354: Mistakes Were Made
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Prologue
Ira Glass
OK, 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. In just the last few weeks, President Trump has refused to apologize for calling for the deaths of the Central Park Five, even though somebody else admitted to that crime, and DNA evidence confirmed that version of the story.
Joe Biden has refused to apologize for saying this about a segregationist senator back in the '70s, quote, "He never called me boy. He always called me son." Presidential candidate and senator Cory Booker called on Biden to apologize for it. Biden refused to apologize, called on Booker to apologize for the very thought that the remark might have been wrongheaded.
And when politicians do apologize, you know how it goes. It's usually the kind of insincere, I regret the error. I meant no harm, I will do better kind of thing. Like the apology the Prime Minister of Hong Kong issued this month after two million people took to the streets to protest how cozy she is 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 with that tone. You would not feel reassured that they were really sorry.
OK, so years ago when Barack Obama was still president-- and I remember he was apologizing for some remark he'd made about small town America. And around the same time, Hillary Clinton was apologizing for saying that she flew into Bosnia under sniper fire, which did not happen-- 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 him to apologize as their parent, usually, the apology is fake-- just pro forma fake, the kid version of the politician's non-apology apology. And what do you do with that?
Derek Jones
Because how do you make somebody actually feel sorry for something they don't feel sorry for? 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, and they're not going to. They don't yet have the empathy. 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 feel-- you're trying to explain it like this.
And you can see the look on their eye, like this cold steely look. Like I hear what you're saying. I hear your little fable. I'm just not buying it. And I don't know. They'll do lip service to it. They'll kind of sigh and shrug, and sort of, in a sense, allow that, perhaps that's the case. And then they take another shot at the apology.
Ira Glass
But as a parent, don't you feel like, well, OK, if all I'm going to get is lip service, at least I'm going to get the lip service. At least they recognize--
Derek Jones
Yes, sir.
Ira Glass
--our moral code.
Derek Jones
Even if your heart's not in this, I want to watch you go through the motions. This is what people do when they really are sorry.
Ira Glass
See, but that makes me feel more sympathetic to politicians or to this act which actually, usually fills me with contempt. I feel like, well, at least the politician is pretending and acknowledging, yes, there is a moral code. They don't feel sorry, but they'll acknowledge that someone should feel sorry. And I feel like, well, if that's what we're going to get out of our politicians, well, OK. I guess it's not what I want, but I can kind of live with that.
Derek Jones
Yeah. Well, I don't know if you're familiar with all the details of that Bible story about David and Bathsheba. And it's almost this funny modern politics story, right?
Ira Glass
No, I don't know this one.
Derek Jones
Oh, OK. Well, so here's King David, powerful king of Israel, and he basically commits adultery in office. 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's 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 a prophet becomes aware of this divinely and comes to confront David on it.
And what does he do? He tells him a story. He gets him engaged in this little fable about somebody who has a pet lamb, a poor man with a pet lamb that he loves like a pet. And that a rich man goes in and gets that lamb and prepares it for a meal. Because of his power, he's able to-- the poor man's like a serf who lives on his land, so the rich man is just like, hey--
Ira Glass
I'm taking that.
Derek Jones
Yeah, because it's-- you know, everything you have is mine. So it's this really awful thing of something that someone else valued very highly was valued very low by the rich man just because of his power. 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 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. And he has a very genuine apology and repentance. I mean, but he does really end up paying for it. And he's a much better king afterward. And so if you could sit down Clinton or Obama-- and I don't know, you'd have to do something like that, maybe.
Ira Glass
What's sad is that they both know this story. They're always talking about how they're always going to church.
Derek Jones
Yeah. [LAUGHS] That was a good point.
Ira Glass
They've already heard this story.
Derek Jones
Yeah. You wonder if one of their pastors will sit them down, tell them that story, and then say, you are the man.
Ira Glass
With 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.
Act One: You’re As Cold As Ice
Ira Glass
Act One, You're Cold as Ice. So many scientific advances begin with amateur enthusiasts. Or is that enthusiasts? Whatever. I'm talking about people who 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.
Sam Shaw
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 Ettinger 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 100 years or 1,000, the doctors of the future could bring him back to life. This was cryonics or cryonic suspension. And groups of enthusiasts began to spring up here and there, which is how Bob Nelson got involved.
Bob Nelson
I was on the freeway in a traffic jam-- very common here in California. And it came on the radio that there was going to be the first meeting of the Suspended Animation Group at Helen Kline's house. And I remember going there thinking that I'm probably not going to be allowed in, because I'm not a scientist. But at least I'll get to see some of the scientists. And I went in. I was allowed in, and I came out voted president.
Sam Shaw
Bob had no medical or scientific training whatsoever. Hadn't even finished high school. He was a 30-year-old TV repairman with a wife and three kids. But he was charming, the kind of charm where you like him because he lets you know in 100 ways that he likes you. After a few hours with him, he's hugging you goodbye. And Bob sincerely believed that cryonics 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.
Bob Nelson
And it did. It took off like a cyclone. It was stunning. I remember once going into a restaurant, and I was at the urinal and 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? And I thought it was just bizarre to be in that situation where you're famous for something that you don't know quite how it happened.
Sam Shaw
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 non-profit, the Cryonics Society of California. And before long, they'd drafted a lineup of scientific advisors. 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. Bedford wanted to be frozen, and he wondered if the Cryonics Society could help him. So Bob says he got on the phone with the godfather of the movement.
Bob Nelson
Well, I called Robert Ettinger that night, and I told him what had happened. And he said, oh my god, this is the biggest thing that's happened in the cryonics program. And so Ettinger 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 cryonics forward than the freezing of the first man.
Sam Shaw
Were you right? Did you lose them?
Bob Nelson
Absolutely. Lost every one of them the next day.
Sam Shaw
So Bob assembled a team of doctors to carry out the freezing. Though when Dr. Bedford died on January 12, 1967, they were all caught off guard. Dr. Bedford's nurse had to run up and down the block collecting ice from the home freezers of neighbors. Cryonics 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 morgue, 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 of student embalmers with access to equipment at the mortuary college, and they performed the freezing the only place they could, in the Cryonics Society office on two desks pushed together and covered with a sheet.
Bob Nelson
I was a nervous wreck because I'm thinking, I don't know how many violations I'm committing here. For example, a dead body legally can only be moved by a mortician. And then I had no idea if I was committing any violations by having the body up in our offices, and putting her on ice there, and then carrying her down the stairs. It was all just really peculiar.
Sam Shaw
One challenge with cryonics 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 replace 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 cryonics 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 Cryonics Society had no place to keep a frozen body. For all they knew, centuries might pass before she could be thawed 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 dollars-- 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.
Bob Nelson
They all said, yeah, yeah, go ahead, Bob. Yeah, go ahead. Oh, OK. So I should have said, well, is anybody going to help here? Or is it just me? And but it turned out it was just me. And then I get to the point where I begin to realize that this was me. I had the power, the decision, to say, OK, we're going to give up on Marie, which we should have done in hindsight.
But I kept thinking that it's going to work. So it just seemed that it was worth going just a little bit further. I never intended with Marie Sweet to forever keep her in preservation at my own expense. No. I just felt for a while to see what happened next.
Sam Shaw
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.
Bob Nelson
Now Helen Kline-- let me preface by saying-- was, for me, very special. This was the lady that introduced me to the concept of cryonics. She was the one that had that first meeting. She just somehow put a spell on me. You know? I just loved her.
Sam Shaw
The society already had one body on its hands and no real plan of action. Like Marie Sweet, Helen Kline had died more or less penniless, leaving no funds to pay for a proper cryonic suspension. But the truth is Bob liked these people, and he didn't want to let them down. And who knew? Maybe cryonics 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 Kline followed Marie Sweet to a mortuary in the city of Buena Park, where Bob had jerry-rigged a temporary storage container-- basically, a wooden box lined with polyurethane.
Bob Nelson
Actually, what the wooden box is, is when they ship a casket, it's the outer box-- the wooden box that they ship them in. And we would put styrofoam on the sides and on the top, and they make excellent refrigeration units.
Sam Shaw
In other words, a giant cooler filled with a lot of dry ice. The problem was dry ice is expensive. So he made what seemed like a simple decision at the time.
Bob Nelson
We had a container with a lady in dry ice already. It didn't cost anymore to put this little lady in there. Once we put Helen Kline in-- she was a tiny little thing, and so was Marie.
Sam Shaw
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 two 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 Klockgether, the mortician at the facility.
Joe Klockgether
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 it was the garage, but it didn't make any difference, really, except that, oh, you kept them in a garage. That doesn't sound good.
But yeah, I was anxious to get them out of here. Bob, come on, I got to use my garage. I got things I want to do. I don't want to keep doing this here. And I don't want to 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 forever. Temporary-- something should be down on the road. You should have some kind of a date.
Sam Shaw
It was at this point, with Bob dodging Joe Klockgether, and Joe Klockgether 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.
Bob Nelson
Russ Stanley 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 cryonics. To him, there was nothing else in life but cryonics and assuring me always that when he died, the society would be in good, good shape.
Russ used to always say, I am loaded. I own my own house. So I expected him to leave a couple hundred thousand dollars or something.
Sam Shaw
But had he left that much money?
Bob Nelson
He left his money to his next door neighbor, who was his ex-lover, a Mr. Coco. Mr. Coco hated cryonics. So he called me about three or four days after we had Russ in dry-- we put him in the container, too. So now we got three people in this dry ice container. It was big. I couldn't put anymore in there, but I figured, well, this was going to save the day. But Mr. Coco said, Russ Stanley directed me to give the Cryonics Society $5,000 now and $5,000 in three months.
Sam Shaw
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 Chatsworth, 30 miles north of LA. A 15x20 room dug like a bunker into a gently sloping hillside. Now all he needed were stainless steel capsules to hold the bodies into perpetuity.
Bob Nelson
But as luck would have it, we got a call from Mrs. Bowers.
Sam Shaw
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.
Bob Nelson
She couldn't pay 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 words, she says, "He threatened to kick the effin' capsule out into the street." So she called me, and I went, wait. Well, hmm. 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-- boy, would that solve my problem. And that would solve her problem.
And again, that's probably the only thing that I am somewhat ashamed about-- that I didn't tell her that I was going to put three more people in there.
Sam Shaw
Why didn't you tell her?
Bob Nelson
I don't know. Probably fear.
Sam Shaw
Were you afraid-- was there part of you that was nervous if you did tell her that she might not go for it?
Bob Nelson
I wasn't worried about that because she had no alternative. She had nowhere else to go.
Sam Shaw
So why not tell her? What's the risk?
Bob Nelson
Well, I didn't think it was necessary to burden her with that big complex problem of her dad being coupled with other people. It might have been a problem for her. I don't know. Maybe it wouldn't have been.
Sam Shaw
The capsule arrived at the mortuary in Buena Park in the spring of 1969, and Bob was there to greet it. A cryonic 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 blowtorch. They spent most of the night unsealing the tank and arranging the bodies, which they wrapped head to toe in Mylar. Joe Klockgether was there, too.
Joe Klockgether
Here again, I'm just kind of helping them because it's here. And I'm curious, too. Anybody would be curious just to see.
Bob Nelson
I was feeling excited and nervous because the question was, would we be able to orchestrate the arrangement of these bodies inside that container successfully?
Joe Klockgether
Well, first of all, you have to 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 just to get it to fit right, you know? These people were frozen. And when they were frozen, it could have been maybe an elbow out, so you might have to turn them another way to get the other one to slide beside them. I mean, oh, it was cramped. Yeah, it was cramped.
Bob Nelson
I had to have gloves on because the body is like steel. And 300 degrees below zero, it's like holding a pot that's 300 degrees above zero. It's just, you can't do it. And it took probably a couple of hours to get them so that everyone was comfortably arranged.
Sam Shaw
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 businesslike. No more soft-hearted exceptions. No more pro bono freezings.
But the capsule Bob had pinned his hopes on needed round-the-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.
Bob Nelson
We had to keep a pump, an electronic pump, pulling the vacuum 24 hours a day, seven days a week. At Chatsworth, 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 burn out, need to be replaced. Then it just got worse and worse and worse. I was there, I would say, virtually every day.
Sam Shaw
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 artist's renderings of the futuristic cryonics facility he planned to build, appearing on radio and TV talk shows-- Regis Philbin, Phil Donahue.
Newscaster
What exactly is the perfusion process?
Bob Nelson
The perfusion process--
Sam Shaw
Here he is on a local LA newscast.
Bob Nelson
--protecting the patient biologically for the cold temperatures that he is going to be exposed to.
You ever seen or heard the movie Three Faces of Eve? This is the Two Faces of Bob Nelson. The dual role of my life was to on the one hand, be a spokesman for cryonics, and then on the other hand was my nightmare responsibility of keeping this antique capsule running.
Sam Shaw
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 Guy, 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 Guy saw it, it didn't matter if cryonics was a long shot. Bob Nelson presented the only slim hope his daughter had left. Guy didn't have a lot of money, but he managed to fly Genevieve to California, where he got her admitted to a children's hospital. Bob remembers meeting her there.
Bob Nelson
She was sitting on the bed, and her dad was with her. And she always had the expression of-- it was so sad. So, so sad. Because she knew how sick she was. She knew she was dying, and she didn't want to.
Sam Shaw
Did her parents talk to her about the idea of being frozen?
Bob Nelson
Yes, they did. And 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 she didn't want to leave her sisters and her family. She wanted to go back to school.
Sam Shaw
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 of years older. He went to see Genevieve a lot. One day, she made a request.
Bob Nelson
Genevieve only spoke French, so the mother would interpret. And her mom said, Mr. Nelson, Genevieve wants to ask you a question. So I said, what? And she said, did I know where Disneyland was? And I said, yes, I do. Matter of fact, my buddy Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse work there. And so she told Genevieve that, and Genevieve, ooh-- like that.
And I said to her mom, why is-- she said, the doctor said that it'd be OK for her to go because sitting here is not good for her. I said, I can't believe it. So I said, tell Genevieve, could she be ready to go to Disneyland tomorrow morning?
We went the next morning and picked up Genevieve and drove to Disneyland. And we got her in a wheelchair and drove her, pushed her around. And she got in the tea cup and the different things with my young daughter. And then, at one point, she was in one of these little kid-- turtle game, I think it was. And her mom says, Mr. Nelson, Genevieve 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.
Sam Shaw
For a little while, it looked like Genevieve was improving. Then one morning, Bob was back at the hospital.
Bob Nelson
Guy was sitting on the bed, and he was holding her. And oh, I stopped. I knew this was a sacred moment. And so he looked up, and he said, get the nurse. I think Genevieve has passed. And so I got the nurse, and sure enough, she had passed.
So he put her back on the bed, and then it was all business. It was critically important to get her temperature down. That's the most important thing about a cryonic suspension is that once the heart stops, the temperature has got to drop. Nothing is more important than that.
They packed her in ice, put her in 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 gurney, and put her in the hearse. So within an hour and a half, she was on the mortuary table, receiving a perfusion and having her temperature further lowered.
Sam Shaw
According to Bob, Guy 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 cryonics patient named Steven Mandell, 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 Genevieve 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 groundskeeper called a company to fix it, they never showed.
Bob Nelson
I came back, 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. And 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 meant 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, emotional experience of my life. I had failed that little girl. I promised her dad. And she was gone.
Sam Shaw
Bob says he immediately flew to Montreal to tell Genevieve's father in person.
Ira Glass
In Montreal, though, is where the story really starts to get interesting. And that's coming up in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.
It's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our show, we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Mistakes Were Made. Sam Shaw's story about Bob Nelson continues. Bob has just discovered that his second freezing capsule has failed. Liquid nitrogen has leaked out. And he says the first person that he went to tell was the little girl, Genevieve's father.
Bob Nelson
So he met me at the airport in a little snack shop, coffee shop. He was right in my face instantly. What happened? And I tried to tell him as gently as I could. Then when he pressed me, 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, OK. 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 upset.
Sam Shaw
Next, Bob says he flew to see Terry Harris, whose mother, Mildred Harris, was in the second capsule with Genevieve and whose father, Gaylord, was also in the vault.
Bob Nelson
And he met me at the airport and introduced me to his wife. 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 Guy said.
Sam Shaw
Did he understand what it meant?
Bob Nelson
It's almost like he didn't care. I mean, no, 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.
Sam Shaw
A few days after Bob told me a story, I talked on the phone with Genevieve's father, Guy. 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 Genevieve's death and suspension was just too painful. He said a little ruefully that the whole idea of cryonics 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 remembered so vividly, Guy said it never happened. So next, I contacted Terry Harris, and I told him Bob's version of what transpired.
Sam Shaw
Terry, 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 in Des Moines.
Terry Harris
They said in the article that the machinery had broken down. And it was just incredulous. I just couldn't believe it. So I called Bob, and he assured me that everything was fine. And the paper was just trying to generate a sensational readership. And so I never saw him. I just talked to him on the phone at that point.
Sam Shaw
Right. So there was never a time when Bob flew out and met with you at the airport?
Terry Harris
No. That would have been the right and honorable thing to do. And I wish it had occurred. But it's just not accurate.
Sam Shaw
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 cryonics 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 Guy 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 Guy was another matter. Bob said he was devastated that Guy didn't remember their talk in the Montreal airport. He wondered if it was possible that Guy had repressed the memory.
Then I spoke to him a few days later, and he offered this take.
Bob Nelson
I would say this about that, that if Guy said that I never came to the airport in Montreal, then he's right. I have to concede that it's possible that what happened-- because I've been mulling this over for the past few days. It's possible what I'm remembering is going through this scenario with him over the phone.
Sam Shaw
Yeah. I mean, when you talked about it, it sounded so vivid. You remember it being in a sandwich shop and--
Bob Nelson
Well, in my mind, I must have been over it 1,000 times. What it was going to be like to face him, to talk to him. And it was just the horror of my life because it just-- so anyway, I have to agree that most likely, I didn't go to Montreal.
Sam Shaw
To be clear, Guy says he never heard from Bob at all-- no visit, no phone call, nothing.
Sam Shaw
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.
Bob Nelson
Other parts? Such as?
Sam Shaw
Well, such as Terry Harris.
Bob Nelson
No. Sam, I'm never going to budge one speck from that. You need to believe what you need to believe, Sam. I'm only telling you that I'm telling you what I-- and there would be no reason for me to make up that I went to see Terry Harris and them. That's not part of the story. That isn't important to my story.
Sam Shaw
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?
Bob Nelson
How do you defend yourself-- I don't know. How do you defend yourself against something that's not true? I don't know.
Sam Shaw
What's clear is that Bob's convinced he did right by Terry and Guy, and Terry and Guy are equally convinced that he didn't. If it sounds like Bob is harder on Terry than he is on Guy, 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 o'clock 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 Klockgether's malpractice insurance.
In 1979, the Harris brothers flew out to California to meet an attorney who led them to the vault at Chatsworth, along with a local TV news team. By that point, Bob had washed his hands of the Cryonics 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.
Terry Harris
Well, the door in the facility was made of steel. And it was then chained and padlocked closed. The chain was rusty, and there was grass growing around that door where, before, it wasn't. And our attorney brought a pair of bolt cutters, and removed that lock and chain, and slid the door back. And we went down, and you could just see that there was a piece of equipment here and there, and the capsule lid open.
And it was unbearable, just unbearable. And I was just-- I was just numb. Just numb. Well, I couldn't look inside that capsule, but I just backed away when I realized that there were just remains inside. We brought flowers. And so we laid them there by the capsule, and then I just went up the stairs and left.
I felt guilty because I should have been there night and day, which, of course, isn't very realistic. But at the time, I felt very guilty.
Bob Nelson
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 here. This chapel was exactly the same.
Sam Shaw
Bob and I drove out the cemetery in Chatsworth 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 Astaire and Ginger Rogers are buried there. And the cemetery staff will point you to the grave sites of a half dozen lesser stars. But none of the groundskeepers we talked to had ever heard of a cryonics 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.
Bob Nelson
See where the ground rises up over here? This was where the vault is. See where these-- they've put two benches right here.
Sam Shaw
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.
Terry Harris
I have no idea where my parents are.
Sam Shaw
You have no idea where they're buried now?
Terry Harris
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, 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. Now, doesn't that sound outlandish to you?
Sam Shaw
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.
Cryonics carried on without Bob Nelson. And all these years later, when people in the field tell Bob's story, they call it the Chatsworth disaster. On cryonics 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 Genevieve and her family, and for dragging the mortician, Joe Klockgether, 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.
Bob Nelson
Which meant that they donated their body to the Cryonics Society of California. And according to my attorney, 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 carry on research and do whatever we wanted in the perfection of suspended animation.
And so we just felt that there's no need to be telling other people. I mean, I could have just locked that capsule, that vault up, and not told anybody that we'd stop putting liquid nitrogen in there. That probably could have gone on until today. You know? But at some point, I had to settle back down to reality.
Sam Shaw
Bob says a lot depends on your perspective. If the science of cryonics pans out, it'll be possible to look at Genevieve, and Mildred Harris, and Helen Kline 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 Cryonics 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 1,000, he'll wake up in a world he barely recognizes. A world where Chatsworth wasn't a disaster, but the first imperfect battle in the war that saved us all.
Ira Glass
Sam Shaw-- his regular job, he writes for television. Bob Nelson published a memoir about his years in cryonics. It's called Freezing People is Not Easy.
Today's show is a rerun, actually, from 2008. 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 Cryonics Institute in Clinton Township, Michigan, alongside his hero, Robert Ettinger. His old friend and co-defendant, the mortician, Joe Klockgether, oversaw his suspension.
[MUSIC - FEIST, "SO SORRY"]
Act Two: You’re Willing To Sacrifice Our Love
Ira Glass
Act Two, You're Willing to Sacrifice Our Love. So one of our producers, Sean Cole-- when we came up with this idea to do an episode about people who were apologizing without fully apologizing, he pointed out this poem, which is basically that in a nutshell. In addition to making radio, Sean is a published poet.
Sean Cole
So the poem's by William Carlos Williams. And it's a poem that's taught a lot in all sorts of poetry classes everywhere and, particularly, elementary schools, which is where I heard about it. And the way it was taught to me was that it was an actual note that William Carlos Williams left for his wife. And I always sort of imagined it sitting there on the kitchen table, waiting for her.
Ira Glass
Right.
Sean Cole
And 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."
Ira Glass
What's funny about the poem is that he never really apologizes.
Sean Cole
He never apologizes. He says forgive me, which is kind of a command. And so I feel like it's like, oh, I ate the plums, and that was a bad thing. But I'm not sorry I did it.
Ira Glass
It's interesting to me that it makes you mad.
Sean Cole
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.
Ira Glass
Now, this is a poem that is often imitated?
Sean Cole
Imitated. Spoofed by many a poet. It's kind of become a game among poets to write a version of "This Is Just to Say." My favorite one is by a poet named Kenneth Koch.
Ira Glass
OK, let's hear him.
Sean Cole
"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."
Ira Glass
That story has everything, that last one.
Sean Cole
It really does. It's an entire novel in three lines.
Ira Glass
So my favorite of all the variations on this is written by a student named Andrew-- maybe it's pronounced Vech-ee-oh-nay?
Sean Cole
Veck-ee-oh-nay, maybe.
Ira Glass
Veck-ee-oh-nay, maybe. And could I ask you to read that? It's called "Sorry, But It Was Beautiful."
Sean Cole
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."
Ira Glass
That's the work of sixth grader Andrew Vecchione from a book by Kenneth Koch 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 Red? Sean Cole says the poetry book of his that is easiest to find-- and he has assured me that it is not easy at all-- it's called ITTY CITY.
We asked some of our regular contributors to do their own variations on the poem. Here they are.
Sarah Vowell
"This Is Just to Say," by Sarah Vowell. 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.
David Rakoff
"This Is Just to Say," by David Rakoff. At our wedding, I disappeared briefly to have sex with your sister up against the back of the Portosans. 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.
Starlee Kine
"This Is Just to Say," by Starlee Kine. 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 used your dog as an excuse to pick up girls at the dog park, 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.
Jonathan Goldstein
"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?
Shalom Auslander
"This Is Just to Say," by Shalom Auslander. 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 doe, 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, OK? And didn't know when to shut up. Still, we never would have killed him if we'd known he was the Lord.
Heather O'neill
"This Is Just to Say," by Heather O'Neill. 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.
[MUSIC - FOREIGNER, "COLD AS ICE"]
Credits
Ira Glass
Our program was produced today by Sarah Koenig and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Beree, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Senior producer for today's show is Julie Snyder. Production help from Seth Lind. Music help today from Jessica Hopper. Additional help on today's rerun from Bim Adewunmi, Aviva DeKornfeld, Jarrett Floyd, Stowe Nelson, and Matt Tierney.
Thanks today to Dave Dickerson and Chris Gethard, David Rakoff, one of our longtime contributors who 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, ThisAmericanLife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia, who reminds you, don't mess with them.
Bob Nelson
I am loaded. I own my own house.
Ira Glass
I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
