Three years after the death of her husband at 41, Kat Lister describes the posthumous conception dilemma she faces
It’s the hottest week of the year and I am sitting in a windowless room on the lower ground floor of London’s University College Hospital discussing the precise temperature of frozen sperm. At -196C, these glacial swimmers are biologically inert, I’m told, as I’m handed two props: a thin plastic straw that bends to the will of my fingertips and a cylindrical cup segmented by colourful tubes – blue, green, purple, orange, red – that gives this storage container the look of a rainbow-hued toy, a playful wagon wheel you might buy for a child.
“Is this how you imagined it?” the manager of the fertility laboratory asks me – “it” being the process of posthumous sperm banking. I can’t quite find the words to answer that, no, this isn’t what I imagined at all because when I close my eyes, I think of poppy seeds and ice cubes. And that, at the age of 38, this isn’t the way my story was supposed to go.
