MY THOUGHTS ABOUT DEATH
As a small child, I prayed in my bed to live forever, while my father looked at me from a half open door. The wish tp liver forever lingered during my childhood and adolescence. In 1967 I saw an article in Life Magazine about the first man that had been frozen in the USA. I was fifteen years old and imagined this man drifting through time while in suspended animation. He was called James Bedford. As I looked at the cryostasts where he was kept, I wanted my body to be frozen after my death. We lived in Palmira, a town in southern Colombia, and the idea of having my body cryonically preserved sounded like science fiction to my family.
My mother shook her head. “Who would like to live again?”
This life was hard and full of pain, and Cryonics was for people who had a lot of money. I tried to forget my dreams of immortality, as I finished my education and started college in the city of Cali.
I went to England a few years later to work as an Au-Pair. I still thought cryonics was for millionaires like my mother had said. Then I married and had children. I taught them to enjoy this life because once you die, you never come back. I didn’t think in Cryonics again.
One day I read an amazing article in a woman’s magazine. A couple had arranged to have their bodies preserved. They had paid the full cost of the procedure with a life insurance. My dreams of living forever came back to my mind as I read the story, and I decided to do it. I wanted to take my children to the future.
I had divorced my husband by then and my family thought I had lost my mind.
My father, a doctor in Palmira, was still alive and thought the idea was pure science fiction.
“You have a good imagination,” he said. “Cryonics is for millionaires.”
I thought he was wrong. I had to get a life insurance, and the bank would pay the American company after my death. Immortality was for everybody and not just for the very rich. I have a life insurance now and have arranged for some of my children to be frozen after death.
People are not frozen in liquid nitrogen anymore. They are vitrified. Vitrification is a glass solution at very low temperatures. It doesn’t damage the cells as much as liquid nitrogen does. I hope that by the time we die the procedure will have advanced a lot more, and we’ll wake up in the future with most of our memories and personalities. Doctors will use nanotechnology to repair our brain cells. We wouldn’t have a new chance of life if we had chosen to be buried or cremated.
I’m dreading the moment I have to die. I wish I could go in suspended animation before my heart stops. If a day I get cancer, I will travel to Switzerland, where I can kill myself while the cryonics team waits nearby. Then I won’t be afraid of death.