Poetic Variations on Non-Apologies

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I meant no harm kind of thing Remember a classic Prime Minister of Hong Kong years ago two million people took to the streets to protest how cozy she was with mainland China As a chief executive, she said They have more to learn and to do better to balance diverse interests and listen to people from all walks of life 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 But something else completely, and somehow we got intoo the subject of this whole apology business. And the guy has two daughters. they were both around thirteen 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 Pro fora fake kid version of the politician's non apology apology And what do you do with that Be becausecause 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, sayay you're sorry, sayay it like you mean it and they don't mean it.re they're not gonna They don't They don't yet have the empathy You know, trying to explain to one of them, lookook 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 him, you know, youre trying to explain it like this? You can see the look on their eye like this cold steely look You know, like I hear what you're saying, I hear your little fable I' just not buying it You know 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 take take another shot at the apology But as a parent, don't you feel like, well, okay, if I'm going to get is lip service, at least I'm going to get the lip service. att least they recognize our moral code. Even if your heart's not in this, I want to watch you go through the motions This is what people do, you know, when they really are sorry. See, but that makes me feel more sympathetic to politicians or or to this act which actually usually fills me with contempt I feel like what I feel like at least the politician is is pretending and acknowledging, yes, there is a moral code. Like they they don't feel sorry, but they'll acknowledge that they that someone should feel sorry. And I' be like, well, if that's what we're gonna get out of our politicians, well, okay, I guess I guess 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 two thousand eight Today show iss 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 backack when we recorded this, I remember Barack Obama had just apologized for some remark that he made about small toown America, and Hillay 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 presresident 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 Of course, that's the last thing you'd ever do. It was nice when they used to say I screwed up Sorry evenven if was insincere I don't know it said there are things that people just shouldn't do. I agree W you know? That's making me, I don't know if if you familiar with all the details of that that Bible story about David and Bathsheiva, you know. And it's almost this funny modern politics story, right? No, I don't know this one Okay, well, so' here's King David, powerful king of Israel and he He basically commits adultery in office He sees a woman that he can have because of his power He' 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 the profit becomes aware of this, you know, divinely. and comes to conffront David on it and what does he what does he do All He tells him a story. He gets him engaged in this little fable about as somebody who has a pet lamb poor man with a pet lamb that he loves like a pet And that a rich man goes 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's just like, Hey, you know I'm taking that. Yeah, because it's you know, everything has his mine So this is really awful thing of, you know S that someone else valued very highly was valued very low, you know by the rich man just because of his power. And David But Dathan's not telling him this 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 See this done right. We're going to bring that rich man here 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 he and he has a very genuine 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 a politicians today like that. I don't know, you'd have to do something like that, maybe Sit them down, tell them that story and then say you are the man Welcome WWC Chicago, is this is 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. A one, your cold is ice. A two, you're willing to sacrifice our love Stay with us Spp supportort for this American Life and the following message come from Red Fin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you are probably multitasking Are you scrolling home listings on Redfin saving homes that you don't really expect to get Redfin wants you to know that they are not just built for endless scrolling They really are built to help you find an own home Red Vin agents close twice as many deals as other agents. So when you find the one You got a shot at getting it ' Get started at redfin. com own the dream This this American life A wine your cold is ice. So many scientific advances Be begin with amateurs ammateur enthusiast Is that enthusiast? 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 gu them Samshaw tells the story It was the nineteen sixties, 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 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 fifty years or one hundred years or a thousand. 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. I was on the freeway in a traffic jam, very common here in California And I came on the radio that there was going to be the first meeting of a suspended animation group at Alen Klein's house I remember going there thinking 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. I went in, I was allowed in and I came out and voted president, you know Bob had no medical or scientific training whatsoever, hadn't even finished high school. He was a thirty year old TV repair man with a wife and three kids But he was charming, the kind of char where you like him, because he lets you know in a hundred ways that he likes you After a few hours with him, he's hugging you goodbye. And Bob sincerely believed that Chromics was going to save millions of lives. And that belief was infectious He did some press, local TV and radio It turnurned out he was a really good salesman. And it did. it took off like a cyclone It was stunning. I remember once going into a restaurant. And I was at the Uurrinal and I overheard two guys talking saying, you know what that is That's the guy that freezes people And the other guys saying, Why does he do that? you know? And I thought, it is just bizarre to be in that situation where you're famous for something that 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 Cronic Society of California, and before long they 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 notot 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 Dror Bedford wanted to be frozen, and he wondered if the Cryonic Society could help him So Bob says, he got on the phone with the godfather of the movement 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 Pcronics program. And so Edinger said, We need to go ahead and do it. And I said, but we'll lose the scientific addvisory 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 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 doror Bedford died on january twelfth, nineteen sixty seven, 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 Cronics was still just a theory, and the proceedings have 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 over twenty seven years earlier, along with a handwritten message. It said, This is as I wish to be restored They called a couple student embalmers with access to equipment at the Mortuary College, and they performed the freezing the only place they could in the Cronic Society Oice two desks, pushed together and covered with a sheet. I was a nervous wreck because You know, I'm thinking, I don't know how many violations I'm committing here. You know, for example, a dead body legally can only be moved by a mortician Um, and then, you know, I had no idea if I was committing any violations by having their body up in our offices and putting her in ice there and then carrying her down the stairs It was all just really peculiar 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 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 Cronics Buff in Arizona had started building capsules for exactly this purpose. That's where doror Bedford ended up, sent there by his son after the first freezing But it wasn't clear where to send Marie. chronic 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 Swet's husband manag 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. They all say, 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 it 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 it's going to work. So it just seemed that it was worth going just a little bit further, going I never intended with Marie Sweet to forever keep her in preservation at my own expense. No I just felt for a while 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 Cryonics. 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 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 chryonics 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 Sweet to a mortuary in the city of Buenna Park, where Bob had Jerry rigged a temporary storage container Basically a wooden box lined with polyurethane Actually what the wooden box is is when they ship a casket. It's the outer box, the wooden box that they shipped them in. And we we we would sttyrofoam on the sides and on the top and they make excellent U, 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 a lady in dry ice already didn't cost any more to putut this little lady in there Once we put Helen Klein in, She was a tiny little thing. as 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 back seat 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 Clockheather, 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 it was a garage but 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 Come on, let's, you know U 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 playay around with the health department. S 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 is 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 Clockkeetather andoelockkeetather dodging the health department that a third member of the society died unexpectedly Rus Stanley, a man in a position to solve all of Bob's problems Rest Stanley used to call me at home every night and drive me nuts onn the telephone for an hour, sometimes two hours. I couldn't get rid of them. telling me about every little thing that happened everywhere in the country about chronics to him there was nothing else in life but chronics. and assuring me always that When he died the society would be in good good shape Russ used to always say, I'm loaded. I own my own house. So I expected him to leave a couple hundred thousand dollars or something. But had he left that much money? He left his money to his next door neighbor who was his ex lover, mister Coco Mr. Coco hated Chryonics. So he called me about three or four days after we hadus. We put him in the container too. So now we get three people in this dry ice container. It was big. I couldn't put any more in there, but I figured, well, this was going to save the day. But mister Coco said, Rus Stanley directed me to give the Chronic Society five thousand dollars now and five thousand dollars in three 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 Chatsworth, thirty miles north of L.A A fifteen by twenty room dug like a bunker into a gently sloping hillside Now all I needed were stainless steel capsules to hold the bodies into perpetuity But as luck would have it, we got a call from This is 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 Poenix, 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 storage that Ed Hope was charging. She couldn't pay the liquid nitrogen And she says I owe him fif thousandteen hundred dollars And her exact word, she says, he threatened to kick the FN capsule out into the street So She called me and I'm away What? If I could put 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 wouldould that solve my problem And that would solve her problem And again, that that's probably the only thing that I that I am somewhat ashamed about that I didn't tell her that, you know, that I was gonna to put three more people in there Why didn't you tell her Uh I don't know. It 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 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 didn't think it was necessary to burden her. with that the complex problem of, you know, her of her dad being, you know, coupled with other people It might have it might have been a problem for her. I don't know. Maybe maybe it wouldn't have been The capapsule arrived at the mortuary in Buenna Park in the spring of nineteen sixty nine, and Bob was there to greet it The brownic 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 blow toorch They spent most of the night unsealing the tank and arranging the bodies, which they wrapped head to toe in Milar Joe Clockather was there too Here again, I'm just kind of helpeling them because it's here. You know, I'm curious too. Anybody be curious just to see I was feeling excited and nervous because the question was, would we be able to you know, to orchestrate the arrangement of these bodies inside that container successfully Well, firstunly, I see much room is in there Yes, just to move because of the configuration of the container. it was round, of course, but U just to get it to fit right You know, it's these people were frozen and When they were frozen, it might have been could have been maybe an elbow out, so you might have turned them another way. to get the other one to slide beside him. I mean, it, it was cramped Let's put it but yeah it was cramp have buoves on because the u The body is like a steel. And and you know, three hundred degrees below zero, it's like holding a pot that's three hundred degrees above zero, you know, it's just you can't do it And it took it took it took probably a couple of hours to get them so that everyone was, 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 Cle 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. We had to keep a pump, an electronic pump pulling the vacuum twenty four hours a day, seven days a week At Chatsworth, the temperatures got up to over one hundred one hundred and ten sometimes And that was death to these vacuum pumps. they couldn't take that heat The pumps 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 And sometimes the checks would bounce Meanwhile, he was flying around the country, giving lectures, showing off artists' renderings of the futuristic Cryonics facility he planned to build, appearing on radio and TV talk shows Regis Philbin, Phil Donghue What exactly is the profusion process? The profusion process Here he is on a local LA newewscast.esting the patient biologically for the cold temperatures that he is going to be exposed to. You was seen they heard the movie Th faces of Eve, you know This is with 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 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 nineteen seventy one, Bob got a call from a Canadian man named Gee, 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 Cryonics was a long shot Bob Nelson presented the only slim hope his daughter had left He didn't have a lot of money, but he managed to fly Jean Vievere 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 was so sad, so, so sad because 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 she didn't want to leave her sisters. and your 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 of years older He went to see Jean Vie a lot One day she made a request Janiev only spoke French, so the mother would interpret And her mom said, Mr. Nelson Ganvieve wants to ask you a question So I said, what? And she said that I know where Disneyland was And I said, Yes, I do. As a matter of fact, my buddy, Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse Wor there And so she told John V have that and John we have Oh Like that, you know? And I said their Mwi 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 Lave it. So I said, tellell Janviev, couldould she be ready to go to Disneyland tomorrow morning We went the next morning and pick up Jan Via and drove to Disneyland And we got her in a wheelchair and drove her, you, pushed her around and she got in a teaacup and did different things with my young daughter. And then at one point, she was in one of these little kid turt turtle game, I think it was. and her mom says, Mr. Nelson. Jean Vievesre wants to ask you another question And I said, sureure, 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 Jeantiev was improving. And then one morning, Bob was back at the hospital Gee was sitting on the bed And he was holding her. and I stopped. I knew this was sacred moment So he looked up and he said, Get the nurse, I think Janviev is 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 you know critically important to get her temperature down. That's the most important thing about a chronic 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 gurney and put her in the hurse. So within an hour and a half, she was on the mortuary table receiving a profusion having your temperature further lowered According to Bob, Guee hoped to raise ten thousand dollars 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 nineteen seventy two, Bob arranged to take custody of a chronics patient named Stephen Mandel, who'd been frozen and sealed in a capsule in New York It was the Marie Bowerss capapsule all over again He opened it up. added Jan Vieve and another woman you'd frozen, Mildred Harris and welded it shut again B 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 Bob kept it going. Then a few years later, he had to leave town for a week He paid a groundskeeper a hundred dollars hundred to babysit the capsule and the pump broke And when the groundskeeper called the company to fix it, they never showed They 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 nitgen 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 And there was some hope that me 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 walked 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 that she was gone Bob says he immediately flew to Montreal to tell Jean Vievere's father in person Montreal though is where the story really starts to get interesting. And that's coming up in a minute from Chicago Public Radi program continues This message comes from Yise, the smart way to manage your money around the world. With Yise, you can send, spend and receive money in over forty currencies at the mid market rate. Learn more at wise. com Ts and Cs Apply Support for this American Life comes from Squarespace, the all in one platform for creating a fully custom on brand website. Choose from a wide range of professionally designed award winning templates with options for every user category. Showcase your offerings with a website designed to grow your business, and manage payments seamlessly with branded invoices and online payments Visit squarespace d. com slash American to get ten percent off your first purchase of a website or domain Support for this American L life comes from Mattress Firm Sleeping hot can make it harder to stay asleep and feel rested Mattress firm sleep experts are trained to match you with the right cooling mattress like the Temper Breeze, designed to deliver cooling comfort for hot sleepers For the great sleep you deserve, visit Mattress Firm and get a three hundred dollars instant gift, plus next day delivery when you upgrade to a temperedic They make sleep easy. Restrictions apply, next day delivery available on select mattresses and subject to location CSar for details It's this American L life Amera Glass H you're to show we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme.od's program is a rerun mistakes were made Samshaw's story about Bob Nelson continues. Bob has just discovered that his second freezing capsule has failed. Liquid nitrogen is doubt And he says the first person that he went to tell was the little girl, Jean Vievere's father So he met me at the airport in a little snack shop, coffee shop He was Right in my face instantly. What happened And u 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 how 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 Vievesre, and whose father Gaylord was also in the vault 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, Yeahah, so he essentially said the same thing that Gee said D he understand what it meant It's almost like he didn't care, you know I mean, 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 Vievere'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 Bievere's death and suspension was just too painful. He said a little rofully 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 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 Moinne they said in their article that the machinery had broken down and I just it was just incredulous. I just couldn't believe it So I call Bob and He assured me that everything was fine and then the paper was just trying to generate uh, sensational readership, you know, and, uh So 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 would that would have been you know, the right and honorable thing to do And I wish it had occurred, but it's just not accurate Terry Harris was in his early twenties when he met Bob Nelson. He'd lost both his parents in a span of three months. and Chronics 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 gave him hope And then everything had gone so wrong So I called Bob and I told him about my conversations with Gee 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 Gheee was another matter And Bob said he was devastated that he didn't remember their talk in the Montreal airport. He wondered if it was possible that Geeed 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 Gee said that I never came to the airport in Montreal then he's right. Um I have to I have to concede that it's possible what happened because I've been mulling this over for the past few days 's possible. what I'm What I'm remembering is 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 remember like being in sandwich shop? Well in my mind, you know, 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 just the horror of my life because it you know, it it just, um, So anyway, I have to I have to agree that most likely 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 tootally trustworthy. Other parts such as Well, such as Terry Harris No Sam, you know, I'm never gonna to budge one spec from that. You need to believe what you need to believe, Sam. You know, I'm only telling you, Um, you know, 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 isn't you know, important to my story. But don't you think that there might be a reason why it would be important for you believe that you went out and had those conversations with them face to face You know, uh, How do you defend yourself again I don't know. how do you defend yourself against something that You know, that that's not true I don't know What's clear is that Bob's convinced he did right by Terion 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 ten o'clock newews There wasn't just a public reckoning There was a trial Terry and his brother were two of the plaintiffs And they won the tune of eight hundred thousand dollars The half they actually collected came out of Mortician Joe Clockkeeters's Malpractice insurance In nineteen seventy nine, 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 crrown of 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 padlock closed The chain was Rusty and there was grass grow around that door where before it wasn't and our attorney bought brought a pair of bolt cutters and u rememove that lock and chain and slid the door back and We went down and you could just see that You know, there was 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, 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 they were just u you know, remains inside and We'd brought flowers and so we laid them there but a capsule and then And 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 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 forty years ago. This little shack was here. This chapel was exactly the same. Bob and I drove out to 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 Estair and Ginger Rogers are buried there. and the cemetery staff will point you to the graves 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 whereere the vault used to be, there's just an empty swath of grass. No padlocked opening, No monument or plaque See where where the ground rises up over here. This was this is where the vault is See where these they 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 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 one day a big pickup truck came up there and He disinterred them and took them away and he said he didn't have any legal permit to do that. They didn't provide anything And doesn't that sound outlandish to you? This is where all Bob's secrets and lies about the bodody is finally led 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 it had become of his parents He's never found it s 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 Krak's discussion boards, he's beenabeled 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 Jeanne Vieve and her family, and for dragging the mortician Joe Clockether 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 Cry and anxiety 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 carry on research and do whatever we wanted in the perfection of suspended animation. And so we just felt that You know, there's no need to be telling other people U You know, 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. You know? That probably could have gone onntil 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 Cryonics pans out, it'll be possible to look at Jean Vievere 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 twenty eight thousand dollars to pay for his own freezing at the Crayonics 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 fifty years or one hundred or one thousand, he'll wake up in a world he barely recognizes A world where Chatsworth wasn't a disaster the first imperfect battle in the war that saved us all Sam Shaw. He's the creator of the TV series Manhattan, Castle Rock Bob Nelson publish a memoir about his years in Conics called freezing people is not easy As I said earlier Today show' is a rerun And years after we first ran this episode, Bob died That was in june twenty eighteen and As his body, it took some time, but his family raised the money to honor his wishes. Bob is awaiting reanimation Pryonics Institute Pinton toownship, Michig Alongside his hero, Robert Ettinginger His old friend and co deffendant, the Mortician Joe Ck togetherher. oversaw his suspension Steep two, you're willing to sacrifice our love So one of our producers, San Kul, 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 Sean is a published poet Pems by William Carlos Williams. And it's a poem that's taught a lot in all sorts of poetry classes everywhere and particularly elementary school, 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 sort of I always sort of imagine like it's sitting there on the kitchen table waiting for her And it's 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 Let's know probably about it. They live together Now Now this is a poem that is often imitated imitated Boof by many a poet It's kind of become a game among poets to like write a version of this is just to say U my favorite one is by a poet named Kenneth Coke Okay, let's here 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. whereere I am the doctor That story has everything that last one. It really does. It's an entire novel in three lines So my favorite of all the variations on this is written by a student named Andrew, mayaybe it's pronounced vecione Viconee, maybe. Viconee maybe. Uh and u and could I ask you to read that? It's called Sorry but it was beautiful 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 Veconee from a book by Kenneth Coch 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 they are 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 The wood was so gummy And my knife was so sharp This is Just to sayay by David Rakov At our wedding, I disappeared briefly to have sex with your sister up against the back of the porto ss. 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 will laugh about this Well by one day I meant that day And by me, I meant me. And by laugh I'm at laugh This is just to say by Starley Kind I chose the other girl I'm sorry It's not just that I'm more attracted to her also that she is more interesting Tw. I used your dog as an excuse to pick up girls at the dog bark whichich 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 Shom Ausslander 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, littleittle De 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 a 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. plans were always so sweet so delicious. and so cold So coool B I hard in ' Well program is produced today by Sarah Kanig and myself with Alex Bloomberg, Jane Berie, Lisa Pollock, Robin Semey and Alyisss Shippp and Nancy Upeikeke. Senior producer for today's show is Julie Snyder, Production H from Seth Lind, Music Hp today from Jessica Hopper. Additional help on today's reround from Adrianne Lillily, Molly Marcello, and Stonee Nelson Thanks today to Dave Dickerson and Chris Gethher, David Rackoff, one of our longtime contributors, who wrote a variation of This is Just to sayay in that last act. He died back in twenty twelve. He is not frozen, but his books are still out there. Our website, thisammericanlife dot org commot This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio Exchange Thanks always to Brookams co founder, Miss Tor Mata, 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 Next week on the podcast of this American Live If you're stuck in an icice detention facility right now with no reliable way to communicate with the outside world No money