The doctor carefully sutures the patient back up. The room is quiet. There is no beeping monitor or IV drip. No one checks the patient’s vitals. He has been given no pain relief.

The patient is dead.

He has, in fact, been so for a while – over 30 hours, according to his chart – but some of him survives. What the doctor has extracted is a liquid that can create life. An incredible substance that is neither person nor property; simultaneously so abundant yet valuable that we still haven’t quite figured out how to treat it. It is the dead man’s sperm.

A second chance

Ana and Michael Clark had only been married a year when Mike got orders to ship out overseas for his fifth deployment. Mike, 25, was a sergeant in the Marine Corps. He joined at 18 and in his seven years had already earned several ribbons and medals, including a Purple Heart. The couple had decided to connect with a trip before Mike’s deployment: a motorcycle ride along a California highway.

It would be their last together. On the way back onto the highway after lunch, Mike lost control of their bike and they flew off a cliff. Ana survived the accident. Mike did not.

Recovering from spine and shoulder fractures in the hospital, Clark was grieving for not only her husband, but their future children. “We had talked about it maybe a week or two before he passed because he was going on the deployment, and he said, ‘Yeah, you know it’s too bad that we can’t go to a sperm bank now and freeze sperm… I have way too much to do at work.’”