Every few years, an executive sits across the desk in our Madison Avenue office and asks a variation of the same question. Usually, it starts with a joke about Walt Disney. They want to know if it is legally possible to freeze themselves upon death—and, more importantly, how to keep their wealth waiting for them when they thaw out.
I always have to break the news that Walt Disney was cremated in 1966. His ashes rest in a California cemetery, not in a cryogenic vault beneath a theme park. But the legal puzzle behind the myth—how New York handles the preservation of human remains and the assets required to fund that preservation—is a fascinating intersection of property law, trust structures, and human mortality.
At Morgan Legal Group, we view estate planning as the deliberate stewardship of a family’s legacy. While cryonics pushes the boundaries of traditional stewardship, it forces us to confront exactly what the law can and cannot do when a client’s wishes fall far outside the norm.
The Legal Status of a Frozen Body
To understand cryonics from a legal perspective, we first have to strip away the science fiction. When an individual’s heart stops and they are pronounced medically dead, they lose their status as a legal person. Under New York law, a human corpse is not a person with rights; it is quasi-property subject to strict regulatory control.
The state does not recognize a suspended animation category. You are either alive and possess legal capacity, or you are dead and your estate must be administered. Cryonics companies operate under anatomical donation laws. When a person is frozen, they are technically donating their body to a scientific research organization.
The immediate legal hurdle is ensuring that the client’s physical body actually makes it to the cryonics facility. If an individual passes away in a Manhattan hospital, the facility will eventually release the remains to the next of kin. If that family member thinks cryonics is a waste of money or morally objectionable, they can simply authorize a traditional burial or cremation.
To prevent this, we rely on New York Public Health Law § 4201. This statute allows an individual to execute a written instrument directing the disposition of their remains and appointing an agent to carry out those specific instructions. Without a properly drafted Appointment of Agent to Control Disposition of Remains, the right to decide falls to a strict statutory hierarchy:
- The surviving spouse
- A surviving domestic partner
- Any surviving children over the age of eighteen
- Surviving parents
- Surviving siblings
If a client intends to be cryogenically preserved, we cannot leave that decision to the consensus of grieving relatives. We must deliberately appoint a custodian who is legally bound—and philosophically willing—to immediately contact the cryonics response team the moment death is pronounced.
Funding the Freeze: The Perpetuities Problem
Getting the body to a liquid nitrogen dewar is only the first phase. The second is financial. Cryonic preservation requires perpetual maintenance. Someone has to pay for the storage facility, the liquid nitrogen, and the eventual medical procedures theoretically required for revival.
This is where clients hit a massive legal wall. You cannot leave money to yourself. Once you are legally dead, your property must pass to living beneficiaries, a recognized charity, or a valid trust. You cannot be the beneficiary of your own post-mortem trust because, in the eyes of the Surrogate’s Court, you do not exist.
New York law actively prevents assets from being tied up indefinitely. The Rule Against Perpetuities, codified in New York Estates, Powers and Trusts Law (EPTL) § 9-1.1, dictates that a trust cannot last forever. Historically, a trust must vest within a life in being plus twenty-one years. If a client attempts to create a trust that simply pays for their frozen body for the next three hundred years, the trust will fail. The courts will dissolve it, and the funds will be distributed to the client’s living heirs.
The few individuals who actually pursue this do not rely on traditional revocable living trusts. Instead, they typically use life insurance. A client will purchase a life insurance policy and name the specific cryonics organization—which is legally structured as a non-profit research institute—as the sole beneficiary. Upon the client’s death, the death benefit pays out directly to the organization. The organization then uses those funds to finance the ongoing storage.
There are also highly specialized “revival trusts” engineered in jurisdictions outside of New York that have abolished the Rule Against Perpetuities. These trusts are designed to hold assets for centuries, with complex trigger clauses that attempt to define what a revival means and how the revived individual can reclaim the assets. However, these vehicles exist in a gray area of jurisprudence. No court has ever ruled on whether a revived human being has a legal claim to a trust established by their former self.
Intentional Stewardship Over Science Fiction
The extreme hypotheticals of cryogenic preservation often distract from the underlying legal mechanics, which highlight a fundamental truth about estate planning: hope is not a strategy.
Whether a client wants to preserve their body for a future century or simply ensure their family business survives the next decade, the law demands precision. Vague instructions fail. Unfunded mandates collapse. If you want a specific outcome—be it anatomical donation, the protection of a special needs child, or the generational transfer of a real estate portfolio—you must put the exact legal architecture in place while you have the capacity to do so.
Stewardship. That is what we are really talking about. It is the deliberate act of structuring your wealth and your final wishes so that they survive your physical absence.
Most of the families we represent are not looking to cheat death. They are looking to protect the people they leave behind. They want to avoid a protracted battle in Surrogate’s Court. They want to shield their children’s inheritance from creditors and divorce. They want to ensure that if they are incapacitated by a stroke or dementia, a fiduciary is ready to step in and manage their affairs without missing a beat.
These are not science fiction scenarios. They are the realities of life, aging, and mortality.
Before you worry about what medical science might achieve in two hundred years, you must secure what your family will need in the next twenty. If you have not recently reviewed the specific legal instruments that dictate who controls your medical decisions, your assets, and your remains, that is where your focus belongs. To ensure your current directives accurately reflect your intentions, schedule a review of your Appointment of Agent to Control Disposition of Remains and your primary estate documents with our office.
