To Elizabeth:
Possible steps:
1.Answering better the post mortem request form. e.g. Your mother's and sister's names, phone numbers and addresses. What will they let you do?
I think it is just your mother's decision, and not your or your sister's, at least that is the way it is in Norway. My sister opposed the freezing of my grand father, but my mother was the nearest kin, and my sister had no legal standing, thus I only had to convince my mother. Maybe it is different in Australia, maybe your mother, you and your sister all have to agree. You have to find out what the Australian law says regarding who that decides over a dead body.
2.Documenting better what you can afford and when you can afford it.
E.g. do you own the house yourself? Is it the house your father and mother lived in?
Or is it a separate house you own yourself? What is it worth? Is it paid for? What do you owe on it so far?
3. Deciding what solution to go with (maybe your mother and sister at least will let you store tissue samples and any information you can gather about your father's life?)
If we go with full body suspension:
4.Writing a contract that you and I can afford to implement.
5. Submitting the contract to the human services in Melbourne, so that your father can be exhumed and body and/or cell samples taken and frozen and stored temporarily in Melbourne until we are ready to ship these elsewhere.
6. It would be of value (spread the risk around) to have tissue samples taken just after the exhumation and have these frozen and stored separately from the rest of the body, e.g. in any of the cryonics facilities in the United States.
7.Submitting the contract to various Norwegian government agencies, so to hear what requirements we have to meet to not run into problems with the Norwegian government.
8.Meeting requirements set by various Norwegian government offices.
e.g. setting up a tax extempt trust (stiftelse) as a bio bank.
9.Then you have to transfer the money to a local lawyer here in Norway that has agreed to be your agent. He will then pay for expenses as authorized by you.
10. He will then release money so that I then can rent a facility, build a dry ice box, order a liquid nitrogen dewar, order dry ice and liquid nitrogen and set everything up so that we can receive your father.
11. Then, and only then can he be shipped in.
12.Whereupon he would be received, picked up at the airport, transfered to a local facility and stored here,
13. Overtime more people (4 to 6 total dependent upon the dewar kind we buy) could be stored in the same dewar, thereby reducing your cost of maintaining the latter.
14. Since your father has been dead for so long time, it would be of value to try to create a map of his life, personality, mind, mental content, goals, motivations, will system, achievments, and thoughts etc. from external sources. e.g. from what you and others know about his life, and supported with any pictures or written material you might have. If cloning or repair ever becomes possible, an external source of information might make it easier to teach the clone or revived body something about your father. Such a map can be useful even in the best cryonic cases but is a must in adverse cases like your father's where it might never be possible to retrieve any information from the brain itself.
15. Join a cryonics organization and work to make it possible to freeze and bring back live organisms, then possible, legal and affordable to revive still more deteriorated dead organisms. etc.
16. Set up or join some cryonic brotherhood that pledges to assist one another, so that if anyone is brought back, that person will work to bring back 5 other people etc.
17. Focus on your own life, try to live healthy as long as possible yourself too,
and to be frozen under better circumstances when you die yourself.
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If you select to go with just the storage of cell samples, or if that is all you can afford, or all your mother will permit, then the steps would be as follows:
4. Find out if blood and cell samples, biopsies etc. exist at the hospitals he has been at before he died.
5. If no samples exist, then get your mother's approval to have your father exhumed so that 10 to 20 tissue samples can be taken. e.g. from the leg/thigh skin & muscle. You might throw in some hair and nail samples too as a supplement though these are not complete DNA samples.
5b.Find an undertaker willing to assist you in taking and freezing the tissue samples.
6.Ask hospitals to preserve the samples (e.g. to freeze these at minus 135 degrees or colder.)
7. Find a storage provider in Melbourne (hospital, blood bank, tissue bank, bio bank, sperm bank etc. that is willing to store the cell samples for the long run.
8. Contacting Cells-4-Life, ACS and C.I. to see what these will charge for storing the cell samples.
9.Writing a contract with a company willing to store the cell and or blood samples.
negotiate a contract, sign it.
10 Use the contract to get human services in Melbourne to approve the exhumation.
11.Have the body exhumed by a local under taker, and cell samples taken and frozen.
12. Pay the storage company. Shouldn't be more than USD 1,000 for perpetual storage. (Vivigen used to charge $ 350 to $ 450 for such a service, but doesn't provide it any longer.)
13. Ship the cell samples packed in dry ice to the storage company.
14. Systematically gather information about your father that can be used to educate a possible future clone about your father's life, personality and mind.
15. Work to make cloning of dead tissues possible, legal and affordable.
16. Consider volunteering to carry a clone forth to birth yourself.
17. Live healthy as long as possible, and then be frozen under the best circumstances yourself.
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Independent of which option, you select, if any:
You might consider working to establish health retreats where people can live healthy and then be frozen under ideal circumstances.
Since your father died of cancer you might consider taking steps to reduce your own risks of getting cancer. E.g. maybe have your house tested for radon, or stop smoking if you smoke, or change your diet if you eat a lot of salt. You might find the following web page interesting:
http://www.gerson.org It is a cancer therapy developed by a German doctor.
Too bad you didn't know about it before your father died.
Sincerely,
Trygve Bauge