Mistakes Were Made | This American Life | Episode 354

Key Takeaway

When you make a mistake, resist the urge to preserve your image with a polished story or a partial disclosure. Today, choose one unresolved error: state what happened plainly, tell the people affected before they discover it elsewhere, name the impact without arguing for your intentions, and specify what you will do next. Bob Nelson’s cryonics story shows how repeated “just a little further” exceptions, secrecy, and hope can turn an early problem into irreversible harm.

Episode Overview

This rerun examines apologies that acknowledge a moral code without fully accepting responsibility. In Act One, Sam Shaw traces how cryonics promoter Bob Nelson’s compassion, improvisation, financial strain, and secrecy culminated in the Chatsworth disaster; Act Two uses variations on William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just to Say” to expose the gap between asking forgiveness and feeling remorse.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Mistakes Were Made | This American Life | Episode 354 from This American Life. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Okay, this just in. People don't like to admit it when they mess up. It's true for little kids, true for adults, and maybe especially true for politicians. The rare instances where politicians do apologize, you know, it goes, it's usually the kind of insincere, I regret the error, I meant no harm kind of thing. I remember a classic from the prime minister of Hong Kong years ago. after two million people took to the streets to protest how cozy she was with mainland China. As a chief executive, she said, "I still have more to learn and to do better to balance diverse interests and listen to people from all walks of life." Just imagine for a second your partner or your spouse saying something like that to you like with that tone like you would not feel reassured that they were really sorry.

Okay, so years ago I was interviewing this guy about something else completely and somehow we got into the subject of this whole apology business and the guy has two daughters. They were both around 13 years old back then and he told me that whenever one of his daughters does something to the other and he tells them to apologize, you know, as their parent, usually the apology is fake, just proforma fake, the kid version of the politician's non-apology apology. And what do you do with that? Cuz because how do you make somebody actually feel sorry for something they don't feel sorry for?

You know, I mean, there they are and you're like, say you're sorry. Say it like you mean it. And they don't mean it. They're not they're not going to they don't they don't yet have the empathy. you know, trying to explain to one of them, look, the way your sister feels is they go through life, they share with you, and then when you aren't generous with them, that makes them, you know, you're trying to explain it like this, and you can see the look in their eye like this cold, steely look, you know, like, I hear what you're saying.

I hear your little fable. I'm just not buying it, you know, and I don't know, they they'll do lip service to it. but kind of sigh and shrug and and uh sort of in a sense allow that perhaps that's the case and then they we take another shot at the apology and but but as a parent don't you feel like well okay if all I'm going to get is lip service at least I'm going to get the lip service at least they recognize a moral code even if your heart's not in this I want to watch you go through the motions uh this is what people do you know when they really are sorry see but that makes me feel more more more uh sympathetic to politicians or to to this act which actually usually fills me with contempt.

I feel like well I feel like at least the politician is is pretending and acknowledging yes there is a moral code like they they they don't feel sorry but they'll acknowledge that they that someone should feel sorry and if you're like well that if that's what we're going to get out of our politicians well okay I guess I guess I it's not what I want but I can kind of live with that. Yeah. I just want to jump in and say here this conversation happened years ago.

This was back in 2008. Uh, today's show is a rerun. This was so long ago that we talked about this. The politicians actually still felt obliged to apologize when they screwed up sometimes. Anyway, like back when we recorded this, I remember Barack Obama had just apologized for some remark that he made about small town America and Hillary Clinton had just apologized for saying she flew into Bosnia under sniper fire. You remember this? It did not happen. It was a different time. Not like today when the president does stuff like, you know, posting a photo of himself as Jesus Christ or remember when he posted a video of the Obamas as apes and lots of people called on him to apologize.

But of course, that's the last thing he'd ever do. It was nice when they used to say, "I screwed up. Sorry." Even if it was insincere. I don't know. It said that there are things that people just shouldn't do. I I agree. Well, you know, that's making me I don't know if you if you uh uh familiar with all the the details of that that Bible story about um David and Bethsheba, you know, and uh it's it's it's almost this funny modern polit politics story, right?

No, I don't know this one. Oh, okay. Well, so it's a here's King David, powerful king of Israel, and he um he basically commits adultery in office. uh he sees a woman that he can have because of his power, who's not his wife, and arranges her to come to the palace and has his way with her. And then the story is going to break and her husband's going to find out. And he in a very modern way tries to quell the story, quash it before it gets out.

He has her husband sent to the front lines of battle where he gets killed. He does everything he can to hope that he can just actually hide it. He does not feel sorry about it. And he really digs himself in deep. And time goes on and the prophet becomes aware of this uh you know divinely and uh comes to confront David on it. And what does he do? Uh he tells him a story. He gets him engaged in this little uh fable about um somebody who has a pet lamb.

A poor man with a pet lamb that he loves like a pet. And that a rich man uh um goes and and gets that lamb and prepares it for a meal. Because of his power, he's able to the poor man's like a surf who lives on his land. So the rich man's just like, "Hey, I'm, you know, I'm taking that." Yeah. Because it's, you know, everything you have is mine. So it's this really awful thing of, you know, something was that someone else valued very highly, was valued very low, you know, by the rich man just because of his power.

Yeah. And David and but Nathan's not telling him the story like it's a fable. He's telling him like, "This is happening in your kingdom. What are you going to do about it?" David gets all enraged on behalf of the victim and says, "Bring him here. We're going to do justice on him. We're going to see this done right. We're going to bring that rich man here." and we're going to punish him to the full extent of the law. And so David is like demanding justice for the perpetrator.

And the prophet looks at him and says, "You are the man." And that does it. Then David really gets it and he comes apart, you know, and and he uh and he has a very genuine uh apology and repentance. I mean, but he does he does really end up paying for it and he's a much better king afterward. I wonder if you could sit down with politicians today like that. I don't know. You'd have to you'd have to do something like that. Maybe sit them down, tell them that story, and then say, "You are the man." Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life.

Today on our program, mistakes were made. Stories of people apologizing in that way that amounts to not apologizing at all, not accepting responsibility for the things they've done. Our show today in two acts. Act one, you're cold as ice. Act two, you're willing to sacrifice our love. Stay with us. T American life act one. You're cold as ice. So many scientific advances begin with amateurs, with amateur enthusiasts. or is that enthusiasts? Whatever I'm talking about people who are form little groups to explore new scientific ideas like robots or computers or just whatever this story is about a group like that and the guy who led them, Sam Shaw tells the story.

It was the 1960s, the decade of the first heart transplant and the first working laser. New antibiotics gave the surgeon general such a jolt of confidence he announced to Congress that the time had come and I quote to close the book on infectious diseases. It was against this backdrop of high-flying optimism that a Michigan college professor named Robert Etinger wrote a book posing a simple question. What if death itself was just another disease generally fatal but not necessarily incurable? His theory went like this. If you could freeze somebody at the exact moment of clinical death, maybe, just maybe, in 50 years or a hundred years or a thousand, the doctors of the future could bring him back to life.

This was cryionics or cryionic suspension, and groups of enthusiasts began to spring up here and there, which is how Bob Nelson got involved. I was on the freeway in a traffic jam, very common here in California, and uh I came on the on the radio that there was going to be the first meeting of the suspended animation group at Helen Klein's house. And I remember going there thinking they I'm probably not going to be allowed in because I'm not a scientist, you know, but at least I'll get to see some of the scientists.

And uh I went in, I was allowed in and I came out, voted president, you know. Bob had no medical or scientific training whatsoever. Hadn't even finished high school. He was a 30-year-old TV repair man with a wife and three kids. But he was charming. The kind of charm where you like him because he lets you know in a 100 ways that he likes you. After a few hours with him, he's hugging you goodbye. And Bob sincerely believed that Cryionics was going to save millions of lives.

And that belief was infectious. He did some press, local TV and radio. Turned out he was a really good salesman. And it did. It took off like a cyclone. It was stunning. It I remember once going into a restaurant and uh I was at the urinal and uh I overheard two guys talking saying, "You know who that is? That's the guy that freezes people." And the other guy said, "Why does he do that?" you know, and and I thought it was just u bizarre to be in that situation where where you're famous for something that uh you don't know quite how it happened.

You know, the members of Bob's group weren't experts. They were just fans of an idea. As you'd expect, many were older people, some of them sick and thinking about their own deaths. They set up a nonprofit, the Cryionic Society of California, and before long, they drafted a lineup of scientific adviserss. At this point, nobody had actually been frozen yet. And the scientists set one condition for their participation. That nobody try. Not yet. They wanted to take things slow, conduct research, publish papers, and that was fine with Bob until he got a call from the son of a psychology professor who was dying of cancer, a man who couldn't wait for the research to pan out.

His name was James Bedford. Dr. Dr. Bedford wanted to be frozen and he wondered if the Cryionic Society could help him. So Bob says he got on the phone with the godfather of the movement. Well, I called Robert Etinger that night and I told him what had happened and he said, "Oh my god, this is the biggest thing that's that's happened in the chronics program." And [clears throat] so Edinger said, "We need to go ahead and do it." And I said, "But we'll lose the scientific advisory council." He said, "Maybe not all of them, and if we do, we'll get them again." He said, "There's nothing that will push the program of chronics uh forward than the freezing of the first man." Were you right?

Did you lose them? Absolutely. Lost every one of them the next day. So Bob assembled a team of doctors to carry out the freezing. Though when Dr. Bedford died on January 12th, 1967, they were all caught off guard. Dr. Dr. Bedford's nurse had to run up and down the block collecting ice from the home freezers of neighbors. Cryionics was still just a theory, and the proceedings had the slightly manic quality of a local theater production forced to open a couple of weeks early. A half a year later, when a member of their own group turned up at the morg, wearing a medical bracelet saying she was supposed to be frozen, Bob wasn't much better prepared.

Her name was Marie Sweet. And among the things she left when she died, there was a photograph someone had taken of her 27 years earlier along with a handwritten message. It said, "This is as I wish to be restored." Bob called a couple student inbalmers with access to equipment at the mortuary college and they performed the freezing the only place they could in the cryionic society office on two desks pushed together and covered with a sheet. I was a nervous wreck because um you know I'm thinking I don't know how many violations I'm committing here.

You know, for example, a dead body uh legally can only be moved by a mortician. Um and then uh you know, I had no idea if I was committing any violations by having the body up in in our offices and putting her in ice there and then carrying her down the stairs. It was all just really um uh peculiar. One challenge with cryionics is that the freezing process itself can do a lot of damage to the body. Living cells are full of water and when water freezes, it expands like a house in winter where the pipes burst.

To minimize the damage, Bob and his team replaced the blood with special chemicals, a process called perfusion. Meanwhile, they packed ice around the head and body. A lot of ice. The goal was to get Marie into a giant stainless steel container cooled by liquid nitrogen. A cryionics buff in Arizona had started building capsules for exactly this purpose. That's where Dr. Bedford ended up, sent there by his son after the first freezing. But it wasn't clear where to send Marie. The crownic society had no place to keep a frozen body.

For all they knew, centuries might pass before she could be thought out and brought back to life, which is to say, they needed someplace really permanent. That was going to cost a lot of money. Marie Sweet's husband managed to scrape together a few hundred. That's it. And the society was broke. What the society did have was a lot of enthusiastic members, all of them hoping to be suspended. Bob figured he'd let them decide whether to keep Marie frozen. It wasn't a very tough room. They all said, "Yeah, yeah, go ahead, Bob." Yeah, go ahead.

Oh, okay. So, you know, I should have said, "Well, is anybody going to help here or you know, is it just me?" And but turned out it was just me. And then it got to the point where I began to realize that this was me. I had the power, the decision to say, "Okay, we're going to give up on Marie," which we should have done in hindsight, you know, but I kept thinking that um it's going to work. So, it just seemed that um it was worth going just a little bit further, going I never intended with Marie Suite to to um forever keep her in in preservation at my own expense.

No, I just felt for a while to see what happened next. This very reasonable position led Bob into a lot of very unreasonable decisions over the next few years. Decisions he's still explaining decades later. And what happened next is that another member of the society died. Now, Helen Klein, let me preface by saying, was for me very special. This was the lady that introduced me to the concept of cryionics. She she was the one that had that first meeting. She just somehow put a spell on me, you know, I just loved her.

The society already had one body on its hands and no real plan of action. Like Marie Sweet, Helen Klein had died more or less penniles, leaving no funds to pay for a proper cryionic suspension. But the truth is, Bob liked these people and he didn't want to let them down. And who knew? Maybe cryionics would be huge and there'd be money in it someday. Once again, Bob put the question to the group. And once again, they all agreed their friend deserved a shot at a second life.

So Helen Klein followed Marie Suite to a mortuary in the city of Buena Park where Bob had jerryrigged a temporary storage container. Basically a wooden box lined with polyurethane. Actually what it what the wooden box is is that when they ship a casket, it's the outer box, the wooden box that they ship them in. And uh we we've we would put styrofoam on on the sides and on the top. and they they make excellent um refrigeration units. In other words, a giant cooler filled with a lot of dry ice.

The problem was dry ice is expensive. So, we made what seemed like a simple decision at the time. We had a container with with a lady in dry ice already. Didn't cost any more to put this little lady in there. Once we put Helen Klein in, she was a tiny little thing. So was Marie. Maintaining the cooler was a big job, but Bob didn't really see an alternative. Every week or so, he put hundreds of pounds of dry ice in the backseat of his little vintage Porsche and drove 2 hours from Woodland Hills to the mortuary in Buena Park, where the bodies were stored.

Not in some state-of-the-art permanent facility. Remember? Here's Joe Clockeather, the mortician at the facility. It was in the garage that I had them. So, I have to say the storage facility because when you say storage facility, you think of something much neater, but but it was the garage, but it didn't make any difference really except Oh, you kept them in a garage. You know, that doesn't sound good. But yeah, I was anxious to get them out of here. Bob, come on. Let's, you know, uh, I got to use my garage.

I got things I want to do. you know, I don't want to keep doing this here and I don't want to uh play around with the health department. See, there's a term temporary storage. They don't really clarify what temporary means, but you or I know temporary doesn't mean like forever temporary, you know, not, you know, something should be down the road. You should have something kind of a date. It was at this point with Bob dodging Joe Clock and Joe Clock dodging the health department that a third member of the society died unexpectedly.

Russ Stanley, a man in a position to solve all of Bob's problems. Russ Danley used to call me at home every night and drive me nuts on the telephone for an hour, sometimes two hours. I couldn't get rid of him, telling me about every little thing that happened everywhere in the country about chronics. To him there was nothing else in life but crownics and assuring me always that when he died the society would be in good [clears throat] good shape. Russ used to always say I'm loaded.

I own my own house. So I expected him to leave a couple hundred,000 or or something. But had he left that much money? He left his money to his nextdoor neighbor who was his ex-lover, Mr. Koko. Mr. Koko hated Cryionics. So he called me about 3 or 4 days after we had dress Russ and dry. We put him in the container, too. So now we get three people in this dry ice container. It was big. It I couldn't put any more in there, but I figured that well, this was going to save the day.

But Mr. Koko said, "Uh, Russ Stanley um directed me to give the Cryionic Society $5,000 now and $5,000 in 3 months." It was enough money at least to solve Bob's most pressing problem, to get a legal place to store the frozen bodies he was keeping in the garage. So he bought a plot of land and built a vault in a cemetery in Chadzsworth, 30 mi north of LA, a 15 by20 room dug like a bunker into a gently sloping hillside. Now all he needed were stainless steel capsules to hold the bodies into perpetuity.

But as as luck would have it, we got a call from um Mrs. Bowers. Mrs. Marie Bowers was a housewife from Detroit. A few years back, her father had died and she'd arranged to have him frozen by Ed Hope, the same guy who was storing Dr. Bedford in Phoenix, Arizona. Her father had spent a year and a half there in a one-man capsule the size of a standard water heater. Now, as it turned out, Marie was in a fix of her own. She couldn't pay the the storage that Ed Hope was charging.

She couldn't pay the liquid nitrogen. And she says, "I owe him $1,500." And her exact word, she says, "He threatened to kick the effing capsule out into the street." So she called me and I went, "Wait, well h boy boy, if I could put a couple of people in that capsule, if I could get them all in there, I didn't know if four people would fit in one capsule, you know, boy, would that solve my problem?" and um that would solve her problem. And again, that that's probably the only thing that I that I am somewhat um uh ashamed about that I didn't tell her that, you know, that I was going to put three three more people in there.

Why? Why didn't you tell her? Uh I don't know. Probably fear, you know. Were you afraid? Was there a part of you that was like nervous if you did tell her that she you know she might not go for it? I I didn't I wasn't worried about that because she had no alternative. She had nowhere else to go. So why not tell her what's the risk? Well, I I didn't think it was necessary to burden her with that. The complex problem of uh you know, her of her dad being you know, coupled with other people might have been a problem for her.

I don't know. Maybe maybe it wouldn't have been. The capsule arrived at the mortuary in Buena Park in the spring of 1969, and Bob was there to greet it. A cryionic container is basically a giant thermos, one steel tube inside another with a vacuum in between. So long as you added liquid nitrogen once every few months, the tank stayed really cold. These containers weren't designed to be open and shut again. So when the time came to add the extra bodies, Bob had to improvise. He drained the liquid nitrogen and had a welder open the capsule with a blowtorrch.

They spent most of the night unsealing the tank and arranging the bodies which they wrapped head to toe in myar. Joe Clocker was there too. Here again, I'm just kind of helping them because it's here, you know. I'm curious, too. Anybody be curious just to see. Uh I was feeling excited and nervous because the question was would we be able to um you know to orchestrate the arrangement of these bodies inside that container successfully. Well, first of all, you see how much room was in there?

Yeah. Just to move because of the configuration of the container. Well, it was round of course, but uh just to get it to fit right, you know, it these people were frozen. And when they were frozen, it might have been could have been maybe an elbow out. So, you might have to turn them another way to get the other one to slide beside him. I mean, it was Oh, it was cramped. Let's put it. Yeah, it was cramped. had to have gloves on because the um the body is like steel and and you know 300 degrees below zero it's like holding a a pot that's 300° above zero you know it just you can't do it and it took uh it took it took probably a couple of hours to get them so that everyone was uh you know comfortably arranged.

Then they sealed the container back up. It was that simple. Bob told two confidants about the welder and the four bodies in the tank. Otherwise, he kept it a secret. He'd done what he felt he had to do. And for the moment, what he felt was relief. He'd steered the car back onto the road, secured a working capsule for the four people in his care and a legal vault to keep it in. From here on out, he'd be practical and business-like. No more soft-hearted exceptions, no more pro bono freezings.

But the capsule Bob had pinned his hopes on needed roundthe-clock attention. When you're dealing with equipment that's supposed to last hundreds of years, you want the kind of engineering that goes into building a space capsule. This was not that. We had to keep a pump, an electronic pump pulling the vacuum 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. At Chadzsworth, the temperatures got up to over 100, 110 sometimes, and that was death to these vacuum pumps. They couldn't take that heat. The pumps would would burn out and need to be replaced, and it just got worse and worse and worse.

I was there, I would say, virtually every day. After Bob opened up the tank, it was never quite the same. The vacuum was shot and the liquid nitrogen would boil away to nothing. Bob was constantly refilling the tank with coolant at a few hundred bucks a pop. Sometimes he wrote checks from his personal bank account. Sometimes the checks would bounce. Meanwhile, he was flying around the country giving lectures, showing off artists renderings of the futuristic cryionics facility he planned to build, appearing on radio and TV talk shows.

Regis Philin, Phil Donahue. What exactly is the profusion process? the profusion process. Uh here he is on a local LA newscasting the patient uh biologically for the cold temperatures that he is going to be exposed to. You seen the heard the movie Three Faces of Eve? You know, this is the the two faces of Bob Nelson. The dual role of my life was to on the one hand be a spokesman for chronics and then on the other hand was my nightmare responsibility of u keeping this antique capsule running.

The publicity worked. It attracted new people to be frozen, some of them with the ability to pay for it. Then in July of 1971, Bob got a call from a Canadian man named Ghee, the father of a seven-year-old girl dying of a rare kidney cancer. One day, everything was fine. The next day, doctors were telling him his child had weeks to live. The way Gee saw it, it didn't matter if Cryionics was a long shot. Bob Nelson presented the only slim hope his daughter had left.

Gee didn't have a lot of money, but he managed to fly Jean Viviev to California where he got her admitted to a children's hospital. Bob remembers meeting her there. She was sitting on the bed and her dad was with her and uh she always had the expression of so sad. So so sad cuz she knew how sick she was. She knew she was dying and she didn't want to. Did her parents talk to her about the idea of being frozen? Yes, they did. and um she didn't seem to have much of an opinion one way or the other because it still meant that she had to die and uh she didn't want to leave her sisters and her family.

She wanted to go back to school. Bob knew he shouldn't be performing another free suspension, but he couldn't help it. He had a daughter of his own, just a couple years older. He went to see Jean Vieval. One day, she made a request. Jeanviev only spoke French so the mother would interpret and her mom said Mr. Nelson Jean Viev wants to ask you a question. So I said what? She said uh did I know where Disneyland was and I said yes I do. Matter of fact my buddy uh Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse work there.

And so she told uh John Vivv that and John V like that you know and I said to her mom why is she says the doctor said that it'd be okay for her to go because sitting here is not good for her you know I said I can't believe it. So I said [clears throat] tell John Viev could she be ready to go to Disneyland tomorrow morning. Uh we went the next morning and picked up John Vab and drove to Disneyland and we got her in a wheelchair and um drove her, you know, pushed her around and she got in the teacup and the different things with my young daughter and uh [clears throat] then at one point she was in the one of these little kid turtle turtle game I think it was and her mom says, "Mr.

Nelson, uh Jean Viev wants to ask you another question." And I said, "Sure. What would that be?" And she said, "Would I learn French so that she could talk to me?" And I said, "I will do that just for you." For a little while, it looked like Jean Diev was improving. Then one morning, Bob was back at the hospital. Ghee was sitting on the bed and he was holding her and I I stopped. I knew this was sacred moment. So he looked up and he said, "Get the nurse.

I think John V has passed." And uh so I got the nurse and sure enough she had um she had passed. So he put her back on the bed and then it was all business. It was, you know, critically important to get her temperature down. That's the most important thing about a cryionic suspension is that once the heart stops, the temperature has got to drop. Nothing is more important than that. They packed her in ice. They put her in a what's called a body bag. It's a plastic bag that they put ice on the bottom and then they lay her on that and then totally cover her body with ice and put her on a gurnie and put her in the hearse just so within an hour and a half she was on the mortuary table uh receiving a profusion and uh having her temperature further lowered.

According to Bob Gee hoped to raise $10,000 to pay for a capsule, but he just couldn't manage. He had a pile of medical bills and two other kids to worry about. So Bob found himself back in the same fix, short on funds with a couple of bodies in temporary dry ice storage. He did the only thing he knew how to do. In 1972, Bob arranged to take custody of a cryionics patient named Steven Mandel who'd been frozen and sealed in a capsule in New York. It was the Marie Bowers capsule all over again.

He opened it up, added John Viev and another woman he'd frozen, Mildred Harris, and welded it shut again. By now, the first capsule was breaking down more or less constantly, and Bob had hit a wall. The way he describes it, it's as if he was the captain of a sinking ship, throwing cargo over the side to stay afloat. He couldn't save them all, and so he'd come to a decision. He would let the first capsule fail. This much is clear. He kept it a secret. The second capsule was practically as bad as the first, constantly malfunctioning, boiling off liquid nitrogen.

But Bob kept it going. Then a few years later, he had to leave town for a week. He paid a groundskeeper $100 to babysit the capsule and the pump broke. And when the grounds keeper called a company to fix it, they never showed. I came back um drove up to the vault, looked at the capsule. There's a nozzle that comes out of the capsule that has steam visible because the liquid nitrogen is evaporating away. When I drove up and I looked, that steam wasn't there. So, I just didn't want to acknowledge what that meant.

But the test was to go and touch that pipe and if it was cold, then there was some hope. That mean that it was still cold inside. And then going through my mind, what if it's hot? What if those bodies have decomposed? So, I walk up to the capsule, I put my finger on it, and it was like touching a hot frying pan. It was the most painful experience, emotional experience of my life. I had failed that little girl. I promised her dad and uh that she was gone.

Bob says he immediately flew to Montreal to tell Jean Viev's father in person. In Montreal though is where this story really starts to get interesting and that's coming up in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. It's American Life Glass. Each week in our show, we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program is a rerun. Mistakes were made. Sam Shaw's story about Bob Nelson continues. Bob has just discovered that his second freezing capsule has failed. Liquid nitrogen is leaked out.

And he says the first person that he went to tell was the little girl, Jean Viev's father. So I'm he met me at the airport in a little snack shop, coffee shop. He was right in my face instantly what happened. And um I tried to tell him as gently as I could. Then when he pressed me, how many how many days? How long? I said, "I don't know. Three, four, five, I don't know." And what he said just totally blew me away. He said, "Well, I guess we'll just have to start it up again and continue on." And I said, "Okay, I think I should have fought it out with him right there." But I didn't.

I turned around and walked away cowardly. I think he was shook. He left and I could see his face was red. He was he was upset. Next, Bob says he flew to see Terry Harris, whose mother, Mildred Harris, was in the second capsule with Jean Viev and whose father, Gaylord, was also in the vault. And he met me at the airport and introduced me to his wife. I I told him what happened and he just said, "Oh, well, did you fill it up again?" I said, "Yeah." So he essentially said the same thing that Ghee said.

Did he understand what it meant? It's almost like he didn't care. You know, I mean, no, no, let me take that back. Not that he didn't care. No, it was more like, oh well, far enough into the future, they'll be able to fix that, too. A few days after Bob told me his story, I talked on the phone with Jean Viev's father, Gee. He was polite and I must say very patient with my questions, but he didn't want to be interviewed on the radio. The memory of Jean Viev's death and suspension was just too painful.

He said a little rofully that the whole idea of cryionics might be a moot point anyway given the state of the world. The way things were going, even if the science panned out, there might not be a future to return to. And then he told me something else. That meeting at the airport Bob remembers so vividly. Gee said it never happened. So next I contacted Terry Harris and I told him Bob's version of what transpired. Terry, you know, as you know, Bob tells this very detailed story about coming to tell you that the capsule Terry says Bob never told him about the failure of the capsule.

He had to hear about it from an article in the California newspaper that his aunt sent him into mo. They said in the article that the machinery had, you know, broken down and uh I I just I just it was just incredulous. I I just couldn't believe it. So I called Bob and he assured me that everything was fine and then the the paper was just trying to generate uh sensational readership, you know, and um so and I never saw him. I just talked to him on the phone at that point and Right.

So there was never a time when Bob flew out and met with you at the airport. No, that would that would have been, you know, the right and honorable thing to do. And I wish it had occurred, but it it's just not not accurate. Terry Harris was in his early 20s when he met Bob Nelson. He'd lost both his parents in a span of three months, and Cryionics had seemed like this great thing he could give them in return. He sometimes imagined what it would be like when they were all reunited as a family in some distant dreamlike future.

It gave him hope. And then everything had gone so wrong. So, I called Bob and I told him about my conversations with Ghee and Terry. He was shocked and he stuck to his story. Later that day, he sent me a long, pained email calling the situation a heart-wrenching predicament. He called Terry Harris a liar. But Gee was another matter. Bob said he was devastated that Gee didn't remember their talk in the Montreal airport. He wondered if it was possible that GE repressed the memory. Then I spoke to him a few days later and he offered this take.

I would say this about that that if if Keith said that I never came to the airport in Montreal, then he's right. Um I have to uh concede that it's possible that that what happened because I've I've been mulling this over for the past few days. It's it's possible. What I'm what I'm remembering is uh you know going through this scenario with him over the phone. Yeah. I mean when you talked about it, it sounded so vivid. You know, you remembered like being in the sandwich shop.

Well, in my mind, you know, I've been I I must have been over it a thousand times what it was going to be like to face him, to talk to him. And it was the just the horror of my life because it, you know, it it just um so anyway, I have to um I have to agree that most likely uh I didn't go to Montreal. To be clear, Gee says he never heard from Bob at all. No visit, no phone call, nothing. I'm just wondering if when you look at that memory that seems like it was a faulty memory, if it gives you any pause and makes you wonder whether there are other parts of this set of memories that you have that may also not be totally trustworthy.

Other parts such as well such as Terry Harris. No, Sam, you know, I'm never going to budge one spec from that. You know, you need to believe what you need to believe, Sam. You know, I'm only telling you um you know that I'm telling you what I what I and there would be no reason for me to make up that I that I went to see Terry Harris and them. That's not part of the story. That that that isn't, you know, important to my story. But but don't you think that there might be a reason why it would be important for you to believe that you went out and had those conversations with them face to face, you know?

Uh how do you defend yourself? I don't know. How do you defend yourself against something that um you know that that's not true? I don't know. What's clear is that Bob's convinced he did right by Terry and Gee, and Terry and Gee are equally convinced that he didn't. If it sounds like Bob is harder on Terry than he is on Gee, there's one more thing you have to understand. When the truth about the two failed capsules and the nine bodies in the vault finally came to light, when all those hard decisions Bob had made on the fly became sound bites on the 10:00 news, there wasn't just a public reckoning, there was a trial.

Terry and his brother were two of the plaintiffs. and they won to the tune of $800,000. The half they actually collected came out of mortician Joe Clockeather's malpractice insurance. In 1979, the Harris brothers flew out to California to meet an attorney who led them to the vault at Chadzsworth along with a local TV news team. By that point, Bob had washed his hands of the Cryionic Society. He was dead broke and his marriage had fallen apart and he just walked away. And for the first time, Terry saw the reality of his parents' situation with his own eyes.

Well, the door in the facility was made of steel and it was then chained and padlocked, closed. The chain was [snorts] rusty and there was grass growing around that door where before it wasn't. And our attorney bought uh brought a pair of bolt cutters and uh removed that lock and chain and slid the door back. And we went down and you could just see that, you know, there was pieces of equipment here and there and the capsule lid open and it was unbearable. Just unbearable. And I was just numb, you know.

Just numb. I Well, I I couldn't, you know, look inside that capsule, but uh I just, you know, backed away when I realized that there were just uh you know, remains inside. and we had brought flowers and so we laid them there by the capsule. And then then I just went up the stairs and left. I felt guilty because I should have, you know, been there night and day, which of course isn't very realistic, but at the time I I felt very guilty. Here's the entrance.

This is the management office over here. I mean, it looks identical to the day that I was here 40 years ago. This little shack was was here. This chapel was exactly the same. Bob and I drove out to the cemetery in Chadzsworth on a sunny afternoon in March. We spent about an hour wandering the grounds. Bob pointing out landmarks and citing names and dates like a breezy tour guide. He said it felt good to be back. Oakwood is a really beautiful spot, a rolling park surrounded by jagged sandstone hilltops.

Fred a stair and Ginger Rogers are buried there. And the cemetery staff will point you to the grave sites of a halfozen lesser stars. But none of the grounds keepers we talked to had ever heard of a cryionics facility there. And really, it's no surprise. Where the vault used to be, there's just an empty swath of grass, no padlocked opening, no monument or plaque. See where the where the ground rises up over here? This was uh this is where the vault is. See where these they've put two benches right here.

Bob says all but two of the people he froze are still sealed in the vault now covered over with sod. But the cemetery management tells a different story. They say the bodies were all disinterred years ago. Which leaves one final question. Again, Terry Harris, I have no idea where my parents are. You you have no idea where they're buried now? No. No. The management of the cemetery said, "Well, they're gone." And I said, "Well, what do you mean gone?" And he said, "Well, that uh one day a big pickup truck came up there and disinterred them and took them away." And he said he didn't have any legal permit to do that.

They didn't provide anything. Doesn't that sound outlandish to you? This is where all Bob's secrets and lies about the bodies finally led to Terry Harris making phone calls, writing letters, combing through legal documents. Somewhere he figured there had to be a record, a clue that would tell him what had become of his parents. He's never found it. Cryionics carried on without Bob Nelson. And all these years later, when people in the field tell Bob's story, they call it the Chadzsworth disaster. On Cryionics discussion boards, he's been labeled a murderer.

Though of course all the people he supposedly killed were dead to begin with. When Bob talks about those years, he says he's gotten a bad rap. He genuinely seems to feel bad about failing Jean Viev and her family and for dragging the mortician Joe Clock through the trial. But just as emphatically, he'll tell you that his main mistake was caring too much, that the secrets he kept were necessary to keep the project going, and above all, that the people he froze had donated their bodies under the Anatomical Gift Act, which meant that they donated their body to the Cryionic Society of California.

And according to my attorney, um, we could grind them up for hamburger if that's what we wanted to do. We were given the right by the state of California to to to carry on research and do whatever we wanted in the perfection of suspended animation. And so um we we just felt that um you know there's no need to be telling other people. Um, you know, I mean, I could have just locked that capsule, that vault up and not told anybody that we had stopped putting liquid nitrogen in there, you know.

I probably could have gone on till today, you know, but um, at some point I had to settle back down to reality. Bob says, "A lot depends on your perspective. If the science of cryionics pans out, it'll be possible to look at Jean Viev and Mildred Harris and Helen Klein as casualties of progress, or as Bob calls them, frozen heroes. Bob's not a rich guy, but he's managed to save $28,000 to pay for his own freezing at the Cryionics Institute in Michigan. He thinks his odds of reanimation are pretty good.

And in the end, that's the thing that sustains him. The hope that someday in 50 years or 100 or a thousand, he'll wake up in a world he barely recognizes. A world where Chadzsworth wasn't a disaster, but the first imperfect battle in the war that saved us all. Sam Shaw, he's the creator of the TV series Manhattan and Castle Rock. Bob Nelson published a memoir about his years in cryionics. It's called Freezing People is Not Easy. As I said earlier, today's show is a rerun. And years after we first ran this episode, Bob died.

That was in June 2018. And as for his body, it took some time, but his family raised the money to honor his wishes. Bob is awaiting reanimation at the Crayionx Institute in Clinton Township, Michigan, alongside his hero, Robert Edinger. His old friend and co-fendant, the mortician Joe Cockather, oversaw his suspension. Tech two, you're willing to sacrifice our love. So one of our producers Shank when we came up with this idea to do an episode about people who were apologizing without fully apologizing he put out this poem which is basically that in a nutshell in addition to making radio Shawn is a published poet.

So the poem's by William Carlos Williams and it's a poem that's taught a lot in uh all sorts of poetry classes everywhere and particularly elementary school which schools which is where I heard about it and uh the way it was taught to me was that it was an actual note that William Carlos Williams left for his wife sort of and I was sort of imagined like it's sitting there on the kitchen table waiting for her. Right. And it's uh it's called this is just to say.

I have eaten the plums that were in the ice box and which you were probably saving for breakfast. Forgive me. They were delicious, so sweet, and so cold. What's funny about the poem is that he never really apologizes. He never apologizes. He says, "Forgive me." Which is kind of a command. And so I feel like it's like, oh, you know, I like I ate the plums and that was a bad thing, but I'm not sorry I did it. You know, it's interesting to me that it makes you mad.

The thing that really breaks my heart is that she was saving them. And when he says probably saving them for breakfast, he knew she was saving them for breakfast. There's no probably about it. They live together. Now, now this is a poem that is often um imitated imitated spoofed by by many a poet. It's kind of become a game among poets to like write a version of this is just to say. Um my favorite one is by a poet named Kenneth Ko. Okay, let's hear him.

I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer. I am sorry, but it was morning and I had nothing to do and its wooden beams were so inviting. Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg. Forgive me. I was clumsy and I wanted you here in the wards where I am the doctor. That story has everything that last one. It really does. It's an entire novel in in in three lines. So my favorite of of all the variations on this is written by a student named Andrew.

Maybe it's pronounced Vetion. Veion maybe. Veion maybe. Uh and uh and uh could I ask you to read that? It's called Sorry, but it was beautiful. Yeah. Sorry I took your money and burned it, but it looked like the world falling apart when it crackled and burned. So, I think it was worth it. After all, you can't see the world fall apart every day. That's the work of sixth grader Andrew Veion from a book by Kenneth Ko about teaching poetry to kids in which he has them write their own versions of this is just to say.

The book is called Rose. Where did you get that read? Sean Cole's most recent poetry anthology is called After These Messages. He also produces the podcast The Writer's Almond Brother. We asked some of our regular contributors to do their own variations on the poem. Here they are. This is just to say by Sarah Vowel. I carved your name, not mine, into the arm of Dad's chair. Sorry you were punished, but the wood was so gummy and my knife was so sharp. This is just to say by David Rakov.

At our wedding, I disappeared briefly to have sex with your sister up against the back of the porto sands. What can I say? The Chardonnay was so fresh and cold, and I so full of love and a sense of family. And I said, I'm sure one day we'll laugh about this. Well, by one day I meant that day, and by we I meant me. And by laugh I meant laugh. This is just to say by Starly K. One, I chose the other girl. I'm sorry. It's not just that I'm more attracted to her.

It's also that she is more interesting. Two, I use your dog as an excuse to pick up girls at the dog bark, which is especially tacky since I'm your boyfriend. Please forgive me. I'm really bad at being in a relationship and I'm pretty sure I told you that when we first got together. This is Just to say by Jonathan Goldstein. This is just to say I have eaten the fruit of knowledge. But nothing happened, not a word, no lightning or volcanoes, not even a drop of rain.

So I was just wondering, are you there? This is just to say by Shalomander one. I'm sorry you're overweight and drinking and feeling like everything in your life is doomed to failure, but this is probably why mom said I was her favorite. Two. It sucks, little dough, that I hit you with my car, but at least you weren't alive to watch the hunters shoot your children. three. He was a troublemaker, okay? And didn't know when to shut up. Still, we never would have killed him if we'd known he was the Lord.

This is just to say by Heather O'Neal. Dear mom, this is just to say I forgive you for eating all the plums, the apples, the pears, and even drinking the last of the orange juice. I forgive you for emptying Dad's bank account and for painting stars on our station wagon right before you got in and drove away. I forgive you for leaving us without even saying goodbye. Your plans were always so sweet, so delicious, and so cold. So cold and downarted. [singing] I've been FL since our love was party.

[singing] The world program was produced today by Sarah Kanig and myself with Alex Bloomberg, Jane Bereie, Lisa Pollock, Robin Semi and Alyssa Ship and Nancy Updike. Senior producer for today's show is Julie Snder. Production help from Seth Lind. Music help today from Jessica Hopper. Additional help on today's rerun from Adrienne Lily, Molly Marcelo, and Stone Nelson. Thanks today to Dave Dickerson and Chris Gthert. David Rackoff, one of our longtime contributors. He wrote a variation of this is just to say in that last act. He died back in 2012.

He is not frozen, but his books are still out there. Our website, this americanlife.org. This American life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange. Thanks as always to Brigham's co-founder, Mr. Troy Malatia, who reminds you, don't mess with him. I'm loaded. I own my own house. I'm Eric Glass. Back next week with more stories of this American life. [singing] [singing] Next week on the podcast of This American Life. If you're stuck in an ICE detention facility right now with no reliable way to communicate with the outside world, no money, how do you tell your loved ones where you are?

Or you can yell over the massive walls to the people outside or not many people can do this. You can throw a bottle with a note. I had chills and I was like that's insane. Hail Mary passes. Thanks on the podcast on your local public radio station.