# Transhumanist Grief

A person close to me has died. And I can’t do anything about that. 

When I was 13, at some celebration, I gave a toast saying that I wished all of us could be cryopreserved one day. Back then I wasn’t a committed transhumanist yet, but the idea already felt deeply right to me.

When I was 14, I remember sitting up at night, crying, and telling myself: I will look for a way to live forever—so that I can figure out how people might be brought back.

I was going through a very hard time then, and my depression was probably beginning. I didn’t see a psychologist for many years after that; my parents used to call all psychologists charlatans.

When I was 16, on his birthday, he heard that I dreamed of people living forever. A few days later we ran into each other by chance on the street, and he asked me:

“How many times can a human cell divide?”

“You won’t catch me on that one,” I said. “Fifty-two times.”

“Correct. And how did the Gobi Desert form?”

“I don’t know.”

“Mostly through the weathering of rocks. Mighty mountains turn to dust over the years—nothing is eternal.”

In a sense, he was right. Absolute eternity… is probably not possible for us—extremely complex systems made of quadrillions of atoms. Entropy, after all, is one of the most fundamental laws of the world.

But he may not have known that some cells can divide indefinitely; they don’t have a Hayflick limit. Those are cancer cells or stem cells. He most likely didn’t know that cells can be rejuvenated with Yamanaka factors. That aging and death don’t depend only on that limit—although it seems to constrain, in many ways, the maximum human lifespan around 125–130 years. And so on, and so on.

Yes, nothing is eternal. Not even mountains. But mountains crumble over millions of years. And I truly want us to crumble that slowly too.

Not in an instant. Not in a single phone call or message saying that it’s all over.

But that message has already come. And I can’t do anything. I can’t bring him back.

During the first day I felt crushing guilt. I thought I had done far too little about life extension. Then I thought I could have spent more time with him, tried harder to help with his health.

Then I remembered that before I even turned 17, a war began in my country and missiles and fighter jets flew over my head. I fled, and for two years I lived in a half-destroyed building, sleeping on a mattress on the floor, without water and without electricity, and I didn’t understand that I should have reached out to social services for help. People told me, “go get a job,” but all I could do was cry. 

Only recently did things get better. Only recently did I start living normally—and then he died.

And you know what’s the worst part? I can’t even give him a proper burial. Let alone cryopreservation.

My whole poor family doesn’t have enough money even to bury him in the ground. I tried to raise money, my mother wrote to everyone who knew him, but almost no one helped. It looks like we’ll have to cremate him, and that makes it hurt even more.

Why do I hate cremation? Honestly, I don’t have a purely rational reason. But I do have some thoughts.

**1\. Preserving information.**

If we think about ways a person might be “revived,” then in every hypothetical scenario I know, the key factor is preserving—or later recovering—information about the person, and reconstructing them from that information.

When you burn a body, that information is destroyed almost completely.

Yes, decomposition in the ground doesn’t preserve information anywhere near as well as cryopreservation. But it’s still something. Sometimes, from a single bone, paleo tologists can infer how a creature lived, what it ate, and how it died. What can you infer from a handful of ash?

**2\. Preserving DNA.**

I kept a few of his hairs in hopes of sequencing DNA from them in the future. I don’t know if it will work. I’m not a biologist, and I’m not even sure the hairs are preserved well enough.

If he were buried, there would be a better chance of recovering his DNA later, if needed. It would remain for a long time, at least. And I don’t even know the exact cause of his death—my parents don’t want to investigate.

**3\. Pain.**

All my life people told me about heaven and hell. People say things like, “burn in hell.” They talk about eternal fire, the lake of fire, and so on.

And then they say: “Oh, your loved one will be completely burned. Wonderful, right? You’ll be able to carry around a Pringles can with what’s left of him.”

That’s not a rational reason, I know. But the pain is real.

I’m not religious. But I was raised in that environment, and cremation causes me intense anguish.

I even thought about taking out a loan to pay for a burial, but I’m a 20-year-old migrant with no job. Who would lend me anything?

It’s just horrific. I can’t revive him, I can’t come up with any solution—and I can’t even simply bury him in the ground. This helplessness is destroying me.

It’s also awful that I have no one to talk to. I don’t have close transhumanist friends. And I don’t want to hear standard advice.

I know LessWrong isn’t a mental health support forum. But I truly had nowhere else to say all of this. I know there are people here who are often sympathetic to transhumanism and might share some of what I’m feeling.

I want to ask: how have you coped with something like this, and how can one go trought it? How can I not lose my mind—and still keep fighting death—without being tortured by the fact that my contribution will most likely be infinitesimal no matter how hard I try?