This seems like something out of a movie but it isn't. This is the story of Louis, which isn't his real name for privacy and safety reasons, who in his early 30s had hatched a grand scheme that 30 years later would eventually come to fruition.
Louis was on a secret mission, motivated by a deep anxiety that had built as he drifted through early adulthood. Profound questions of mortality were keeping him awake at night. “I had started to think, ‘Who will remember me when I’m gone? Who will talk about me? Who will be my heir?’” he says. “I think our biggest fear in life is not to die, but to be forgotten.”
If he wasn’t going to have children of his own in the normal way, maybe he could donate sperm in such quantity that – eventually – a child might try to find him. To pull it off, Louis would need to play a biological numbers game. “If I had 10 children this way, there would be a very slim chance of success,” he says. “But what if I had 100… or even more?”
Read the rest of the story written by Simon Usborne on The Guardian.
(Image credit: Judith Jockel/The Guardian)