The Mansion of Happiness

by Jill Lepore

  Karen Ann Quinlan did not die in 1976. Instead of pulling the plug, her doctors slowly weaned her off the respirator. To everyone’s surprise, she was able to breathe on her own. In June 1976, she was moved to the Morris View Nursing Home.73 No one knew how long she might live. Her parents might have asked to remove her feeding tube; they did not. Every time she got sick—respiratory problems, chiefly—reporters kept a deathwatch. One tried to get into the nursing home disguised as a nun.74 Every day, her father stopped at the nursing home on his way to work, to kiss his daughter good morning, and again on his way home, to kiss her good night. Her mother visited daily, too. Once a week, she brought her parents. Quinlan’s grandmother always whispered, “Hurry up and get better, Karen.”75

  The months stretched into years. Karen Ann Quinlan lived through the Reagan revolution of 1980, when evangelicals joined the pro-life movement and brought the movement’s style, tactics, and assumptions, if not always its agenda, into nearly all of American politics. She lived through the “Baby Doe” case two years later, when the parents of a baby born with Down syndrome refused to authorize lifesaving surgery for an easily fixed esophageal impairment. The baby starved to death. On the floor of Congress, Mick Staton, a Republican congressman from West Virginia, said the doctors’ decision to let the parents refuse surgery had “terrifying similarities to the Nazi Reich’s brand of eugenics.”76 In the Washington Post, George Will wrote of his own son:

  Jonathan Will, 10, fourth-grader and Orioles fan (and the best Wiffle-ball hitter in southern Maryland), has Down’s syndrome. He does not “suffer from” (as newspapers are wont to say) Down’s syndrome. He suffers from nothing except anxiety about the Orioles’ lousy start.77

  Matters of life and death are not, inherently, partisan. They have been turned to partisan purposes, and that shift has fundamentally altered American political culture. Americans have always fought about rights, but life is different from liberty and property. When politics turns on a right shrouded in the sacred, issues demanding debate become matters inviolable and political conversation is no longer civil, pluralist, and yielding. And when this happens, day after day, year after year, there is no more politics; there’s only one sort of impasse or another.

  Karen Ann Quinlan died of pneumonia on June 11, 1985. Her mother was with her, holding, between her hands, her daughter’s hands, as bony as bird claws. Julia Quinlan prayed to the Virgin Mary, “To you I come; before you I stand.” Her daughter took her last breath. The Quinlan family waited five days to tell the press, and asked only to be left alone. Thomas Trapasso, now a monsignor, celebrated the Mass of Resurrection at Our Lady of the Lake. And then Karen Ann Quinlan’s body was taken in a hearse, over miles of winding road, to a cemetery called the Gate of Heaven.78

  [CHAPTER 10]

  Resurrection

  Robert C. W. Ettinger, who thought death was for chumps, drove a rusty white Chevy Lumina with a bumper sticker on the rear that read, “Choose Life!” When I met him, he was ninety years old, bent and crooked. His face was splotched, his goatee grizzled, his white hair wispy and unkempt. He leaned on a worn wooden cane and wore a thick orthopedic shoe on his left foot; he sometimes covered a short distance without the cane by groping from one object to the next, chair to table, table to doorjamb, like a toddler taking his first steps. His legs were smashed when he was hit by German mortar fire in November 1944, just before the Battle of the Bulge. He spent four years in an army hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan, where he had bone grafts and skin grafts; antibiotics saved his life. More recently, he’d undergone angioplasty, cataract surgery, a hemorrhoidectomy, and prostate surgery, twice. That he’d lasted so long was a miracle of science. Actuarially, chances were good that he’d be dying soon. He didn’t mind. He wasn’t afraid of anything except a stroke; although, if the going got much tougher, he said, he’d kill himself. He’d planned that down to the last detail. He had one concern. “The problem, of course, with suicide,” he told me, “is that if you don’t do it right, you face autopsy. And then you’re no good for freezing.”1

  Ettinger founded the cryonics movement. Cryonics is what happens when ideas about life and death move from the library to the laboratory, from the humanities to the sciences, from the past to the future, and get stuck there. Ettinger planned that, when he died, the blood would be washed out of his body, antifreeze would be pumped into his arteries, and holes would be drilled in his skull, after which he would be stored in a vat of liquid nitrogen at 320 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.2 His mansion of happiness is a freezer. He expected to be defrosted, sometime between fifty and two hundred years after his death, by scientists who will make him young and strong and tireless.3 When I went out to Michigan to meet Ettinger in 2009, he had already frozen his mother and his two wives, along with ninety-two other people, who were awaiting resurrection inside giant freezers in a building just a few blocks from his house in Clinton Township.4

  Clinton Township, population 95,648 at the last census—95,743 if you count the corpses at the Cryonics Institute (“Our patients are not truly dead in any fundamental sense,” said Ettinger)—lies twenty miles northeast of Detroit and just a few miles inland from Lake St. Clair. In 1782, Moravian missionaries pitched camp and named the site New Gnadenhutten, which means “tents of grace,” but they might have called it Stechmückenhutten, “tents of small, nasty flying insects”; they were badly attacked by mosquitoes. The Moravians buried their dead on top of Indian dead. The township is named after New York’s Erie Canal–building governor, DeWitt Clinton, because easterners began arriving in droves soon after the canal was completed in 1825. Ground was broken for a canal to Kalamazoo in 1838, a year after Michigan entered the union, but the railroad came instead.5 At the Clinton Township Historic Village, which consists of a log cabin, an old Moravian meetinghouse, and a wishing well, the grass was squishy and soggy, as if someone had left the sprinklers on for too long; but it was just the old, abandoned Clinton-Kalamazoo Canal, oozing up. The past has a way of doing that.

  There are only three ways to go when you die. You can be buried, burned, or frozen. If there is no God, said Ettinger, your only chance at an afterlife is option 3. I decided to take a closer look at options 1 and 2. Driving along Cass Avenue, I passed the First Presbyterian Church, where a sign out front read,

  LIFE IS SHORT

  SO PRAY HARD.

  Down the road, I stopped at Clinton Grove Memorial Park, established in 1855, the oldest burial ground around. A canopy of oaks and elms shelters six thousand nineteenth-century dead. Vacancies remain. A brightly lit neon billboard cycled through three messages: CREMATION SPACE $395…MONUMENTS SOLD HERE … THINK SPRING!

  Across the street were two tombstone firms: Lincoln Granite, family owned and operated since 1903, and Clinton Grove Granite Works, established in 1929. Both offices were closed, so I browsed through the outdoor displays, gravestones of pink and gray granite, their borders engraved with stock sentiments: FOREVER IN OUR HEARTS, inside two valentines; IN GOD’S CARE, on a banner beneath a cross. In the middle of each stone a polished, empty space awaited only a pair of dates and somebody’s name. I tried to think spring.

  A sign above the blanks caught my eye: RESURRECTION MARKERS & MONUMENTS. Of the thirteen cemeteries in Clinton Township—fourteen if you count the Cryonics Institute—the biggest is a place called Resurrection.

  The Cryonics Institute occupies a seven-thousand-square-foot brick-fronted warehouse in an industrial park behind the township’s water and sewerage building and just across the street from a condominium development called Still Meadows. Past a shabby waiting room was the small office of Andy Zawacki. Andy constituted half of CI’s staff. (Ettinger used to be the other half, but he retired in 2003.) Andy is also one of CI’s nearly eight hundred members, which means that he plans to be frozen when he dies. (“Lifetime members” pay $1,250 to join and $28,000 to $35,000 upon “death”; members are encouraged to pay by making the institute the beneficiary of their life insurance polici
es.)6 On CI’s website, Andy sported a lab coat, as if he were a scientist or a doctor, but mostly he’s a handyman. He’d been working for CI since he graduated from high school. He’s also the nephew of Ettinger’s daughter-in-law. He’s lumpy and balding and soft-spoken but, other than that, not a bit like Peter Lorre.

  He answered the door and brought me into the office, where Robert Ettinger was waiting. I started to say hello.

  “You want to see it?”

  Andy led us down the hall and through a door into a storage area with fluorescent lights and twenty-foot-high ceilings. Almost everything else in the room was white or silver, like the inside of a refrigerator just off the truck from Sears. It sounded like a refrigerator in there, too, a faintly throbbing hrrrmmm. There were fourteen cylindrical freezers. They looked like propane tanks, the kind you attach to your gas grill, except they were about fifteen feet tall and eight feet wide. Each held six patients. All but four were filled. There were also three older, rectangular freezers, and then there was one more vat, the smallest, and that’s where Ettinger was headed. He stopped at a stainless steel thermos about the size of a rain barrel. He lifted the lid. Liquid nitrogen wafted out.

  “Cats,” he said. He blew into the container and waved his hand, trying to clear the vapor. “Can’t see much, I guess.”

  I peered in. I blew. We blew together. I couldn’t see a thing.

  “Cats in there?” I asked, peering, blowing.

  “Yup.”

  “How many?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Andy interjected: “We’ve got forty pets. Mostly dogs and cats.”

  “A few birds,” Ettinger added, halfheartedly. He closed the lid.

  I stared at the giant freezers. “Are they upside down?” Better for the brain on thawing, I guessed. I pictured hibernating bats.

  “Well, not the first ones,” Ettinger explained. “We put them in horizontally. Everyone else—in the cylinders—is upside down.”

  “And, in … canisters or something, within the cylinders?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “In sleeping bags.”

  “Just regular sleeping bags? Like, from Kmart?”

  “No,” said Andy. “Walmart.”

  Ettinger, leaning on his cane, surveyed the room.

  “Your mother, and your two wives,” I began, hesitantly. “Are they all in this room?”

  “Yes.”

  “And … where?”

  “No idea.” He shrugged. “My mother and my first wife used to be over there,” he said, pointing to one corner of the room. “Andy, do you know where they are?”

  “That one.” Andy nodded, with his chin, at one of the cylinders. “Or maybe that one. One of those two. I can check.”

  Ettinger, slightly sheepish: “We have a chart.”

  Robert Ettinger was born in Atlantic City in December 1918. His mother’s family came from Odessa; his father was born in Germany. In about 1922, the Ettingers moved to Detroit. Ettinger’s father ran a furniture store, and the family lived in a house on Calvert Street, where, in 1927, when he was eight years old, Ettinger started reading Amazing Stories, the first magazine of what its editor, Hugo Gernsback, called “scientifiction”: “Extravagant Fiction Today … Cold Fact Tomorrow.”7 Paul de Kruif’s Microbe Hunters, which inspired a generation of young readers to pursue careers in science, appeared just months before the first issue of Amazing Stories, and much of Gernsback’s scientifiction concerns the work of de Kruifian scientists; Gernsback’s July 1929 issue included “The Purple Death,” the story of a young scientist who keeps a copy of Microbe Hunters in his laboratory.8 Gernsback promised his young readers that everything that happened in his stories, however fantastic, would very likely become established science one day soon. Much of it has. Rockets, television, computers, cell phones. Gernsback’s stories also revisited what has been, for millennia, a literary perennial: immortality.

  Stories about immortality are ancient, and they always contain within them an argument with history, an argument against history, because to live forever is to conquer time as much as it is to conquer death. Not all stories about time travel involve immortality (think of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court or The Time Machine), but all stories about immortality involve transcending time. (One of CI’s competitors is called Trans Time.) About a century and a half ago, stories about immortality got mixed up with stories about scientists. In 1845, Edgar Allan Poe wrote “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” a story about a mesmerist who hypnotizes a dying man at the instant of his death and keeps him in a trance for seven months. When he tries to lift the trance, the poor man cries, “For God’s sake!—quick!—quick!—put me to sleep—or, quick!—waken me!—quick!—I say to you that I am dead!” and promptly melts into a pool of putrescence.9

  Conquering death is usually gory; conquering time is usually depressing. In 1899, H. G. Wells published When the Sleeper Wakes, about a man who falls asleep for two hundred years and awakens to a London he can’t understand. In “A Thousand Deaths,” Jack London’s first short story, also from 1899, the narrator’s mad scientist father kills and revives him again and again, leaving him dead for longer and longer stretches: “Another time, after being suffocated, he kept me in cold storage for three months, not permitting me to freeze or decay.”10

  Rot is always a problem for the living dead, which is why resurrectionists borrow a good deal from methods used for preserving food. In 1766, the Scottish surgeon John Hunter tried to animate frozen fish. Benjamin Franklin thought that if he could be preserved in a vat of Madeira wine, he’d like very much to see what the world was like in a century or two.11 People used to eat their food fresh, canned, or salted, until someone got the idea to sell pond ice, and then those who could afford it paid to have ice delivered by the iceman. Starting in the 1890s, housewives could rent lockers in cold storage warehouses. All this made for some fantastic scientifiction. In January 1930, Gernsback published “The Corpse That Lived,” in which a man who dies in a plane crash in the year 2025 is immersed in a bathtub of ice cubes and brought back to life by an electric pulse. The next month’s issue included “The Ice Man”: Marcus Publius, frozen in Rome in 59 b.c., is defrosted in 1928 by an ingenious professor who happens to be remarkably handy with an electric blanket.12

  Ettinger dates his interest in immortality to 1931, when he read “The Jameson Satellite” in Amazing Stories: in 1958, a dying professor has himself entombed in a rocket and launched into the cold storage of space. Forty million years pass, whereupon a race of mechanical men transplant Jameson’s brain into a body like theirs. The Zoromes used to have soft, fleshy bodies, but they gave them up, preferring instead to encase their squishy brains within impenetrable steel helmets attached to six probing tentacles. (Eternity turns out to be crushingly dull if you’re stuck on your own planet with no women, which is why the Zoromes are out exploring the universe.) They take Jameson to earth to show him that everyone there has died. Overcome by loneliness, he briefly considers throwing himself off a cliff, calculating that if he could land on his steel head with enough force, he could squash his brain. But then he decides he’d rather be an everlasting Zorome.13

  When Ettinger was a boy, life expectancy was rising. G. Stanley Hall published Senescence in 1922. “How Long Can We Live?” was the question Paul de Kruif posed in Ladies’ Home Journal in 1930—during the parrot fever panic—chronicling how every success in the twentieth century’s battle against infectious disease was lengthening life and marking progress.14 In 1932, de Kruif published a book called Men Against Death. “I grew up with the expectation that one day we would learn how to reverse aging,” Ettinger says.15 Immortality’s no good if you’re doomed to decrepitude. In the 1920s, a Viennese scientist named Eugen Steinach perfected a surgical technique whose purpose was rejuvenation: the Steinach operation was, basically, a vasectomy. Steinach, much like Sylvester Graham, thought that if men could keep their spermatic fluid, they would enjoy greater potency and live
longer, too. Freud had the Steinach operation. So did Yeats. Steinach rejuvenated women by bombarding their ovaries with X‑rays. In 1923, his work reached an American audience through a book called Rejuvenation: How Steinach Makes People Young.16

  When Ettinger was shot, during the Second World War, he thought, naturally, about death. In the hospital, he wrote the kind of fiction he’d read as a boy. In 1950, his story “The Skeptic” was published in a Gernsback knockoff called Thrilling Wonder Stories. In it, Robert, a soldier in leg casts, scorns his army doctors—“you so-called physicians, you medical midgets, you dope-dispensing dimwits”—and discovers a way to relieve his unbearable pain through mind control. Ettinger’s science fiction was autobiographical. Another of his stories, “The Penultimate Trump,” also written while he was in the hospital, was published in Startling Stories in 1948. The plot concerns H. D. Haworth, who is ninety-two years old and survives only because his doctors have cobbled him together: “They gave him gland extracts, they gave him vitamins, they gave him blood transfusions. They gave him false teeth, eye-glasses and arch-supports. They cut out his varicose veins, his appendix, one of his kidneys.” (Ettinger appears to have been influenced by Poe’s 1839 story “The Man That Was Used Up.”) Haworth, pursuing immortality with the same ruthlessness with which he had pursued an ill-gotten fortune, pays a brilliant young scientist to put him “to sleep in a nice refrigerator until people really know something about the body.” The scientist says, “We’d better put the vault in Michigan—very safe country, geologically.”17