‘I imagine the children we might have had’: deciding what to do with my late husband’s frozen sperm

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

It'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.