At 5 p.m. on May 30, 2015, an elderly man on his deathbed lay in a hospital bed.
Only to see the old man holding the hand of her daughter in front of the hospital bed and reluctantly releasing it, she looked at it greedily, as if she wanted to deeply reflect her daughter's appearance in her mind.
The daughter suppressed tears and comforted her mother, who was about to die:
"Mom, you know what? If the plan succeeds, maybe you will be younger than me when we meet, and then you will have to take care of me! ”
The old man squeezed out a smile and whispered:
"Well, then... That's great! ”
The daughter pounced on it and hugged her mother.
At 5:40 p.m., the strong and optimistic old man passed away peacefully.
Subsequently, the remains of the elderly were transported to the United States for freezing treatment for the first time.
According to their vision, perhaps in 50 years, the elderly will be able to thaw their heads and rebuild their bodies through future science and technology to achieve a true sense of "resurrection".
This old man is a well-known female writer in China and the first frozen person in China - Du Hong!
Du Hong was born in 1955 to an intellectual family in Chongqing. His father was a cadre on a state farm and his mother was a primary school teacher.
Because her father was very busy at work and often was not at home, Du Hong had to follow her mother and grandmother when she was a child and grew up in the primary school in the mountain village.
Perhaps because of the innate genetics and the acquired environment, Du Hong developed a strong interest in literature and writing when he was a child.
Since the college entrance examination was cancelled by the state at that time, after graduating from high school, 17-year-old Du Hong worked as a salesman in a local cooperative.
In 1977, the state restored the college entrance examination system. Through the college entrance examination, 22-year-old Du Hong became a correspondence student at Chongqing College. After further studying in college, Du Hong's daughter inherited her mother's business and successfully became a people's teacher.
Out of his love and pursuit of literary writing, Du Hong insisted on writing after becoming a teacher. Since the 1980s, she has published in various newspapers and magazines, and later worked directly for a well-known publishing group.
Although Du Hong is still relatively smooth in her career, in marriage, she can be regarded as unladylike.
Du Hong's husband has a strange personality and a short temper, and since the two of them got married, the family has not been quiet for a moment. Sometimes when her husband was in a bad mood, Du Hong would still suffer from skin and flesh, and his body would be beaten to a piece of blue and purple. Because of these injuries on his body, Du Hong would even be unable to even work at times.
The most hateful thing is that Du Hong's mother could not see the son-in-law's atrocities against her daughter, and when she came to the middle to persuade her, the son-in-law even beat the old mother-in-law. Afterwards, he fell to his knees weeping and begging for forgiveness.
Finally, after a few years of marriage, that is, when her daughter Zhang Siyao was 4 years old, the couple finally divorced.
Since then, Du Hong has never seen her husband again, nor has she received a single child support from her husband for her daughter.
The difficulties of a divorced mother living alone with her daughter can be imagined!
In order to support this family and let her daughter Zhang Siyao grow up healthily, Du Hong, in addition to her own work, also worked hard to write and use the manuscript fee to supplement the family.
Happily, although the mother and daughter are dependent on each other and live a poor life, without the domestic violence of their husbands, they live a simple and happy life, and the 20-square-meter cottage is often filled with joyful laughter.
Du Hong, who is good at observation, found that her daughter's every move in life is a good material for writing. Since Zhang Siyao was 5 years old, Du Hong has compiled the fairy tales in her life into poems for publication.
Influenced by her daughter, Du Hong developed a strong interest in children's literature. She began to write fairy tales, the protagonist of fairy tales small animals, the prototype is her daughter Zhang Siyao.
After four or five years of hard work, Du Hong has published a series of children's works in succession, and many of her children's poems have also been selected for primary school Chinese textbooks. Correspondingly, economic income has gradually become richer.
By the time Zhang Siyao was 10 years old, the kind-hearted Du Hong had also adopted an 8-year-old girl in an orphanage.
I thought that the happy days would last for a while, but the good times were not long, and Zhang Siyao's grandmother suddenly had a cerebral infarction and was sent to the hospital.
After the doctor's diagnosis, the elderly have a variety of diseases due to overwork in old age and youth, and need heart transplantation.
This kind of surgery is very expensive, in order to be able to get enough medical expenses as soon as possible, Du Hong had to start working part-time everywhere.
In addition to making money to treat his mother's illness, Du Hong also tried his best to make the old man happy. She specially wrote a fairy tale of "Grandmother and Little White Cloud", and the prototype of the grandmother in the story is her mother.
After writing it, Du Hong read it to his mother, who seemed to laugh out loud in cooperation. Later, the fairy tale won the "Best Fairy Tale of the Year 2000".
For many years, Du Hong has been struggling to hold on to it by himself. Relatives and friends saw that she had been single for many years, and they had also asked her to go on a blind date several times, and Du Hong refused one by one.
With two daughters and a seriously ill mother, this will drag people down.
In addition, if you meet someone unladylike again, then not only will you be wronged, but your mother and daughter will also suffer.
Thinking of this, Du Hong no longer had the heart to think about reorganizing the family.
In 2006, Zhang Siyao was admitted to the Choreography major of the Central Academy of Drama with excellent results. After graduating from Chinese opera, she stayed in Beijing to work hard.
During this period of work, Zhang Siyao made a boyfriend. This boyfriend is named Zhou Lei, handsome and handsome, witty and humorous, and the most important thing is to take good care of Zhang Siyao. In Zhang Siyao's own words:
"He filled the gap in my life about fatherly love and care, and in the happiness of love, my personality gradually warmed up, and I also knew how to care for my mother."
Later, the two naturally entered the palace of marriage.
For this son-in-law, Du Hong did not have any material requirements. The two of them had just graduated, had little savings, and everything was done for the wedding from Jane.
In order to be able to live with her daughter and son-in-law, Du Hong, who is about to retire, used the writing fees she had saved over the years to buy a small house of more than 20 square meters near her daughter's home and moved from Chongqing with her mother.
In early 2013, Du Hong's mother died of nasopharyngeal cancer in Beijing. Zhang Siyao also had a great touch in addition to her grief, that is, "filial piety should be early", do not "the son wants to raise but the relatives are not there".
After that, Zhang Siyao spent more time with Du Hong. As soon as they had time, the mother and daughter went shopping, ate, bought clothes, watched movies, watched theater, and traveled.
She wants to use her own way to make up for the shortcomings in her mother's life, and use her own actions to repay her mother's love for herself.
At the end of 2013, 59-year-old Du Hong, accompanied by her daughter, went to a hospital in Beijing for a comprehensive physical examination. The results showed that everything was normal, which made the mother and daughter very happy.
However, only 10 months later, Du Hong suddenly felt unbearable stomach pain. She had to go to the hospital again for a check-up, and the color ultrasound showed a "pancreatic mass."
After the test results came out, the doctor said that he wanted to talk to Zhang Siyao alone, but Du Hong insisted on knowing the condition, so the mother and daughter also had a big fight. In the end, Zhang Siyao could not resist her stubborn mother, but still compromised.
"Pancreatic cancer stage III, go to a better hospital to see if there is any possibility of surgery!"
The doctor's words made the mother and daughter's hearts cold. Zhang Siyao couldn't wait to look up information related to "pancreatic cancer" on the Internet, and found that pancreatic cancer is known as the "king of cancer", which will take the lives of patients at a very fast rate.
For more than a month, Zhang Siyao accompanied her mother to various hospitals in Beijing, large and small, and the results were the same: the tumor of the pancreas enveloped the main blood vessels, and Du Hong's condition was not suitable for surgery.
In desperation, Du Hong had to give up the operation.
At that time, Zhang Siyao and her husband Zhou Lei had just signed an agreement with someone to write a script for a 30-episode TV series, which was the first independently signed work of the two. But because Du Hong fell ill, Zhang Siyao had to resign and go home to take care of her mother, and Zhou Lei was also suspended from work in the project team.
Because Du Hong's illness requires eating fewer meals and eating five meals a day, the couple needs to run back and forth between the family and the hospital every day. In the evening, the two stayed in the hospital to accompany Du Hong.
In the few months from the end of 2014 to the beginning of 2015, Du Hong's condition was relatively stable. She usually reads books, practices calligraphy, and occasionally visits the flower and bird market or park with her daughter. During the Spring Festival, Du Hong also went with her daughter and son-in-law to Zhou Lei's hometown in Guangdong for the New Year.
In 2015, Du Hong won the Hugo Award and the editing qualification of the famous science fiction novel "The Three-Body Problem".
However, since mid-March 2015, Du Hong's situation has become more and more serious.
At that time, her cancer cells gradually spread to the bones, lungs and peritoneum, and her body began to be in severe pain, requiring 2 morphines a day to relieve pain. Later, morphine was played more and more, and in May, 8 morphines a day could not stop Du Hong's pain.
Zhang Siyao was anxious and heartbroken, but there was nothing she could do. She wants to die with her mother, but Du Hong's only wish is to let her daughter live well and pursue her own happy life.
When treated in the hospital, a news item on the Internet attracted the attention of Du Hong and Zhang Siyao: a Thai couple could not save their daughter with a brain tumor, sent her to a scientific research institution in the United States to freeze, hoping to thaw their daughter for treatment when medicine developed in the future.
Du Hong felt that this was very magical, if it was really possible, she might have the opportunity to see her daughter again in the long future, even if this opportunity was very slim. So, she half-jokingly told Zhang Siyao her thoughts.
After discussing with her husband Zhou Lei, Zhang Siyao felt that this was an opportunity, and it was possible to succeed in the future, although it was not optimistic about most people now.
In order to help her mother fulfill her wish, after a period of searching, Zhang Siyao really found a company on the Internet that claimed to be able to do cryonics.
But when he met with the head of the company, he told him that the research project had been stopped, and if it did not stop, the complete freezing of the human body would probably require hundreds of millions of dollars. For Zhang Siyao and his wife in the ordinary working class, this is undoubtedly an astronomical number.
After the two learned about these situations, they were a little discouraged, but Zhou Lei did not give up. Through online volunteers and several of his classmates in the United States, he contacted Alcor, a scientific research institution specializing in human freezing in the United States———.
Through several conversations with them, Zhou Lei felt that their view that human death is not instantaneous is credible.
In addition, Wei Jingliang, one of the volunteers who helped Mr. and Mrs. Zhou Lei, a ph.D. student in animal genetic engineering at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, told them:
"Biologically speaking, at the first time the doctor announces the death of the patient, the patient is scientifically allowed to enter a 'medically stable' state, and then a series of methods are used for cryopreservation, which can make the human body go to sleep with minimal damage." When a few years later, the scientific level of human beings reaches a higher level, and then the human body is thawed, it is indeed possible to 'resurrect'! ”
Through the information of all parties, Zhang Siyao learned that Alcor's human body freezing technology has made a more obvious breakthrough in the past 10 years. Now they have frozen more than 140 patients, and more than 1,000 members have signed freezing agreements.
In addition, their freezing is also divided into head freezing and full body freezing. Full body freezing costs about 2 million yuan, head freezing only costs 750,000 yuan, and its technology is more mature than full body freezing.
Considering his economic situation and technical conditions, Zhang Siyao felt that his mother Du Hong was more suitable for head freezing. But only freezing the head, losing the body, will the mother agree?
After Zhang Siyao told Du Hong about the freezing plan, she readily agreed. Because Du Hong has suffered a lot and is usually very frugal in life, Zhang Siyao hid the cost of the operation from her.
Du Hong told her daughter that whether it can be resurrected after 50 years of freezing is an unknown, she does not mind experimenting with her own body, the emergence and improvement of a new technology, always need to be constantly worked for.
Since Du Hong had already agreed, everything had to proceed quickly, and there was not much time left for her.
Zhang Siyao sold his mother's small house in Beijing, plus all his and her husband's savings over the years, and finally scraped together 750,000 yuan and signed a contract with Alcor.
At 5:40 p.m. on May 30, 2015, Du Hong passed away.
Subsequently, two American surgeons injected anticoagulants, antibacterial drugs and antithrombotic drugs into Du Hong's body for the first time to prevent blood clotting and pressed the heart with special equipment to ensure that blood continued to circulate.
After doing this, Du Hong's body was placed in a wooden coffin filled with ice cubes and quickly transferred to Alcor's headquarters in Los Angeles for surgical treatment.
After Du Hong's head was separated, it was stored in a special container for liquid nitrogen environment at -196 °C. In the long years to come, the staff will add liquid nitrogen on schedule to ensure the long-term preservation of Du Hong's head.
In this way, Du Hong became the first frozen person in China!
According to the optimistic estimates of Alcor scientists, science and technology in 50 years may be able to thaw Du Hong's head and rebuild his body, that is, ——— resurrection.
In September, Zhang Siyao and Zhou Lei flew to the United States to visit their mother's frozen head. The staff told them that Du Hong's body was handled very successfully.
50-year predictions may fail, and experiments on frozen resurrection may fail. But either way, it's always a hope!
This hope will help Zhang Siyao to run forward with the "50-year covenant" and let her live out the way her mother wants to see when she wakes up 50 years later.
The development of science and technology is changing rapidly, and 50 years is not a long time, but it is not short. Maybe by that time, technology can really be developed to "resurrect" Du Hong.
At that time, at the moment when their mother and daughter met, it would be another tearful scene.
【Text/Wakagi Picture/Network】
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