The Mansion of Happiness

by Jill Lepore

  MILES ​(pacing): ​A miracle of science is going to the hospital for a minor operation, I come out the next day, my rent isn’t two thousand months overdue. That’s a miracle of science. This is what I call a cosmic screwing. And then: Where am I anyhow? What happened to everybody? Where are all my friends?

  DOCTOR: ​You must understand that everyone you knew in the past has been dead nearly two hundred years.

  MILES: ​But they all ate organic rice!48

  In Man into Superman, Ettinger throws around a lot of Nietzsche and George Bernard Shaw but shows more evidence of having whiled away the hours reading Penthouse, which started in 1965. The world of tomorrow will be unimaginably better than the world of today. How? There will be transsex and supersex! Scientists will turn woman into a “sexual superwoman … with cleverly designed orifices of various kinds, something like a wriggly Swiss cheese, but shapelier and more fragrant.” Animals will be bred as sex slaves; even incest might be allowed. Also, scientists will likely equip men with wings, built-in biological weapons, body armor made of hair, and “telescoping, fully adjustable” sexual organs.49 (Hold on. That last one. Doesn’t the existing model already come with that?)

  Ettinger saw Allen’s film when it came out. His opinion: “He has a lot of good things to say about death.”

  LUNA: ​Oh, I see. You don’t believe in science. And you also don’t believe that the political systems work. And you don’t believe in God, huh?

  MILES: ​Right.

  LUNA: ​So then, what do you believe in?

  MILES: ​Sex and death.

  Though that opinion is qualified: “But as far as I know, he’s never done anything about it.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like sign up.”

  For a very long time, no one signed up. Ettinger’s first patient was his mother, Rhea. He froze her in 1977.

  “Did she want to be frozen?”

  “I don’t know if she was really enthusiastic about it, but she was willing.”

  Ettinger’s second patient was his first wife, who died in November 1987. What did she think about the prospect of being frozen?

  “She never talked much about it. It was just taken for granted.”

  He remarried the following year. One month after Ettinger froze his first wife, Saul Kent froze the head of his mother, Dora, at the Alcor facility. Kent, the author of Future Sex (1974) and The Life-Extension Revolution (1980), had become a convert to cryonics after reading The Prospect of Immortality on the beach. He had also founded the vitamin-peddling Life Extension Foundation, in Hollywood, Florida, which was raided by the Food and Drug Administration in 1987. There was some question of whether Dora Kent was actually dead when her head was cut off. But Kent was never convicted of anything.50

  Ettinger’s second wife, Mae, suffered a stroke in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 2000. Ettinger was with her. It was horrible. She was helpless; he was helpless. “All she was able to do was to move one arm,” he said, his voice quavering. Mae knew she would be frozen; Ettinger had paid a retainer to a local funeral home “to practice once a year.” She died the day after her stroke. Ettinger took comfort in what happened next. He acted fast: “I pronounced death—anyone can do that in Arizona—and the funeral people were there in a few minutes. We had already started packing her in ice, and the funeral people started right away.” She was flown to Detroit. She is Patient 34. She was not lost.

  Ettinger finds nothing so uninteresting as history. “When the future ex–pands, the past shrinks,” he once wrote. Take literature. In the golden age, no one will read Shakespeare: “Not only will his work be far too weak in intellect, and written in too vague and puny a language, but the problems which concerned him will be, in the main, no more than historical curiosities.”51 Still, Ettinger told me, when I asked, that his mother and both his wives kept photo albums and that they’re at the institute, in that storeroom that was once a library, somewhere. He promised we could look for them on the second day of my visit, even though he was baffled by my interest. He showed me the cat vat. He told me about the heads. The future, so gleamy and white. How could anyone possibly care about the musty, dusty past?

  The storeroom was a mess. There was an old StairMaster and some folding tables. The bookshelves housed a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica, someone’s college textbooks—including a copy of Organic Chemistry—and a T‑shirt on which was printed the periodic table. Along one wall stood a bank of file drawers.

  “What’s in there?”

  “Any patient who wants to can buy a drawer, to put things in,” Andy said.

  “Really?”

  “But not many of them ask.”

  Mae Ettinger asked. She kept a diary and asked for it to be kept here, marked, “Not to be read until and unless it is deemed useful for the revival.” It won’t survive, though. Paper turns to dust.

  “Anything else?”

  “One of our members suggested it would be a good idea to store your computer here,” Ettinger said. “No one’s done it yet, though.”

  Andy riffled through drawer after drawer. At last, he found them: ten bulky albums with flesh-toned covers, pink, brown, and beige. He and I lugged them back to the table in the conference room. And then Ettinger and I sat, for a good hour, maybe more, and turned pages. The albums contained mostly photographs, but there were old documents in there, too: a military ID, a college transcript, newspaper clippings. Ettinger hadn’t wanted to drag these albums out, but now that he’d decided to indulge me, he was determined to be thorough. He didn’t skip a single photograph, even prying apart pages that had gotten stuck. He was bored before we began; I could have looked at that stuff forever.

  The earliest albums belonged to his mother: sepia pictures of his babyhood. He offered names. “That’s Leo.…That’s Pee Wee Russell. He married my mother’s sister, Mary.” He remembered people from his early years best. He was very sharp on the names of his cousins, growing up, and he never missed the name of a dog. He planned to freeze the one he currently had, Mugsy. Mae would like that. His father appeared in a picture or two, then disappeared. There followed dozens of photographs of Ettinger in uniform—handsome, smiling, promising—and, on the next pages, in casts, in wheelchairs, on crutches: a young man cut down. Here was his wedding, under a chuppah. The next albums were Elaine’s, snapshots of postwar suburbia: the wading pool, the tricycle, boys in crew cuts, girls in checkered dresses.

  And then there was a long gap, until Mae’s albums started. There were a handful pictures of Ettinger but many more of a sweetly happy Mae, surrounded by people: her bowling league, her children from her first marriage, her grandchildren from her first marriage. “That’s one of Pat’s kids,” he’d say. Or, more often than not: “Who the hell is that? I don’t know who the hell that is.”

  “When you wake up, nearly everyone in these albums will be gone. Won’t you miss them?”

  “I hope to see the people I knew before and that I loved before.” Ettinger sighed. “Most of the people I grew up with are already gone. That’s been true for a long time. Most of the people that anybody grows up with, they lose track of. We lose them.”

  Unless we save them, in the freezer, in an archive, in our children, forever in our hearts, in God’s care. We had gone through one album, two, five, eight. I asked why cryonics is, by any objective measure, a failure. Ettinger talked about something he calls the “legacy effect,” the crippling hold of the past. He isn’t crippled by it, but other people are. Or else the Freezer Era would actually have dawned, in 1964, when it was supposed to. Idiots. But you can’t worry about other people; you have to take care of yourself.

  And then, as abruptly as we began, we were done. He pulled himself up to standing, grabbed his cane, and tapped the last page of the final photo album. “Someone should have put labels on these things,” he muttered.

  Just after I left Michigan, Ettinger self-published a new book, Youniverse: Toward a Self-Centered Philosophy of Immortalism and Cryonic
s (you are the most important person in the world, it says; no one else matters), and the Cryonics Institute admitted a new patient.52 Patient 93 was born Billie Joe Bonsall, but he had had his name legally changed to William Constitution O’Rights. He had no known occupation, although he liked to dress up as a priest. Bill O’Rights was forty-three when he “deanimated” in a hospital in Maine on May 9; the next day, his body was flown to Detroit in an icebox. At Faulmann & Walsh funeral home, Jim Walsh opened the body and pumped in eleven liters of ethylene glycol. Then he brought it to CI, where Andy put it into a Walmart sleeping bag and placed it in a cooling box. A few days later, Patient 93 was hoisted up on a forklift and lowered into a freezer, headfirst, like a hibernating bat, beside invisible cats, inside a seven-thousand-square-foot building in an industrial park in the heart of America, where some of the sorriest ideas of a godforsaken and alienated modernity endure.53

  Robert C. W. Ettinger died on July 23, 2011. He had held on for a very long time, believing that the longer he lived, the better his chances, because in the golden age, or what used to be called Hell, scientists choosing which patients to thaw will follow a simple rule: Last in, first out.

  His head was packed in ice; his corpse was carried to the Cryonics Institute. He was ninety-two. He was saved. He is Patient 106.

  Last Words

  When I was nine, I swiped my mother’s Joy of Cooking and biked to a place called Annie’s Book Swap, where I traded it for Is Sex Necessary?, a book I couldn’t get out of the public library, where kids were allowed only in a cramped basement, called, rather grandly, the Juvenile Room. It’s hard to write a book about life and death without thinking about your own, even when you’re trying very hard not to.

  Before my mother married my father, who went to Clark University, she worked at the Milton Bradley Company. I was conceived the year Lennart Nilsson’s “Drama of Life Before Birth” appeared on the cover of Life magazine. As a kid, I played the Game of Life. In 1975, I went to Mass and prayed for Karen Ann Quinlan, although I can’t remember, anymore, whether I wanted her to live or to die. I remember only that I was terrified.

  E. B. White is the writer who reached through the brambles of my childhood, grabbed me by the pigtails, and yanked. I always wished I could thank him. I once wrote him a letter on my father’s typewriter; I never had the gumption to send it. I owe him more thanks, since. “I finished ‘Stuart Little,’ ” a son of mine wrote when he was six. “I think E. B. White is saying, stick with it until you find it.”

  I have never attended a Sex Weekend or slept in a Celestial Bed, and I do not run a Kitchen Efficient, but I did once work as a secretary at the Harvard Business School, for a management-consulting guru; I used to own a breast pump; my parents have lived longer than their parents; and the rules to the Mansion of Happiness hang by the front door of my house, where, I like to think, they give strangers pause: “Whoever possesses AUDACITY, CRUELTY, IMMODESTY, or INGRATITUDE, must return to his former situation till his turn comes to spin again, and not even think of Happiness, much less partake of it.”

  I have never frozen anyone. But I did once put someone I love in storage. That, I suppose, is where this book began. She was on her deathbed; I was on an operating table, trying to give birth, fast. She wanted to meet that baby before she died. Every minute mattered. I failed. He was born; she died; she never saw him. I wrote her eulogy from a bed in a maternity ward. Before she got sick, she had been writing a dissertation about Cheaper by the Dozen and The Egg and I, books she had loved as a kid. She had not gotten very far. When she really liked someone, she would say, “He’s a good egg.” She was a good egg. She bequeathed to me her books; I put them on my shelves. We scattered her ashes. Then I printed out the contents of her hard drive and carried that sheaf of papers to a library, where it was sorted and cataloged and put in an archive-quality box lined with acid-free paper and stored in a cool, dark, humidity-controlled room, a room where a life on paper lasts forever. I have always believed that the past contains the truth, that history explains, that archives save. I am forever meeting dead people in libraries, and they always have a lot to say. I thought: This should work.

  Nine years passed. A nine-year-old in my house wanted to be Headless Ted Williams for Halloween. He trick-or-treated wearing a Red Sox uniform and carrying a papier-mâché head. When Halloween was over, he put Ted’s head on top of his dresser. All winter, he left it there.

  “How long are you going to keep that thing?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Forever?”

  That spring, the tenth birth-and-death day came, and I figured I had waited long enough. I went back to that library and opened that box and read every scrap. And I found out: she is not there. Folder after folder of her papers, and all that shouted out of that box was my grief. I closed the lid, regretted the box, and remembered Ted. And that’s why, days later, I flew to Michigan, to meet a man who freezes the dead, and found myself across the hall from hibernating bats and invisible cats, because I had thought: Maybe he can’t let go, either.

  Most of the chapters in this book started out as essays in the New Yorker. I don’t know how to thank my editor, Henry Finder, any better than I knew how to thank E. B. White—for a great deal, but especially for sending me to chase a mouse down the halls of the New York Pubic Library and to drive all over New Jersey, looking for the house where Karen Ann Quinlan used to live, to take a picture of a statue of the Virgin Mary in the front yard, for fact-checking. Dear Mr. Finder, It was good to get out. Gratefully, &c.

  “A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided,” E. B. White once wrote, “for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people—people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.” I met a lot of people in libraries while writing this book. Thanks to librarians and archivists all over the place but especially at the American Antiquarian Society; the Baker Library at the Harvard Business School; the Bryn Mawr Library; the Columbia Rare Book and Manuscripts Library; the Connecticut Valley Historical Museum; Cornell Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections; the Countway Library at the Harvard School of Medicine; the Gilbreth Library of Management at Purdue University; the Goddard Library at Clark University; the Gutman Library at the Harvard School of Education; the Houghton Library at Harvard College; the Milton Bradley Archives at Hasbro; the New-York Historical Society; the New York Public Library; the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe; the Special Collections Library at Duke University; Time Inc. Archives; UCLA; the University of Florida, Gainesville; and Vassar’s Archives and Special Collections.

  Many thanks, too, to Dan Frank, at Knopf, for encouragement and wisdom and deft suggestions at every turn. And thanks to Tina Bennett, as ever. Thanks to everyone who commented on portions of this work during lectures and seminars at Colby, Columbia Law School, DePauw, Harvard, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Harvard Law School, MIT, Princeton, the University of Chicago School of Law, the University of Connecticut, the University of Massachusetts, and Yale. Thanks, too, to everyone I interviewed, especially Robert C. W. Ettinger. For stints of research along the way, thanks to Molly Morrissey Barron, Heather Furnas, John Huffman, Sara Martinez, Natalie Panno, and especially Emily Wilkerson. Thanks to Latif Nasser, for sharing with me a play he once wrote about an egg named Otto. Heartfelt thanks to friends and colleagues who read drafts of chapters: Elise Broach, Nancy Cott, Amy Kittelstrom, James Kloppenberg, Leah Price, Charles Rosenberg, Dorothy Ross, Bruce Schulman, Steven Shapin, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Sue Vargo, and Michael Willrich. Adrianna Alty navigated me through rough patches, to say nothing of New Jersey; Denise Webb taught me about redemption; and Jane Kamensky has walked me miles, through woods and around ponds and even over ice. And although everyone in my house hates it when I mention them, for which I adore them, here I must, nevertheless, thank They Who Must Not Be Named by promising that I will never serve Dog’s Vomit o
n Toast, or, at least, not ever again.

  This book is dedicated to John Demos, who once wrote a book about the Puritan author of a book called The Redeemed Captive, whose dedication reads, “Sir, It was a satyrical answer, and deeply reproachful to mankind, which the philosopher gave to that question, What soonest grows old? Replied, Thanks.” I think, though, that thanks are unaging.

  When I came home from Detroit, we put Ted’s head in a blue plastic recycling bin and left it out on the curb. He was pulped and bleached and made, I suppose, into a newspaper, ashes to ashes—or, at least, paper to paper. Since then, I have come around to thinking that archives save only what archives can save, nothing more and nothing less. Most of all, I have come to believe that what people make of the relationship between life and death has got a good deal to do with how they think about the present and the past. Hiding between the covers of this book, then, lies a theory of history itself, and it is this: if history is the art of making an argument by telling a story about the dead, which is how I see it, the dead never die; they are merely forgotten or, especially if they are loved, remembered, quick as ever.