Mum and Dad are in my freezer, and I’ve room for more loved ones Philip Rhoades, 72
My parents lay on adjacent beds at the aged-care facility.
‘At least they’re together,’ I thought. It was May 2016, and docs had called to tell me that my dad, Gerald, 89, didn’t have long left.
He’d been hospitalised after suffering from dementia for several years. Was in great physical pain. I’d travelled seven hours across Australia to be with him in Sydney.
Sadly, when I arrived he was already unconscious from the morphine.
But I was grateful to find staff had wheeled my mum Dorothy’s bed into his room.
Mum, 84, had a number of degenerative physical disorders.
She clutched Dad’s hand for almost 30 hours until, finally, he passed.
‘You have to let go of him now, Mum,’ I said gently. ‘I don’t want to,’ she replied. I understood how she felt. We’d been a close family growing up, and I was one of seven kids.
Mum had been a science and maths teacher and Dad, an industrial chemist.
Throughout my childhood we’d had conversations about science and the possibilities arising from human ingenuity.
‘After I die, I want my body to be used for scientific purposes,’ Dad always said. Then we’d experienced the pain of losing my sister, Jenny, very suddenly when she was just 22 years old.
‘I’ll never again meet a mind quite like hers,’ I thought. ‘And I can’t get her back.’
It got me thinking. Could I preserve the minds of my remaining loved ones?
I was certain that by the year 2000, scientists would have overcome the problem of death.
Yet, by the mid-1990s I accepted it wouldn’t be solved in my lifetime.
Still, science fiction had introduced the possibility that if you store bodies at sub-zero temperatures, there was a chance of resurrecting them when the technology was developed. Known as cryonics, it was our best chance at immortality.
Some surgeries were already being performed at reduced temperatures to preserve organs, so I knew it was being explored.
I began volunteering with the Cryonics Association of Australasia, lobbying to make pre-mortem freezing legal.
I helped design Australia’s first cryonics centre.
‘I want to freeze you after you’re gone,’ I told Mum and Dad in the early 2000s.
‘You gave me a life, now I want to give you one.’
Mum, who was familiar with the statistics, said the chances of them being revived was less than 10%.
‘It’d be zero if you weren’t frozen,’ I said.
‘Sounds like he’s going to do it anyway,’ Dad mused. ‘Well, I appreciate you trying,’ Mum agreed. So, in 2004, I drew up plans for a facility to be built where my
family members could be frozen in nitrogen after they die.
I w
