2: Edinger slightly sheepish.
Speaker 3: We have a chart.
Speaker 2: Robert Edinger was born in Atlantic City in December of
Speaker 2: nineteen eighteen. His mother's family came from Odessa. His father
Speaker 2: was born in Germany and about eineteen twenty two, the
Speaker 2: Edingers moved to Detroit. Edinger's father ran a furniture story,
Speaker 2: and the family lived in a house on Calvert Street,
Speaker 2: where in nineteen twenty seven, when he was eight years old,
Speaker 2: Edinger started reading Amazing Stories, the first magazine of What,
Speaker 2: Its editor, Hugo Gernsbeck called scientif fiction extravagant fiction today
Speaker 2: cold fact tomorrow. Much in Gernsback stories has come true, rockets, television, computers,
Speaker 2: cell phones. Gernsbeck stories also revisited a literary perennial immortality.
Speaker 2: Stories about immortality are ancient. They're part of every religion.
Speaker 2: They riddle myths and legends, and they always contain an
Speaker 2: argument with history, because to live forever is to conquer
Speaker 2: time as much as it is to conquer death. About
Speaker 2: a century and a half ago, stories about immortality got
Speaker 2: mixed up with stories about scientists. In eighteen forty five,
Speaker 2: Edgar Allan Poe wrote The Facts in the Case of
Speaker 2: m Valdemar, about a mesmerist who hypnotizes a dying man
Speaker 2: at the instant of his death and keeps him in
Speaker 2: a trance for seven months. When he tries to lift
Speaker 2: the trance, the poor man cries, for God's sake, quick,
Speaker 2: quick put me to sleep, or quick waken me quick,
Speaker 2: I say to you that I am dead, and promptly
Speaker 2: melts into a pool of putrescence.
Speaker 3: In a Thousand Deaths.
Speaker 2: In early Jack London short story from eighteen ninety nine,
Speaker 2: the narrator's mad scientist's father repeatedly kills and revives him,
Speaker 2: leaving him dead for longer and longer stretches. Another time,
Speaker 2: after being suffocated, he kept me in cold storage for
Speaker 2: three months, not permitting me to freeze or decay. Rot
Speaker 2: is always a problem for the living dead, which is
Speaker 2: why resurrectionists borrow a good deal from methods used in
Speaker 2: preserving food. In seventeen sixty six, the Scottish surgeon John
Speaker 2: Hunter tried to animate frozen fish. Benjamin Franklin thought that
Speaker 2: if he could be preserved in a vat of Madeira wine,
Speaker 2: he would have liked very much to see what the
Speaker 2: world was like in a century or two. People used
Speaker 2: to eat their food fresh, can salted, until someone got
Speaker 2: the idea to sell pond ice, and then those who
Speaker 2: could afford it paid to have ice delivered by the iceman.
Speaker 2: Starting in the eighteen nineties, housewives could rent lockers and
Speaker 2: cold storage warehouses. All this made for some fantastic sign
Speaker 2: to fiction. In January nineteen thirty, Gernswick published The Corpse
Speaker 2: That Lived. A man who dies in a plane crash
Speaker 2: in the year twenty twenty five is immersed in a
Speaker 2: bathtub of ice cubes and brought back to life by
Speaker 2: an electric pulse. The next month's issue included the iceman
Speaker 2: Marcus Publius, frozen in Rome in fifty nine BCE is
Speaker 2: defrosted in nineteen twenty eight by a professor who's remarkably
Speaker 2: handy with an electric blanket. Edinger dates his interest in
Speaker 2: immortality to nineteen thirty one, when, at the age of twelve,
Speaker 2: he read The Jameson Satellite, in which a dying professor
Speaker 2: has himself entombed in a rocket has launched into the
Speaker 2: cold storage of space forty million years pass, whereupon a
Speaker 2: race of mechanical men trans plant Jameson's brain into a
Speaker 2: body like theirs, steel head probing tentacles, so that he,
Speaker 2: too can be an everlasting zorum. I grew up with
Speaker 2: the expectation that one day we would learn how to
Speaker 2: reverse aging. Eddinger has said, immortality is no good if
Speaker 2: you're doomed to decrepitude. When Edinger was shot in the
Speaker 2: Second World War, he thought naturally about death. In the hospital,
Speaker 2: he wrote the kind of fiction that he had read
Speaker 2: as a boy. The Penultimate Trump was published in nineteen
Speaker 2: forty eight in a gernsback knockoff called Startling Stories, and
Speaker 2: tells of H. T. Haworth, who is ninety two years
Speaker 2: old and survives only because his doctors have managed to
Speaker 2: cobble him together. They gave him gland extracts, they gave
Speaker 2: him vitamins, They give him blood transfusions. They gave him
Speaker 2: false teeth, eyeglasses, arch supports. They cut out his Verico's veins,
Speaker 2: his appendix one of his kidneys. Haworth, pursuing immortality with
Speaker 2: the same ruthlessness with which he had pursued in ill
Speaker 2: gotten fortune, pays a brilliant young scientist to put him
Speaker 2: to sleep in a nice refrigerator and told people really
Speaker 2: know something about the body. The scientist says, we'd better
Speaker 2: put him in a vault. In Michigan very safe country geologically,
Speaker 2: Michigan is also where freezers come from. In nineteen twenty three,
Speaker 2: the year after the Edingers moved to Detroit, a company
Speaker 2: called frigid Air, owned by General Motors and based in Detroit,
Speaker 2: began selling refrigerators and cabinets for home use. A chemist
Speaker 2: hired by General Motors developed free on twelve. In the
Speaker 2: nineteen thirties, General Foods launched Bird's Eye Frozen foods. By
Speaker 2: nineteen forty four, more than eighty five percent of American
Speaker 2: homes had refrigerators. When the war ended, Americans had babies
Speaker 2: and built suburbs and bought appliances. Two hundred thousand freezers
Speaker 2: were manufactured in nineteen forty six, and twice as many
Speaker 2: the following year. H. D. Halworth makes his arrangements in secret,
Speaker 2: convinced that if anyone found out what he was doing,
Speaker 2: everyone would dem man a frigid air instead of a coffin.
Speaker 2: He dies, the scientist puts him in a freezer. Three
Speaker 2: centuries later, he awakens naked in a room with a
Speaker 2: beautiful woman doctor and observes that he is young, strong, and,
Speaker 2: to his astonished delight, ready a long forgotten stimulus performed
Speaker 2: its ancient function. Unfortunately, things don't turn out as.
Speaker 3: Well as he had hoped.
Speaker 2: Word had got out and everybody had started going into
Speaker 2: the Freezertoria. In the absence of any expectation of heaven.
Speaker 2: People had begun behaving very badly. Scientists had therefore invented
Speaker 2: the Farbinstein probe to find out if a sleeper had
Speaker 2: ever sinned. After scanning Hallworth's brain, the probe sentences him
Speaker 2: to a penal colony on a planet that used to
Speaker 2: be called Mars. What do they call it now? He asks,
Speaker 2: Now they call it Hell. Inside the Chronics Institute, I
Speaker 2: stood with Edinger, contemplating Hallwarth and finding it hard not
Speaker 2: to think about the Cerebral Library, which appeared in Amazing
Speaker 2: Stories two months before the Jameson satellite, and which involves
Speaker 2: a mad scientist who hires a Chinese surgeon to help
Speaker 2: him collect five hundred brains and glass jars. This place
Speaker 2: reminded me of a library too, or more of an archive,
Speaker 2: a place where people deposit their papers the contents of
Speaker 2: their heads when they're dead, so that someone, some future historian,
Speaker 2: can find them and bring them back to life. Have
Speaker 2: you got any neurrows, I asked. A neurro is a
Speaker 2: severed head. The theory is that scientists in the future,
Speaker 2: like the Zorums, will give you a new body, so
Speaker 2: why bother saving the old one if your brain is
Speaker 2: all they'll need. In two thousand and two, when Red
Speaker 2: Sox baseball great Ted Williams died, his head was sawed
Speaker 2: off and frozen. It is now stored at the Alcore
Speaker 2: Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona. Alcore, with some nine
Speaker 2: hundred members and eighty nine patients, is Seay's chief rival,
Speaker 2: although it charges a great deal more for eternal life.
Speaker 2: After Williams died, his oldest daughter insisted that her father
Speaker 2: had not wanted to be frozen, and produced a will
Speaker 2: in which he stated that he wished to be cremated,
Speaker 2: whereupon his son found in the trunk of Williams's car
Speaker 2: a piece of scrap paper that said something about biostasis.
Speaker 2: Edinger has appeared on ABC World News Tonight and has
Speaker 2: been interviewed by The New York Times, where he was
Speaker 2: referred to as doctor Edinger. Elsewhere, reporters have called him
Speaker 2: a Michigan physics professor. Edinger has two master's degrees, one
Speaker 2: in physics and the other in mathematics, both from Wayne
Speaker 2: State University, which he attended on the GI bill.
Speaker 3: After the war.
Speaker 2: Many decades ago, he taught at Highland Park Community College,
Speaker 2: a school that no longer exists. He doesn't call himself
Speaker 2: doctor or professor, but he does consider himself a scientist
Speaker 2: in so far as he has a scientific attitude neuro preservation,
Speaker 2: has a scientific addictude two, but that doesn't make it
Speaker 2: a science. It's more like extremely optimistic cosmetic surgery. It
Speaker 2: promises to cure hair loss, wrinkles, sen essence, impotence, and
Speaker 2: death all at once. Ah.
Speaker 3: Yes, but will it work.
Speaker 2: It'll be going too far to say that stranger things
Speaker 2: have happened because they haven't. Reanimating and rejuvenating the dead
Speaker 2: would be several orders of magnitude stranger then say landing
Speaker 2: on the moon. But it does boast a handful of
Speaker 2: somewhat prominent promoters and a much larger group of defenders
Speaker 2: whose position amounts to what the hell's worth a try.
Speaker 2: Ralph Merkel, a former professor of computer science at Georgia
Speaker 2: Tech who now teaches at a place called Singularity University,
Speaker 2: serves on Alcore's board of directors. Merkell happens to be
Speaker 2: the grand nephew of Fred Merkel, whose base running error
Speaker 2: he failed to touch second cost the New York Giants
Speaker 2: the National League pennant in nineteen o eight, an error
Speaker 2: known forever after as Merkell's boner. The MIT professor Marvin Minsky,
Speaker 2: who will await resurrection at Alcore, emailed me in lieu
Speaker 2: of an explanation this helpful chart If kuronics works and
Speaker 2: you sign up, you live. If it doesn't work, you
Speaker 2: die and lose your life insurance. But if you do
Speaker 2: nothing either way, you die, which looks a lot like
Speaker 2: this way of thinking. If God exists and you pray hard,
Speaker 2: you live, and if God doesn't exist, you die. But
Speaker 2: if you do nothing, you die either way, and which well,
Speaker 2: altogether different from faith, is another way of trying.
Speaker 3: To cover all the bases.
Speaker 2: As for its scientific plausibility, credentialed laboratory scientists who conduct
Speaker 2: peer reviewed experiments having to do with the storage of
Speaker 2: organic tissue at very low temperatures embryos, for instance, or
Speaker 2: organs for transplant, do not generally think the dead will
Speaker 2: one day awaken. The consensus appears to be that when
Speaker 2: you try to defrostoprozen corpse, you get mush, and even
Speaker 2: if in the future scientists could repair the damage done
Speaker 2: to cells by freezing and thawing, what they would have
Speaker 2: at best is a cadaver. Merkele believes that nanotechnology will
Speaker 2: solve this problem. Microscopic robots will repair the cells one
Speaker 2: by one, but as Edinger himself points out, anyone wanting
Speaker 2: to resurrect and rejuvenate the dead must complete four tasks.
Speaker 3: Cure the person of.
Speaker 2: What killed her, reverse the decay that set in between
Speaker 2: death and freezing, repair the damage done by the freezing itself,
Speaker 2: and make her young again. Even Orpheus would be daunted,
Speaker 2: and of course success would also seem to depend on
Speaker 2: whether the people doing the freezing are doing it well.
Speaker 2: On August eighteenth, two thousand and three, Sports Illustrated published
Speaker 2: an investigative report by Tom Verducci, using tapes, photographs, and
Speaker 2: documents provided by Larry Johnson, Alcore's chief operating officer at
Speaker 2: the time. Forduci described how Williams's head had been shaved,
Speaker 2: drilled with holes, accidentally cracked as many as ten times,
Speaker 2: and moved among three receptacles until it was finally put
Speaker 2: in a liquid nitrogen filled steel can that resembles a
Speaker 2: lobster pot. Alcore denies that the head was mishandled no.
Speaker 2: Edinger declared, what don't do neuros.
Speaker 3: But Andy began? Oh right.
Speaker 2: In nineteen ninety nine, a chronic's firm called cry O
Speaker 2: Care went under. We do have heads, Edinger said transfers.
Speaker 2: Robert Edinger announced the dawn of what he called the
Speaker 2: freezer error at the height of the Cold War in
Speaker 2: nineteen forty nine, he met his first wife, Elaine, at
Speaker 2: a Zionists meeting. In the nineteen fifties, they moved to
Speaker 2: the suburbs and had two children. In the basement of
Speaker 2: their house in Oak Park, Michigan, Edinger built a fallout
Speaker 2: shelter and waited for a scientist to read Penultimate Trump
Speaker 2: and turned to day's extravagant fiction into Tomorrow's cold fact. Finally,
Speaker 2: he decided to do it himself. In nineteen sixty two,
Speaker 2: he wrote a sixty page manifesto and sent a copy
Speaker 2: to Frederick Pohle, the editor of the science fiction magazine
Speaker 2: Worlds of Tomorrow. Pole, who was a regular guest on
Speaker 2: an all night New York AM radio broadcast, The Long
Speaker 2: John Neble Show, arranged for Edinger to be invited. One
Speaker 2: thing led to another, and eventually Thomas McCormick, a junior
Speaker 2: editor at Doubleday, agreed to publish Edinger's manifesto. The Prospect
Speaker 2: of Immortality appeared in nineteen sixty four, the year Doctor
Speaker 2: Strangelove hit theaters. Through that lens, mortality begins to look
Speaker 2: rather a lot like mutual assured destruction and immortality at
Speaker 2: three hundred and twenty degrees below, like nothing so much
Speaker 2: as a fabulously air conditioned fallout shelter. In Strangelove, the
Speaker 2: world faces nuclear armageddon on orders from the US Air
Speaker 2: Force General, who was convinced of a Communist conspiracy to
Speaker 2: sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. American
Speaker 2: airmen have dropped a bomb on Russia, thereby triggering the
Speaker 2: Soviets doomsday machine. Everyone on the planet is about to die.
Speaker 2: From the war room in Washington, the US President, played
Speaker 2: by Peter Sellers, entertains proposals made by his scientific advisor,
Speaker 2: Doctor Strangelove. Also Sellers Strangelove, Mister President, I would not
Speaker 2: rule out the chance to preserve a nucleus of human specimens.
Speaker 2: It would be quite easy at the bottom of some
Speaker 2: of our deeper mind shafts. President, how long would you
Speaker 2: have to stay down there? Strangelove pulls out a circular
Speaker 2: slide rule.
Speaker 3: Well, let's see now, hmm.
Speaker 2: I think possibly of one hundred years after the Manhattan Project,
Speaker 2: after Spotneck, after dishwashers and electric mixers, either scientists and
Speaker 2: engineers were on the verge of solving everything in which case,
Speaker 2: go into the freezer because the world will be even
Speaker 2: better when you wake up, Or someone was about to
Speaker 2: launch an atomic bomb, in which case, go into the
Speaker 2: freezer because maybe you'll survive Before long. Edener predicted the
Speaker 2: objectors will include only a handful of eccentrics. Edinger conceded
Speaker 2: that the logistics of freezing the dead might prove difficult
Speaker 2: at first, especially and what he called the retarded nations,
Speaker 2: where makeshifts may be necessary to stretch the rupees, pesos.
Speaker 3: Et cetera.
Speaker 2: In poor hot countries, bodies will be stored in vaults
Speaker 2: insulated with straw and cooled with dry ice, where in
Speaker 2: all likelihood they will simply rot.
Speaker 3: No worries.
Speaker 2: It will not at first greatly matter how skillfully the
Speaker 2: bodies are preserved, so long as.
Speaker 3: Hope is preserved.
Speaker 2: But if no one ever dies, won't there be too
Speaker 2: many people on the planet. The people could simply agree
Speaker 2: to share the available space in shifts. Edener suggested going
Speaker 2: into suspended animation from time to time to make room
Speaker 2: for others. There will be no childbirth. Fetuses will be
Speaker 2: incubated in jars. Essentially motherhood will be abolished. Then too,
Speaker 2: Eugenics will help keep the birth rate down, and deformed
Speaker 2: babies could be frozen against the day that someone might
Speaker 2: actually want them or figure out how to fix them. Cretans,
Speaker 2: for instance, or babies born with cerebal palsy. Would not
Speaker 2: early freezing be a true mercy for the weak minded,
Speaker 2: who might find making such a decision difficult. Edinger offered
Speaker 2: a philosophical rule of thumb. Ask yourself, if the child
Speaker 2: were already frozen, and it were within my power to
Speaker 2: return him to deform the life, would I do so?
Speaker 2: If the answer is negative, then probably the freezer is
Speaker 2: where he belongs.
Speaker 3: On the floor.
Speaker 2: In front of the freezers at the cryonics Institute are
Speaker 2: four slotted boxes, painted white with a black number in
Speaker 2: each slot, like the slots in a company mail room.
Speaker 2: What's this, Edinger looked away. Andy explained that the numbers
Speaker 2: refer to the patients, most of whom choose to remain anonymous,
Speaker 2: and the boxes for their families over the years. A
Speaker 2: half dozen of cent flowers, mostly roses long dead. Attached
Speaker 2: to one bouquet was a card and an unopened envelope.
Speaker 2: Turns out that staring at an unopened envelope inside a
Speaker 2: freezatorium is substantially more depressing than looking at the blank
Speaker 2: space on a tombstone. Thoughts of spring eluded me. To patients'
Speaker 2: families ever visit, I asked, not many, Andy said. Edinger
Speaker 2: had wandered off toward the office, passing a half open
Speaker 2: door that I hadn't noticed before.
Speaker 3: What's in there.
Speaker 2: A storeroom, Edinger called over his shoulder. He used to
Speaker 2: be a library. We sat down in the conference room.
Speaker 2: Along the wall hung twenty eight eight by ten inch
Speaker 2: photographs of patients, beginning with Edinger's mother. His father, who
Speaker 2: died in nineteen eighty four at the age of eighty nine,
Speaker 2: was not among them. He's in a mausoleum, Edinger said,
Speaker 2: shaking his head. I tried very hard to get him
Speaker 2: to be frozen, but his second wife was against it.
Speaker 3: He was too wimpy to stand up to her.
Speaker 2: Edinger's brother, who died ten years ago, proved to be
Speaker 2: as weak as his father. In his last illness, he
Speaker 2: became depressed and told his children that he didn't want
Speaker 2: to be frozen. I told them they should freeze him anyway,
Speaker 2: but I couldn't get them to, and he was lost.
Speaker 2: This was how Edinger spoke of the unfrozen dead. His
Speaker 2: uncle Herman died in a car accident.
Speaker 3: That was a shame. He was lost.
Speaker 2: A Prospect of Immortality was published, Edinger became something of
Speaker 2: a star. He claims plausibly that nearly everyone now active
Speaker 2: in chronics first heard about it directly or indirectly from him.
Speaker 2: Ben best CI's current president, picked up a copy at
Speaker 2: a health food store. Stanley Kubrick read it, Edinger says,
Speaker 2: and then arranged to meet with him. But when Kubrick
Speaker 2: died in nineteen ninety nine, he was lost. He is
Speaker 2: buried in Hertfordshire. Edger said that he was interviewed by
Speaker 2: David Frost, Steve Allen, MERV Griffin and Johnny Carson.
Speaker 3: Did these people take you seriously? I asked?
Speaker 2: Talk show hosts don't take anything seriously. They're idiots. He
Speaker 2: told me he was once on a show with William F.
Speaker 2: Buckley Junior. What ad Buckley make of you? He was
Speaker 2: aghast at everything I said. This was the first time
Speaker 2: I'd seen Edinger smile. He thought it was immoral, unethical, unsanitary,
Speaker 2: against the will of God, he laughed.
Speaker 3: Buckley understood nothing.
Speaker 2: The first human being was frozen in nineteen ten sixty six.
Speaker 2: It went badly and a few months later the body
Speaker 2: had to be buried. The following year, Edinger held a
Speaker 2: press conference when a man named James Bedford was frozen
Speaker 2: by an organization that later became the Cryonic Society of California.
Speaker 2: What with one snaphoo in another, most of the people
Speaker 2: who were frozen in California rotted. Elcore was founded in
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy two. The same year, Saint Martin's Press, where
Speaker 2: Thomas McCormick had moved, published Edinger's second book, Man into Superman,
Speaker 2: The startling potential of human evolution and how to be
Speaker 2: a part of it. It begins by working hard and
Speaker 2: saving my money. I intend to become an immortal Superman.
Speaker 2: The following year, Sleeper came out. Miles Monroe Woody Allen,
Speaker 2: who runs a health food restaurant in Greenwich Village, goes
Speaker 2: into the hospital flir in ulcer, but when the surgery
Speaker 2: goes awry, he is covered in bird's eye wrapper and
Speaker 2: stuck in a freezer for two hundred years. When he
Speaker 2: wakes up, he's peevish, especially after his doctor tells him
Speaker 2: that his resurrection is a miracle of science, Miles Pacing.
Speaker 2: To me, a miracle of science is like going to
Speaker 2: the hospital for a minor operation.
Speaker 3: I come out the next day.
Speaker 2: My rent isn't two thousand months overdue. That's a miracle
Speaker 2: of science. This is what I call a cosmic screwing.
Speaker 2: And then where am I anyhow? I mean, what happened?
Speaker 3: Everybody?
Speaker 2: Where?
Speaker 3: Are all my friends? Doctor?
Speaker 2: You must understand that everyone you knew in the past
Speaker 2: has been dead nearly two hundred years Miles, But they
Speaker 2: all ate organic rice in man into superman. Edinger throws
Speaker 2: around a lot of Nietzsche and George Bernard Shaw, but
Speaker 2: shows more evidence of having wild away the hours reading Penthouse,
Speaker 2: which began publication in nineteen sixty five. The world of
Speaker 2: tomorrow will be unimaginably better than the world of today.
Speaker 2: How there will be transsects and supersex. Scientists will invent
Speaker 2: a sexual superwoman with cleverly designed orifices of various kinds,
Speaker 2: something like a wrigly Swiss cheese, but shapelier and more fragrant.
Speaker 2: Animals will be bred as sex slaves. Even incest might
Speaker 2: be allowed. Also, scientists will likely equip men with wings
Speaker 2: built in biological weapons. Body armor made of hair and telescoping,
Speaker 2: fully adjustable sexual organs. Hold on that last one. Doesn't
Speaker 2: the existing model already come with that? Edinger saw Alan's
Speaker 2: film when it came out. He has a lot of
Speaker 2: good things to say about death, but as far as
Speaker 2: I know, he's never done anything about it. He said, like,
Speaker 2: what like sign up? For a very long time, no
Speaker 2: one signed up. Edinger's first patient was his mother Rhea.
Speaker 2: He froze her in nineteen seventy seven. Does she want
Speaker 2: to be frozen? I don't know if she was really
Speaker 2: enthusiastic about it, but she was willing. His second patient
Speaker 2: was his first wife, who died in November nineteen eighty seven.
Speaker 2: What did she think about the prospect of being frozen?
Speaker 2: She never talked much about it. It was just taken
Speaker 2: for granted. He remarried the following year. One month after
Speaker 2: Edinger froze his wife, Saul Kent froze the head of
Speaker 2: his mother, Dora, at the Alcore facility. Kent, the author
Speaker 2: of Future Sex nineteen seventy four and The Life Extension
Speaker 2: Revolution nineteen eighty, had become a convert to cryonics after
Speaker 2: reading Prospect of Immortality on the Beach He had also
Speaker 2: founded the vitamin Peddling Life Extension Foundation in Hollywood, Florida,
Speaker 2: which was raided by the Food and Drug Administration in
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty seven. The FDA later dropped all charges. For
Speaker 2: a time, there was some question whether Dora Kent was
Speaker 2: actually dead when her head was cut off. Edinger's second wife,
Speaker 2: May suffered a stroke in Scottsdale, Arizona, in two thousand.
Speaker 2: Edinger was with her.
Speaker 3: It was horrible.
Speaker 2: She was helpless. He was helpless. All she was able
Speaker 2: to do was move one arm, he said, his voice quavering.
Speaker 2: May knew that she would be frozen. Edinger had paid
Speaker 2: a local funeral home a retainer to practice once a year.
Speaker 2: She died the day after the stroke. Edinger takes comfort
Speaker 2: in what happened next. He acted fast. I pronounced death.
Speaker 2: Any one can do that in Arizona, and the funeral
Speaker 2: people were there in a few minutes. We had already
Speaker 2: started packing her an ice, and the funeral people started
Speaker 2: right away. She was flown to Detroit. She is patient
Speaker 2: number thirty four. She was not lost. Edgar finds nothing
Speaker 2: so uninteresting as history. When the future expands, he wrote,
Speaker 2: the past shrinks In the Golden age, no one will
Speaker 2: read Shakespeare. Not only will his work be far too
Speaker 2: weak in intellect and written in too vague and punial language,
Speaker 2: but the problems which concerned him will be in the
Speaker 2: main no more than historical curiosities. Still, Edgar told me
Speaker 2: when I asked, that his mother and both his wives
Speaker 2: kept photo albums, and that they're at the institute and
Speaker 2: that store room that was once a library somewhere. He
Speaker 2: promised we'd look for them on the second day of
Speaker 2: my visit, even though he was baffled by my interest.
Speaker 2: The future so gleamy and white, how could any one
Speaker 2: possibly care about the musty, dusty past. The store room
Speaker 2: was a mess. There was an old StairMaster, some folding tables.
Speaker 2: The book shelves housed a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica,
Speaker 2: some one's college textbooks, organic chemistry, and a t shirt
Speaker 2: with a periodic table. Along one wall stood a bank
Speaker 2: of file drawers. What's in there? Any patient who wants
Speaker 2: to can buy a drawer to put things in, Andy said, really,
Speaker 2: but not many of them, ask may Edinger did. She
Speaker 2: kept a diary and requested that it be stored here,
Speaker 2: marked not to be read until and unless it is
Speaker 2: deemed useful for the revival, it won't survive. Though paper
Speaker 2: turns to dust. Andy rifled through drawer after drawer. At
Speaker 2: last he found them ten bulky albums with flesh tone
Speaker 2: covers pink, brown, and beige. He and I lugged them
Speaker 2: back to the table in the conference room, and then
Speaker 2: Edinger and I sat for a good hour, maybe more,
Speaker 2: and turned pages. The albums were mostly photographs, but they
Speaker 2: were old documents in there too, a military id, a
Speaker 2: college transcript, newspaper cliplings. Edinger hadn't wanted to drag these
Speaker 2: albums out, but now that he decided to indulge me,
Speaker 2: he was determined to be thorough. He didn't skip a
Speaker 2: single photograph, even prying apart pages that it got stuck.
Speaker 2: He was bored before we began. I could have looked
Speaker 2: at that stuff forever. The earliest albums belonged to his mother, Seebia,
Speaker 2: pictures of his babyhood.
Speaker 3: He offered names.
Speaker 2: That's Leo, that's Pue Russell. He married my mother's sister Mary.
Speaker 2: He remembered people from his early years. Best who's very
Speaker 2: sharp on the names of his cousins growing up, and
Speaker 2: he never missed the name of a dog. He plans
Speaker 2: to freeze the one he has now, Muggsy maywell like that.
Speaker 2: His father appeared in a picture or two, then disappeared.
Speaker 2: There followed photographs of Edinger and uniform, handsome, smiling, promising,
Speaker 2: and on the next pages, in casts and wheelchairs on crutches,
Speaker 2: a young man cut down. Here was his wedding under
Speaker 2: a hoopa. The next albums were Elaine's snapshots of postwar suburbia,
Speaker 2: the paddlepool, the tricycle boys with crew cuts, girls and
Speaker 2: checkered dresses, And then there was a long gap until
Speaker 2: May's album started. There were a handful of pictures of Ettinger,
Speaker 2: but many more of sweetly happy May, surrounded by people,
Speaker 2: her bowling league, her children and grandchildren from her first marriage.
Speaker 2: That's one of Pat's kids, he'd say, or more often
Speaker 2: than that.
Speaker 3: Who the hell is that? I don't know who the
Speaker 3: hell that is?
Speaker 2: When you wake up, nearly everyone in these albums will
Speaker 2: be gone, I said, won't you miss them? I hope
Speaker 2: to see the people I knew before that I loved before,
Speaker 2: Edinger sighed. Most of the people I grew up with
Speaker 2: are already gone. That's been true for a long time.
Speaker 2: Most of the people anybody grows up with they lose
Speaker 2: track of. We lose them unless we save them in
Speaker 2: the freezer, in an archive, in our children, forever, in
Speaker 2: our hearts, in God's care. We'd gone through one of
Speaker 2: the albums two five eight. I asked why Chronics is
Speaker 2: by any objective measure of failure. Edinger talked about something
Speaker 2: he calls the legacy effect, the crippling.
Speaker 3: Hold of the past.
Speaker 2: If not for that, the freezer era would have dawned
Speaker 2: in nineteen sixty four when it was supposed to, and
Speaker 2: then as abruptly as we began, we were done. He
Speaker 2: pulled himself up to standing, grabbed his cane, and tapped
Speaker 2: the last page of the final photo album. Someone should
Speaker 2: have put labels on these things, he muttered. Just after
Speaker 2: I left Michigan, Edinger's self published a new book, Universe
Speaker 2: Toward a self centered philosophy of immortalism and cryonics. You
Speaker 2: are the most important person.
Speaker 3: In the universe.
Speaker 2: No one else matters. And the Cryonics Institute admitted a
Speaker 2: new patient, Patient number ninety three, was born Billy Joe Bondshall,
Speaker 2: but it had his name legally changed to William Constitution
Speaker 2: o Rights. He had no known occupation, although he liked
Speaker 2: to dress up as a priest.
Speaker 3: Bill O.
Speaker 2: Wrights was forty three when he deanimated in a hospital
Speaker 2: in Maine. The next day, his body was flown to
Speaker 2: Detroit in an ice box at the Follman and Walsh
Speaker 2: funeral Home. Jim Walsh opened the body and pumped in
Speaker 2: eight liters of ethelene glycol. Then he brought it to
Speaker 2: See Eye, where Andy put it into a wal Mart
Speaker 2: sleeping bag and placed it in a cooling box. A
Speaker 2: few days later, patient number ninety three was hoisted up
Speaker 2: on a forklift and lowered into a freezer head first,
Speaker 2: like a hibernating bat, beside invisible cats inside a seven
Speaker 2: thousand square foot building in an industrial park in the
Speaker 2: heart of America, where some of the sorriest ideas of
Speaker 2: a god forsaken an alienated modernity endure.
Speaker 3: Robert C.
Speaker 2: W Edinger might be the Institute's next patient, but for
Speaker 2: now he's holding on. The longer he lives, the better
Speaker 2: his chances, Because in the Golden Age, or what used
Speaker 2: to be called Hell, scientists choosing which patience to thaw
Speaker 2: will follow a simple rule. Last in first out twenty
Speaker 2: ten PostScript. Robert Edinger died in twenty eleven at the
Speaker 2: age of ninety two. His remains are stored at the
Speaker 2: Cryonics Institute.
Speaker 4: All Right, we're gonna talk about the iceman, Okay, for
Speaker 4: this essay, I want to ask you about the lead
Speaker 4: and writing a great lead, because this essay has a
Speaker 4: great lead. Okay, And I was wondering, so our listeners
Speaker 4: have already heard this, but would you be willing to
Speaker 4: read the opening paragraph?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I don't know I should because I don't remember
Speaker 2: it in any way.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, No, just a kid ass.
Speaker 2: It's Robert CW. Edinger, who thinks death is for chumps.
Speaker 2: Drives a rusty white Chevy Lumina with a bumper sticker
Speaker 2: on the rear that reads Choose Life. Edinger is ninety
Speaker 2: one years old, bent and crooked. His face is splotched,
Speaker 2: his goatee grizzled, his gray hair wispy and un kemp.
Speaker 2: He leans on a warm wooden cane and wears a
Speaker 2: thick orthopedic shoe on his left foot. His legs were
Speaker 2: smashed when he was hit by German mortar fire in
Speaker 2: November nineteen forty four, just before the Battle of the Bulge.
Speaker 2: He spent four years in an army hospital where he
Speaker 2: had bone grafts and skin grafts. Antibiotics saved his life.
Speaker 2: More recently, he has undergone angioplasty, cataract surgery, a hemorrhoid ectomy,
Speaker 2: and prostate surgery twice. That Eddinger endures is a miracle
Speaker 2: of science. Actuarily, chances are good that he'll be dying soon,
Speaker 2: and if the going gets much rougher, he'll kill himself.
Speaker 2: He's planned that down to the last detail. He has
Speaker 2: one concern. The problem, of course with suicide is that
Speaker 2: if you don't do it right, you face autopsy, he
Speaker 2: told me, and then you're no good for freezing.
Speaker 4: It's just so good. Can you talk about where the
Speaker 4: idea for this story came from, and then when you
Speaker 4: came up with the idea for the lead?
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, so this is a crazy origin story. I
Speaker 2: don't think I've ever told this before, But I had
Speaker 2: been writing for The New Yorker for a bunch of
Speaker 2: years and just doing book reviews, not just I mean,
Speaker 2: I love that work. But my editor said, do you
Speaker 2: want to profile somebody? And I was like, like a
Speaker 2: living person, and he said, yeah, you know, want to
Speaker 2: try that out, give that a shot. I was very
Speaker 2: excited at the idea of it. But I don't have
Speaker 2: any training as a journalist or really much experience, and
Speaker 2: I'm a historian I used to I'm used to writing
Speaker 2: about the dead, and the dead, you know, don't talk back.
Speaker 2: Most of the people I had written about at that
Speaker 2: point were you know, died in the eighteenth century of
Speaker 2: the seventeenth century. Like I just the idea of reckoning
Speaker 2: with a living person was scary to me. So in
Speaker 2: one way I ended up pitching Edinger because he was
Speaker 2: almost dead, but.
Speaker 1: He died soon after this came out.
Speaker 2: But the real reason that I wrote about this, so
Speaker 2: it was Halloween and my oldest kid was just turning ten,
Speaker 2: and it was like the part of this year in
Speaker 2: the history of the Red Sox where the Red Sox
Speaker 2: were finally winning. It was after they'd won the two
Speaker 2: thousand and four World Championship, after they'd won the two
Speaker 2: thousand and seven World Championship, So we had a lot
Speaker 2: of Red Sox in our lives, and he wanted to
Speaker 2: be dead Ted Williams for Halloween because there had been
Speaker 2: a story about how Ted Williams. One of his kids
Speaker 2: said that he had wanted to be frozen when he died,
Speaker 2: and so they had decapitated him and his head was
Speaker 2: in like a lobster pot in Arizona, waiting for being
Speaker 2: reanimated and reattached to a new body. And it was
Speaker 2: this crazy story. So we made this hilarious costume, like
Speaker 2: we got a basketball and made a paperchet head paper
Speaker 2: mache head and painted it and we had this head
Speaker 2: and then you know or what Red Sox had like
Speaker 2: with a hangar that propped it up over his head,
Speaker 2: so he was a headless ted Williams and carried around
Speaker 2: the empty head and collected candy and it was great.
Speaker 3: It was a bosom.
Speaker 2: Cost time that all times, but this was right around
Speaker 2: when we so Then the following spring, so that was
Speaker 2: when my kid was nine. The following spring, he was
Speaker 2: going to turn ten, and I really didn't want to
Speaker 2: keep the head. I actually found the head really upsetting
Speaker 2: that the paper mache head that was just like sitting
Speaker 2: in his room. And I'm also a compulsive throwout or
Speaker 2: of things. I hate keeping things, so I really wanted
Speaker 2: to throw it out. He didn't want to get thrown
Speaker 2: I wanted to put it in the recycling but and
Speaker 2: be rid of it. He didn't want to throw it out.
Speaker 2: And his tenth birthday was the tenth anniversary of the
Speaker 2: death of my best friend, who died while I was
Speaker 2: giving birth to him. And on the tenth anniversary of
Speaker 2: her death, I still hadn't doubled her death because I
Speaker 2: came fromme from the hospital with a newborn, and I
Speaker 2: went and delivered a eulogy, and then I just kind
Speaker 2: of like put the whole story of her life and
Speaker 2: my grief over the loss of her in a box.
Speaker 2: Actually in a box, I collected her papers. I printed
Speaker 2: out all of her email from her computer, and I
Speaker 2: gave it to an archive. So I knew that it
Speaker 2: was kind of crippling me emotionally that I'd never agreeed
Speaker 2: for this person, because I'd never really let her go,
Speaker 2: and I wasn't with her on her deathbed because I
Speaker 2: was on a childbirthbed, and like never forgiven myself for
Speaker 2: not being with her. So on the tenth anniversary of
Speaker 2: her death, I went to the library where I had
Speaker 2: donated the archive of her papers, and I put a
Speaker 2: fellow to calls up and they brought them out to me,
Speaker 2: and they're not open to the public. It was just,
Speaker 2: you know, they're clothes for a while, and I spent
Speaker 2: a day in the library reading through, you know, my
Speaker 2: old emails with her, her emails with her friends, her letters,
Speaker 2: her dissertation drafts or whatever.
Speaker 3: And I was horrified.
Speaker 2: It was the most grotesque thing I've ever done. I
Speaker 2: felt overwhelmed with how wrong it was that I had
Speaker 2: kept her things without her permission. She had never said
Speaker 2: she wanted her papers to be kept for future researchers
Speaker 2: or for me. She didn't leave me that her computer.
Speaker 2: We never discussed this. And as a historian, whenever I
Speaker 2: go pull like a box out of the archive and
Speaker 2: read someone's papers, I am so confident that I know them,
Speaker 2: like the person like a like a specter like arises
Speaker 2: from the box and forms in the room and floats around,
Speaker 2: and I'm like, hello, my name is shil and who
Speaker 2: are you, And like I feel like I get to
Speaker 2: know somebody, like I'm reading you know, Edgar Allan Poe's
Speaker 2: papers or something like he's in the room with me,
Speaker 2: I get him, I know him. That's what the work
Speaker 2: of a historian is. And reading these papers my friend
Speaker 2: was not in that box. The only thing that was
Speaker 2: in that box was my grief, and it seemed grotesque
Speaker 2: to me that I had kept them. And then I
Speaker 2: also was kind of crushed with this kind of loss
Speaker 2: of historical faith, like, well, if I can't know her
Speaker 2: reading her papers, even though I knew her better than
Speaker 2: anybody I've ever known before, and she's become a stranger
Speaker 2: to me because all that survives is this, Like what
Speaker 2: makes me think I ever get anything right when I
Speaker 2: write about dead people? So that was at that moment
Speaker 2: that my editor said, do you want to write a profile?
Speaker 2: And I was like, I don't know, but then I
Speaker 2: also thought maybe I should. But then I had the
Speaker 2: idea because I wanted to throw away dead Ted Williams's
Speaker 2: paper machet Head, and I was like, who decided to
Speaker 2: freeze the dead? Like that's that's about the same thing,
Speaker 2: is what I just did. And so I found out
Speaker 2: about the sky Edinger, who's the guy who invented freezing
Speaker 2: the dead? If you just listen to the story, you
Speaker 2: know this, but like first did it? And he froze
Speaker 2: his mother first, and then both of his wives, and
Speaker 2: then you know, hundreds more people, And so I like
Speaker 2: very selfishly just wanted to go meet him and have
Speaker 2: him explained to me what it is to not be
Speaker 2: able to let go of somebody. And so I went
Speaker 2: and flew out to Detroit and spent like three days
Speaker 2: with him, and the whole time every time I wasn't
Speaker 2: talking with him, I ran into the bathroom at this
Speaker 2: freezatorium where all the dead people are and just cried
Speaker 2: and cried and cried. And then I like bucked myself
Speaker 2: back up and go out to ask him another question.
Speaker 2: And everything he said was kind of hilarious to me.
Speaker 2: It was like totally totally off because it was just,
Speaker 2: you know, it was very young Frankenstein. It was like
Speaker 2: mel Brooks couldn't write this guy like he just he
Speaker 2: had this like eager like sidekick.
Speaker 3: Who was this guy Andy?
Speaker 2: Like everything about this is just incredibly funny. But I
Speaker 2: am falling apart because I also really felt like it
Speaker 2: was he kept trying to justify freezing. His second wife
Speaker 2: had agreed agreed to it in the sense that I
Speaker 2: don't know what that really means, but his mother and
Speaker 2: his first wife had not even wanted to be frozen.
Speaker 2: And then then I tried writing they came home when
Speaker 2: I tried writing the piece, and I I wanted to
Speaker 2: kind of have it be funny and light and amusing
Speaker 2: without making fun of everything about this man. But I
Speaker 2: also kind of wanted to fess up that I totally
Speaker 2: identified with him and his inability to let go of people,
Speaker 2: because I just can't do that. I'm terrible about loss,
Speaker 2: like even you know, my parents were still alive then,
Speaker 2: but you know, my parents died not long after that,
Speaker 2: And I never really got like, I'm just terrible at that,
Speaker 2: like most people are terrible at it. You just find
Speaker 2: a way to fake that you know what you're doing
Speaker 2: or that you ever moved past a real loss. So
Speaker 2: and the first draft that I wrote had like two problems. One,
Speaker 2: I did insert myself into it. I think I even
Speaker 2: confessed to like go into the bathroom crying without kind
Speaker 2: of naming anything or just but just and tonally, the
Speaker 2: piece just couldn't handle both trying to be funny and
Speaker 2: also just being deeply sad. And then I also turned
Speaker 2: it in and I told my Heather that I wasn't
Speaker 2: comfortable publishing it, but I really wanted to write it.
Speaker 3: It was a job was in a sign I was
Speaker 3: never going to miss a deadline, I turn it in.
Speaker 2: But that I was really worried because like the very
Speaker 2: first thing editor told me was that he was planning
Speaker 2: to kill himself and that it would be a real
Speaker 2: problem if he just died, because you tissue a decay
Speaker 2: before he could be frozen. Then he had this elaborate
Speaker 2: plan that he detailed to me. He had a protocol
Speaker 2: all set up. He was gonna because you can't implicate
Speaker 2: someone else in murdering you, but you also need them
Speaker 2: to take your body immediately before your cells start to decay.
Speaker 2: So he was going to make an ice bath. He
Speaker 2: was gonna, you know, kill himself and then have a
Speaker 2: timer go off that would make a phone call. Like
Speaker 2: he had this elaborate whole thing so that there would
Speaker 2: be no decay. And I said to my editor, I
Speaker 2: want to write this, and here I did write it,
Speaker 2: but you can't publish it because I think he'll kill
Speaker 2: himself out of like the embarrassment of it all. So
Speaker 2: then my editor was like, Wow, you were really difficult
Speaker 2: to work with. I think he was like, I don't
Speaker 2: work with people who are difficult like this, So I
Speaker 2: mean that's how I interpreted everything that he said, we
Speaker 2: didn't even talk on the phone.
Speaker 3: We never talk on the phone.
Speaker 2: So then I called my really really really good dear beloved,
Speaker 2: much missed friend, Tony Horwitz, who was an amazing, amazing
Speaker 2: historian but had been a reporter for years, ed one
Speaker 2: Pieltzer for like one of his early pieces, investigative piece,
Speaker 2: and we got to be really good friends. And I
Speaker 2: was like, we went for a walk, and I was like, Tony,
Speaker 2: I am.
Speaker 3: I told them whole.
Speaker 2: Story about going to meet ad Einger. Now I felt
Speaker 2: really guilty, Like this guy is this cockaming me idea.
Speaker 2: His entire life is based on a crazy, delusional idea
Speaker 2: he got as a teenager when he was suffering after
Speaker 2: just really devastating war injuries.
Speaker 3: And yet I.
Speaker 2: Think he's actually causing a lot of pain to a
Speaker 2: lot of people. But he doesn't deserve to be mocked
Speaker 2: in The New Yorker. And I was worried that my
Speaker 2: piece was too and asked.
Speaker 3: Tony to beat it. And Tony said, like, all.
Speaker 2: Right, here's the rule. This guy wanted you to come.
Speaker 2: He spent three days with you. He knows you're a
Speaker 2: Harvard professor of history, and he does not think you're
Speaker 2: likely to believe what he believes about the freezing of
Speaker 2: the dead, and what he really wants in life is
Speaker 2: to be profiled in The New Yorker. And does it
Speaker 2: really matter to him that your piece could be funny
Speaker 2: at his expense not a whit And if it mattered
Speaker 2: to him, he could have said, no, he does not
Speaker 2: particularly need your attention. He's not assuming that it's going
Speaker 2: to get him a lot more patience. He calls them patients,
Speaker 2: which is how he makes his money off the money
Speaker 2: that people pay him to freeze them after they've died.
Speaker 2: So he's like, you know, he's completely fair game. Even
Speaker 2: if you were being cruel to him, he would be
Speaker 2: fair game. He wants this attention all his life. He
Speaker 2: has wanted this kind of media attention and never turned
Speaker 2: from it. And he's like, also, the piece is just
Speaker 2: is not cruel, Like it's funny, but it's not really
Speaker 2: cruel at his expense, like, and the fact that you
Speaker 2: identify with him does come across. So that's the reason
Speaker 2: the essay was ever published because Tony kind of convinced me.
Speaker 2: But it was my first like kind of really difficult
Speaker 2: ethical struggle as a journalist when I thought and one
Speaker 2: of the things that I really took away from that was, well,
Speaker 2: I should feel this complicated about writing about the dead,
Speaker 2: because they're not less deserving of, you know, real care
Speaker 2: and concern and solicitude for what's fair to them, what's condescending,
Speaker 2: what's mocking, what's dismissive, what misrepresents their views, what's unfair
Speaker 2: to them? And I think journalists actually have a much
Speaker 2: keener sense of ethics around those things than historians do.
Speaker 2: Historians are completely unaccountable to their subjects.
Speaker 1: So then I.
Speaker 2: Actually really learned from that, and I teach that way,
Speaker 2: thinking about, you know, if this person and that you're
Speaker 2: writing this paper about we're still alive today and their
Speaker 2: family were here in this room, could you look them
Speaker 2: in the face and
Speaker 3: Say, I did my very best to get this exactly right.