Did you hear the one about the cryonics enthusiast who married the hospice worker? It sounds like the setup for a dark joke, but that's exactly what Robin Hanson and Peggy Jackson did 28 years ago. Robin, a professor of economics at George Mason University, is preparing to have his brain frozen in anticipation of eternal life in the great "futurocracy" yet to come. This is more than a little frustrating for Peggy, who spends her days coaxing patients to accept the inevitability of death.

The author of the article, Kerry Howley, reports that this relationship dynamic is so common that the cryonics subculture has even got a name for it, the "hostile wife phenomenon."

It's a bittersweet story. Robin and Peggy seem very much in love. Yet Robin is spending huge sums of money to prepare for an eternal life without her:

“Cryonics,” Robin says, “has the problem of looking like you’re buying a one-way ticket to a foreign land.” To spend a family fortune in the quest to defeat cancer is not taken, in the American context, to be an act of selfishness. But to plan to be rocketed into the future — a future your family either has no interest in seeing, or believes we’ll never see anyway — is to begin to plot a life in which your current relationships have little meaning. Those who seek immortality are plotting an act of leaving, an act, as Robin puts it, “of betrayal and abandonment.” [NYT]

Peggy insists on separate bank accounts so that she doesn't have to see Robin's yearly dues to the cryonics facility.

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if cryonics were like organ donation, where you could check a box and forget about it. Unfortunately for cryonic refusniks like Peggy, the movement seems to consume a lot of the enthusiast's time and resources in the here and now.

Cryonics buffs may be asking a lot of their spouses, as well. It's a big commitment for the surviving spouse to shepherd the deceased through the freezing process. Suffice it to say that it's much, much more involved than calling the funeral home and picking out a casket. Peggy has sensibly washed her hands of the whole matter, thereby further decreasing the likelihood that Robin will live forever. I couldn't bear to say "no" if my partner asked me, but I'd also really, really resent it. Who wants to deal with the brain-removal technician when you're mourning the love of your life?