By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

 

IS there life after death? Some believe that after death, the essential part of an individual’s stream of consciousness or identity continues to live, a belief that derives itself from various religions, esotericism and metaphysics.

What lives after the physical body expires depends on which belief system one believes, or have faith in. Some religions believe that an individual may be reborn in another body and begin living again with no memory of their earlier lives. A person, according to this view, births and deaths may happen over and over until the individual refines himself enough to get entry to a spiritual world.

Science, especially with the fast-developing capacity of artificial intelligence (AI), is also attempting to experiment on the possibility that a dead human can be brought to life again. In the documentary film, Hope Frozen, a Thai Buddhist couple decided to cryogenically-preserve their two-year old daughter immediately after she died of brain cancer in 2015. The film won Best International Feature Documentary award at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival 2019.

Hope Frozen was shown at several documentary film festivals and in 2020, Netflix picked the film for distribution under the title Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice. The film won “the 49th International Emmy Award for Best Documentary in 2021, becoming the first Thai production to win an International Emmy.”

The attempts to bring to life certain life forms buried in ice for thousands of years and had gone extinct have been very successful. National Geographic reported that a male date palm tree sprouted from a 2,000 year-old seed had grown and produced its own seed. The plant, named Methuselah was sprouted under laboratory conditions in 2005. There are other plants as well, cultivated in ancient times and now extinct, whose tissues were extracted from their frozen seeds, and germinated by a team of scientists at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies in Israel.

National Geographic, in an article published in 2012, claimed that Methuselah’s record as the oldest plant to be regenerated had been superseded by a flowering plant native to Siberia, Silene stenophylla, regenerated from 32,000 year-old seeds excavated near the banks of Kolyma River in Russia. The Russian team discovered the seed cache encased in ice, some 38 meters below the permafrost, buried by an Ice Age squirrel.

So, it seems viable that cryogenically-preserved human bodies may survive after a life on ice. There are ethical question,s of course, presented by various belief systems and faiths, but there are valid reasons also, for proceeding in this direction, for the preservation of life.

Which brings me back to my grandfather. He died for the first time at the age of 54. According to those who attended his wake, he was dead for 24 hours, so that when he suddenly rose from his open coffin made of wood, everyone scampered in different directions. He lived. According to him, he was ready to enter a place of soothing light, but was prevented by two huge mountains, closing, each time he made an attempt. It was during his last attempt that he heard a voice, “Go back, continue to heal.”

He did what he was told. He was good at it. And he healed and ministered to the sick until his second death, at the age of 95. It was his wish to be buried directly in the cemetery, as he advocated against paying for the ceremony in the church, but his children brought him there anyway. Cryogenics was still at its infancy during his time, but I know some wished him to be alive again, given the high cost of medical services, and considering he served for free.

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