Biostasis is often described as a personal survival decision.
That is true, but incomplete.
For many people, the deepest reason is not an abstract love of the future. It is the wish to remain part of someone else’s life.
It can mean hoping to make the journey together.
It can also mean deciding that your own life is worth one more attempt, even when the people around you do not understand.
And sometimes it is a parent facing the limit of present medicine and refusing to close the last uncertain door for a child.
Love does not make biostasis work. It explains why the possibility can matter so much.
Wanting to live can be an act of love toward yourself
Self-preservation is sometimes dismissed as selfishness.
That judgement comes too quickly.
A person can care about family, accept uncertainty and still believe that their own continued life has value.
Kim Suozzi had to make that case while dying from glioblastoma at 23.
She had tried standard treatment and an experimental drug. When the cancer returned, she wanted her brain preserved after legal death.
Her father refused to fund the plan and told her that she would have to work it out herself.
Kim did. Her mother contributed, strangers donated and her boyfriend helped carry the plan through.
The full account in The New York Times is not a clean story of family unity. It is a story about a young woman insisting that her own wish still counted.
Wanting another chance at your own life is not selfish by itself.
Kim knew that revival was not available and might never become possible.
She was not choosing between a proven cure and acceptance. She was choosing between certain biological destruction and an uncertain attempt to preserve information.
That distinction does not prove her choice was correct.
It does show why love for oneself can be rational. A life does not lose its value merely because the person defending it is the one living it.
The boundary between self-respect and selfishness is explored in is cryonics selfish?
Some people want to make the journey together
For a couple, close friends or siblings, biostasis can express a simple wish: if another life becomes possible, I hope you are in it.
That hope is emotionally serious. It is not a contract with the future.
One person may receive a better preservation. One may never reach the response team. One may be recoverable while the other is not.
Even hypothetical revival might happen at different times.
So the honest sentence is not “we will wake up together.”
It is “I want us to preserve that possibility together.”
The difference matters because love can become pressure very easily.
“If you loved me, you would sign up” asks another person to prove devotion by accepting your answer to a difficult question.
They may understand the science and still say no. They may value a finite life, reject the theory of identity or choose different responsibilities for their money.
Their refusal is not evidence that they love you less.
Love can invite another person into the plan. It cannot take ownership of their decision.
The possibility of returning without the people you know is considered in what if I wake up alone?
Is biostasis right for you?
Use a short reflection to examine whether biostasis fits your goals and values.
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What can a parent do when medicine has run out?
A parent’s decision is harder because a young child cannot choose.
Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice follows a Thai family facing that problem.
Their daughter, known as Einz, died from brain cancer in 2015 at two years old.
Netflix describes her as the youngest person to have undergone cryopreservation. Her father was a laser scientist; the family were also Thai Buddhists.
They had not found a hidden treatment. Their daughter had died, and no existing medicine could return her.
Cryopreservation was their last attempt to leave a future possibility open.
They could not promise their daughter another life. They could only decide whether to preserve the chance of one.
Calling this an act of love does not settle every ethical question.
Einz could not consent. Her parents could not know whether she would want revival, whether a future version of her could be recovered or what that life would contain.
Parents already make irreversible medical decisions for children. Biostasis is unusual because its possible consequences extend far beyond the parent’s own lifetime.
The film does not reduce that tension to a slogan. It follows grief, scientific hope, religious questions and the questions carried by Einz’s brother.
That is why the example matters.
The love is real. So is the uncertainty.
When parents make arrangements for a living child, the decision should be revisited as that child develops the capacity to understand it.
Love can begin the plan. It should not prevent the future adult from owning or rejecting it.
Love also means doing the practical work
A clear wish that exists only in someone’s head is fragile.
After a death, a partner may need to call the emergency number while in shock. A relative may need to explain the plan to a hospital or funeral professional.
If nobody can find the documents, love does not make the missing paperwork appear.
A funded arrangement, correct beneficiary and informed emergency contacts turn the wish into something other people can use.
Tomorrow.bio and its local partners handle the procedure, documentation and transport. The family should not become an improvised operations team.
The member still has a small but important part: provide requested documents, keep contact information current and make sure the right people know the arrangement exists.
Important documents to keep explains what must remain findable.
Family discussion matters too.
Documents can protect a decision. They cannot remove every conflict at the bedside.
Early conversation gives relatives time to ask whether their concern is scientific, religious, financial or emotional.
The goal is not to win every argument. It is to make the patient’s wish clear before grief and urgency arrive together.
What if my family is against it? addresses that conversation directly.
Biostasis can therefore be an act of love in more than one direction.
It can be love for yourself, expressed as a refusal to treat your own future as worthless.
It can be love for another person, expressed as the hope of sharing more life.
And it can be parental love, making one last uncertain choice when certainty has already run out.
None of those feelings prove that revival will happen.
The act of love is preserving a possibility honestly, preparing it properly and leaving other people free to decide what love asks of them.
TL;DR: Biostasis can be an act of love for yourself or someone else, but only when the person’s wishes, the uncertainty and the effects on the family are respected.
Further reading