Three years after the death of her husband at 41, Kat Lister describes the posthumous conception dilemma she faces

I t’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.

I am writing this piece from a place of ambiguity. A few yards away from this run-of-the-mill patient room, my late husband’s sperm is being stored in a sub-zero canister, frigid and dormant, waiting for instruction – and that instruction can only come from me. Seven years ago, two years after he was diagnosed with an oligoastrocytoma brain tumour, and four years before he would die from brain cancer in his hospice bed, my newly wedded husband walked down the same hospital corridors I did this afternoon, and deposited his sperm into a plastic cup. This fluid was quickly split into 23 plastic straws and slotted into kaleidoscopic cartridges before being placed inside a tank of liquid nitrogen, a ghostly vaporous process that goes by the name of cryopreservation.

When I fondle the PVC straw in my hand, I feel a hair’s breadth away from the man I lost; the man who sat in this basement laboratory seven years ago, whose gametes now sit frozen in a Thermos flask next door. Perhaps that’s why I’m here. There was no need for me to physically come today, I tell the laboratory manager. And yet, here I am, with a notepad and pen. “I need to know where he is,” I told my friend Zoë over the phone a few days earlier, before instantly correcting myself. I know these samples aren’t him, but they’re a part of him, and I suppose a part of me wishes to acknowledge this in a physical way before I decide whether to stick or twist, or to quote the laboratory correspondence I received six months ago, to “discard” them altogether. You could call this hospital visit a pilgrimage, an expedition to the site of a sacred relic, and although this holiness feels discordant with the scientific reality of vacuum layers and cryoprotectants, when the laboratory manager describes the cup that contains my late husband’s sperm as a “goblet”, I imagine a precious metal, enamelled and jewelled.

The NHS letter arrived in late January at the peak of a global pandemic my husband never witnessed. I will continue to receive these annual letters for as long as the laboratory stores his sperm, an expiration date I know with an exactness that defies the unpredictability and uncertainty that has trailed me since his death. The legal consent forms he painstakingly filled out in black ballpoint pen will lapse in 2034. The biological absurdity that I will be 51 years old when it does so, isn’t lost on me.

Over the three years since my husband died in 2018, I have cast away a great many things. Books have been donated, cufflinks gifted, socks have been binned, photos consigned to nearby drawers. Yet now I have to ask myself, what do I do with this? It’s a question that whirls around me as I leave the hospital’s main entrance and manoeuvre slowly through the hustle and bustle of Tottenham Court Road. It’s a question my friend Andy asks me three hours later as I sit on his allotment patch swigging a bottle of beer. “How certain are you that you’re not going to use it?” he inquires as I watch him tug at a clump of radishes, loosening their threadlike roots from the soil. “Ninety per cent,” I reply instantaneously, giving him an impression of confidence and certainty when I know that on my messiest days that remaining 10% still flickers somewhere. A tiny glint of a “what if?” that keeps me loosely tethered to the past.

I’d like to say that a great deal of thought and consideration went into our decision to store these samples in 2014, but when my husband and I were told that his radiotherapy had failed to control his tumour in the ways we had hoped, and that chemotherapy was now our next viable option, we had mere weeks to prepare for all eventualities. At the time, storing these samples was a swift and sudden insurance policy, a back-up option lest my husband’s sperm be permanently damaged by the capsules of temozolomide that he gulped down every day with his breakfast. A year later, we made our first policy claim when I embarked on IVF in the summer of 2015. We sat on a park bench and when he told me that any potential family we might have using this sperm would be mine, not ours, that he probably wouldn’t live long enough to fulfil that role, those 23 straws were instantly transformed into alchemic vials to be sheltered and preserved.

Sometimes, on my messiest days, I imagine the children we might have had. An occasional flash on my way to the supermarket and then it’s gone. We had two near-misses over the course of our five-year marriage. One was medically pursued with follicle-stimulating hormones; the other came by surprise, quite naturally, two years before he died. I still think about that miscarriage from time to time, the opaque ellipse of an empty gestational sac on an ultrasound screen and, when I do, those poppy seeds and ice cubes are never far from my mind. Deep down I suspect that by relinquishing the latter I will make peace with the former. And yet even now, as I write this, I am unable to say when this decision will finally be made.

My determinedness to write about my late husband’s sperm is really fuelled by a desire to temper it in some way. I want to challenge the dropped jaws and open mouths that too often follow any mention of these samples. The wide-eyed astonishment, a cartoonish reflex, that never fails to make me feel as if my life is beyond the realms of what is considered “common” and therefore “normal”. Posthumous conception is a rarefied occurrence, of this I’m well aware, but there is a commonality to be found in the things I’ve been asking myself lately. Which is, at its core, an age-old quandary. The deeply painful question of what one holds on to, and what one eventually lets go.

Is a seed still a seed if it can’t be sown? I’ve pondered this question, too. My husband’s aren’t the only ones that are tucked away in a cryopreservation tank on the lower ground floor of University College Hospital. More than 8,500 men undergoing treatment that may make them infertile, such as chemotherapy, have been referred here for long-term storage since the 1970s onwards. Some have been retrieved, but most will never be used. It’s hard not to consider the potentiality that is semi-permanently cooling inside this laboratory. The beakers of possibility that are residing in a liquid nitrogen tank. Thousands of stories that, for now at least, are being collectively frozen in time.

At one point during our conversation, the laboratory manager calls my particular situation a conceptual challenge. Perhaps this is the most succinct way to articulate the decision I’m faced with as I sit in this hospital chair, three years after my husband’s death, clutching an empty plastic cup. At the age of 38, I am acutely aware that my timespan to conceive is ever contracting. And yet I also know that in spite of my hopes for a family, this biological factor isn’t enough to push me over such an existential line. The dilemma of whether I do, or don’t, retrieve my late husband’s sperm is an intersection where too many paths converge at its core. It’s a place that’s far too complicated, even for me.

“I think the real question here is the one you haven’t mentioned,” my friend Miles poses as we sit outside a busy bar. “And the question I want to ask is why you seem to have written off the possibility of having a child with someone else. Someone who isn’t him and isn’t an anonymous sperm donor.” Bullseye, I think to myself. The next day I jot this query down in a notepad along with all the others – a numbered list of existential concerns that have no definitive resolutions. The pressure on a child to embody the person I lost is one. The prior knowledge that I clobbered my body for many years to try to make a new life with that person is another. And then there’s the theoretical weirdness of time itself. The eerie realisation that despite our six-year age gap, if I were to use these samples now, I’d be a year older than my husband was at the time he deposited them.

A few days before I visited the laboratory I dreamed that I was giving birth in an empty, white room. The contractions kept building but the baby never arrived. We talk about the stages of labour when it comes to delivery, but we rarely acknowledge the labour of trying. I tried for many years: both to make a new life and to nurture the man I loved. To retrieve these samples now would be to reanimate this past in some way; to try to resurrect the husband, and the pregnancy, I lost. If I’m honest, I think it would be a kind of surrender, too. Surrendering myself to the idea that history is all I have now, when I know this isn’t true.

When I leave the hospital that afternoon, I sense a widening gap between the things I’ve seen and the things I’m yet to be. Over the past year, these jolts of movement have often felt confusing and strange. But as I walk past familiar cafés and department stores on Tottenham Court Road, memories of my former life encircle me, and I am reminded of Angela Carter’s tenet that stories are seeds, too. They plant themselves from place to place – and some of us carry them like “invisible luggage” when we leave home.

Not all seed dispersals follow a conventional route. Orchids are dust-like so that they can be carried away with the wind; burdock can attach to fur, and pine tree seeds have two narrow wings to help them fly. My husband’s remain motionless in a cylindrical cup on Euston Road – and for now, at least, that’s where they will remain. Until, I suspect, those ice cubes begin to melt some more. Released, not discarded. From solid to liquid, dissolving into air.

The Elements: A Widowhood by Kat Lister is published this week by Icon Books at £14.99. Buy a copy for £13.04 at guardianbookshop.com