A 14-year-old girl died of cancer on October 17. For parents it's the stuff of nightmares. For any onlooker with a heart, it's terribly sad. For thinking people it raises existential questions about justice and the meaning of life: what sort of moral universe do we live in, when death can come so untimely?
In this case, though, it raised a different question entirely. Granted that someone's going to die, what can we do about it? And it turns out that this is no longer quite a stupid question.
The girl in question, known as JS, decided she wanted to have her body frozen in the hope that one day – perhaps centuries in the future – technology would have advanced far enough to be able not just to revive her but to cure her.
It took a legal battle to make it possible, as her divorced parents disagreed on whether it should happen – and the case can only now be reported, as the judge ordered that nothing should be published about it until a month after her death.
Her father, who had not seen her since 2008 despite repeated applications for contact visits, was opposed to it. He didn't believe it would work and told the judge in a statement: "Even if the treatment is successful and she is brought back to life in, let's say, 200 years, she may not find any relative and she might not remember things.
"She may be left in a desperate situation – given that she is still only 14 years old – and will be in the United States of America [where her body was to be stored]."
He changed his mind, on condition that he could see his daughter's body after she died to say goodbye; her mother refused, however, meaning the court had to decide.
The judge, Mr Justice Peter Jackson, ordered that her mother should have the sole right to determine what happened to her body. She approached the Cryonics Institute in Michigan, US, and Cryonics UK, a non-profit organisation that could freeze the body and transport it there. The whole process cost $37,000, money raised from the girl's maternal grandparents.
The practical details of the case are complex enough. Under the complex legal and technological questions, however, are even more complex human ones. There are the girl's own feelings. Her letter to the judge explaining her request is brief, matter-of-fact and heartbreaking: "I am only 14 years old and I don't want to die but I know I am going to die...I don't want to be buried underground," she says.
There are the feelings of the parents, bitterly divided as they obviously are. And there are the huge ethical and pastoral issues a case like this raises.
How can Christians speak into a situation like this?
There are ways that probably aren't helpful. One is the knee-jerk "thou shalt not" and dire warnings against "playing God". There is something blasphemous, we might want to say, about attempting to cheat death; it, like life, is ultimately in God's hands. The Lord gives, the Lord takes away.
Another is to point to the serious technical questions about the whole process. There are facilities in Russia and the US that can be used to store people's bodies in liquid nitrogen, but no one has ever been revived. Technology would have to advance a very long way before someone who had died of cancer could not only be revived but cured. It remains in the realm of science fiction. It will probably never happen.
But neither of these responses – the condemnatory or the hard-headed and realistic – quite seem to hit the spot. After all, we mess with nature all the time – every time we go to the doctor, in fact. Reversing death might be seen as just another step in the march of medicine.
Furthermore, much modern science began in the minds of fiction writers; the fact that it seems impossible now doesn't mean it always will be. We can't conclusively say this girl will never live again, though the chances are vanishingly small.
But what we can do is examine the attitude of mind that leads to this kind of enterprise in the first place. We can offer a way of thinking about life and death that runs with the grain of humanity and sets them in the context of our creation by a good God.
And the human drama behind this legal case indicates a very modern spiritual malaise. It's the desire to fix everything, and the belief that we can.
Technological advances are having profound profound effects on our lives, in ways we are only just beginning to understand. One of the more subtle ones is the way we are encouraged to believe anything is possible. If we are limited in any way, in body, mind or spirit, there's a fix for it. It's a myth that's fed by our real achievements, like the inclusiveness of the Paralympic Games, which feature many whose physical disabilities have been fixed by technology. We don't see, or choose to see, that it's almost entirely those from wealthy nations who benefit from the running blades, the high-tec wheelchairs and the top-class coaching; the fix is for the rich.
And this cryogenic fix for death is for the rich as well. Whether it is ever found to work or not – and scientific opinion is generally against that – it will only ever be a technique enjoyed by the favoured few, which ought to make us suspicious of it from the start.
It would be foolish to argue that fixing problems isn't important. Our modern world is built on advances brought about by people who've done just that. Compare it with the world of 500 years ago, and I know where I'd rather be. But when fixing problems turns into a denial of humanity rather than an affirmation of it, we need to worry. And when we attempt to deal even with death through technology, that's what's happening.
The death of a loved one is not best dealt with through a technical fix. Cryogenics is one such desperate approach. There are others, too. There's research aimed at vastly extending our lives through delaying aging. Reproductive technology has allowed women to bear children to their dead husbands through frozen sperm, or have their dead daughters' eggs implanted so they can bear their own grandchildren.
Saying it's wrong to tamper with nature misses the point. It is the assumption that everything is fixable, that technology can solve every problem and bring good out of every evil, that is the danger. It may bring good out of some evils, but if we rely on it to make us happy we are changing something fundamental about how we relate to each other as human beings. In the case of the girl who chose to be frozen, her last days with her family were overshadowed by the stress of the procedure; as the Telegraph reports: "Her mother spent the last hours of her daughter's life fretting about details of the freezing process, which was 'disorganised' and caused 'real concern' to hospital staff." And now she is, for them, forever in a half-state between life and death; what this will do to them is hardly imaginable.
This obsession with technical fixes is partly a result of the decline of Christianity in the West and partly a result of just how much we're able to do. Sometimes our technological powers seem limitless. Why shouldn't we overcome death?
The trouble is that while we are doing that, we are neglecting to live. People who need someone to be with them, to walk beside them through the darkness, are being sold an illusion of progress by the high priests of a new religion.
What Christianity offers is something different: a knowledge that while death is an enemy to be feared, it is a defeated enemy. We expect Christians to be afraid of death, because we are human. But we don't expect Christians to be so afraid of death that they would do anything to stay alive. We believe our lives are in God's hands, now and forever. We face death in the context of the love of our family and friends and our Christian brothers and sisters, who walk with us to the threshhold of eternity.
The urge to fix things can come at the expense of accompanying people in their needy humanity. Jesus did solve problems, some of them at least, but for most of his life he was simply with people.
There are some things we are never going to be able to solve. Death is one of them. Our bodies have a built-in obscelescence. We're going to die. And hard though it is to accept it, we have to learn to say, "That's OK."
Follow Mark Woods on Twitter: @RevMarkWoods
