The lead item on the BBC news, at 6.00 a.m., 6.30 a.m., 7.00 a.m., 7.30 a.m., and so on, and so forth, was about the very strange decision by a Family court judge; which allowed a dying teenager’s wish that her body be cryogenically frozen, transported to the U.S.A., and stored there for, possibly, hundreds of years.
Now, firstly, let me assure my readers that I have nothing but sympathy for the parents of this fourteen-year-old girl. To lose a family member is bad enough, but at such a tender age? I have been through that process with a sister who died at the age of sixteen; but her death literally broke my Dad, and my Mother was grief-stricken for months. I have no position, for or against, the theory or process of cryogenics; excepting to state that it always seemed, to me; to be the last resort of egomaniacs and disturbed or mentally-unstable individuals who have a great deal of cash which they preferred to spend upon yet another loopy-loo’s idea of pretend-immortality.
We are all human, we come into this world naked, we grow, or at least most of us grow, to maturity; and from then, we embark upon the slow but inexorable slide towards decay and death. This Judge has taken the opinions of a young woman who cannot possibly have reached a mature judgement, in her sadly-foreshortened life, and allowed her mother to make the arrangements for the alleged preservation of her remains, and storage of those remains in vastly-expensive tanks of liquid nitrogen somewhere in America. Was this decision right or wrong? Myself, I would plump firmly for ‘wrong’; but, there again; thats just me.
But there remains only one question which really needs to be asked and answered. Who has been stuck with the costs of this little exercise in the ultimate vanity? Who pays? It has been reported that the family funded the £37,000 for the process; but the rent costs go on, and on. I do hope that it is not down to the British taxpayer!
Fire, Pillage & Plague 