Resurrection Fail

Raising the dead would involve powerful magick indeed if we are to grant that it's even possible with someone who is truly deceased. While resurrection is one of the miracles attributed to Jesus, the truth is that even if the story of Lazarus happened as written determining the point of death was a tricky thing two thousand years ago. Modern medical technology allows us to revive people who would have been considered dead as recently as a few decades ago, but even today people very rarely wake up in morgues after being declared dead by doctors. This brings us to today's story of a Detroit man so distraught by his father's death that he hoped for a miraculous resurrection. When Clarence Bright passed away at the age of 93, his son sprang into action and took custody of the man's body.

Bright’s body was allegedly taken from a mausoleum at a local cemetery, where it was stored because weather conditions forced his Jan. 12 funeral to be canceled. When cemetery workers attempted to bury him on Monday, they said, they found a van driving away with the body still inside the casket. Though a search of the elder son’s house on Monday yielded no evidence, police found both the van and the casket at a gas station the next day, which led to them finding the body inside a freezer in his basement. “In the interview with the son, he was very, very, very distraught,” said Lieutenant Harold Rochon, according to the Associated Press. “In an interview of the son, he is very religious, and he was hoping his father would be resurrected. He was hoping for a miracle.”

From both a technical and magical perspective the son's actions were suboptimal at best. Granted, the odds of a miraculous awakening are miniscule in the best of circumstances, but putting the body in a freezer pretty much seals the deal. Simply, people who wake up after being declared dead are in fact still alive. If a human body is actually frozen solid there's no way to revive the individual because the water in the cells forms into crystals and irreparably damages them. So far, even bodies that have been carefully frozen in a controlled manner for cryonic preservation have never been successfully revived, and if you're hoping for a magical effect to work you want to take steps that increase the probability of your desired outcome, not eliminate it entirely.