Mundane Death

by Jay Paul

To live, all must eat. Eating entails consuming dead plants and animals. We live through death. Birth and death is the pulse of nature. Well, this isn't entirely true. The flares of stars and their tendency to rhythmically spew elements into space, especially upon demise, is, perhaps, more fundamental. But from the human perspective, as an animal on earth, the pulse of nature that seems most relevant is that of birth and death.

Our bodies will all be eaten. Even bodies embalmed with chemicals and sealed in plastic in a concrete grave will be found out by flesh eating bacteria. It is the fate of all humans, together with all animals, to end as food. However, this starts well before we die. While we are still alive, all sorts of mites are in our intestines and the rest of our body, feeding on us and, oftentimes, doing things that happen to aid us biologically. We couldn't live without certain bacteria eating away in and at our bodies. To live, we need to be eaten.

Being eaten, then, is not just for the dead. It does not mark the difference between life and death. Perhaps surprisingly, it is really difficult to pinpoint the difference between life and death. Even medicine has some difficulty with this task. After all, the body I inhabit today is made of different cells than it was last week. And probably all my cells have died and been replaced in the past year—part of nature's pulse of life and death. Those cells died, cells that made up me, yet I lived. Who is this "I" who lived? Frankly, I 'm not entirely sure. 

What I am sure of is that humans, at least in contemporary culture, tend to flee the pulse of birth and death, to not look straight at the plain fact of our own inevitable demise and consumption by mites or other organisms. Death gives us life in many ways, not only in the form of food, yet we don't want to look straight at it.

And some forms of death are even more intimate with us than our food. Take skin, for instance. The outer layers are made of dead cells.Without them, touching may be too raw, too acute. When we touch the skin of a loved one, the direct contact is made by dead skin cells to dead skin cells. Death is wholly implicated in our most intimate gestures. We can't live without it on so many levels. Death is on me, in me, through me, and all around me. It is everyday and mundane. Yet I am afraid of it.

Why am I afraid of something that has supported me and made my life possible since before I was born? What I fear, perhaps, is not the mundane, omnipresent reality of death. I just take that for granted and pass over paying attention to it. What I am afraid of is a chimerical idea I have of death, a vague notion of it as a monster that's going to come and get me. Given that I am already so intimate with death, such fear makes little sense. It is the equivalent of someone passionately wanting a unicorn as a pet. Both are based on a fantasy.

Paradoxically, intellectually knowing the illusory quality of my fear of death does not free me from it. This is because I am not afraid of it on an intellectual level. It goes deeper. I am profoundly attached to my fear of my illusion of death, emotionally and existentially. It cannot be simply reasoned away.

Death, in some ways, is nature taking no notice whatsoever of our fragile human hopes and dreams. Recently, I have been fascinated by the way nature seems so relentless and heartless from the standpoint of human desires. We often want so much more from life than nature can possibly give. Is this nature's fault? Hardly. Nature just is. There is something about our human conceptions and desires that transport us into a fantastic realm that separates us from the birth-death pulse of nature. We often live in la-la land.

The last several hundred years, first in the West and now throughout most of the world, has seen a massive attempt to overcome this pulse of nature through the use of our concepts and desires. We try to remake nature into what we desire from it, rather than conforming our lives to its birth-death pulse. For instance, Niagara Falls is now a kind of faucet, since most of the Niagara River above the falls can be diverted to create electricity. The province of Ontario decides when to most delight tourists by allowing more water to go over. Certainly, we can transform where the water flows. But what we can't transform is water's tendency to go down with gravity. This shows that nature, in spite of our technological innovations, will prevail.

The recent hack of the computer systems of the water treatment plant in a town in Florida point out the precariousness of these technological systems we have created. Vast complexity and interconnectedness come with a lot of stress points, and each point is a vulnerability. Even our food sources are highly stressed and vulnerable. Industrial agriculture, which we may need if we are to feed all the people, uses massive irrigation and fertilizer to force from the soil more than it could normally give in its natural birth-death pulse.

For instance, a farm is India is dependent on fertilizer that comes from mines and chemical producers  the world over. The farm is dependent on the mines and producers working, the transportation from there to the fertilizer factory, the factory working, transportation from the factory to the fertilizer store, and transportation from the fertilizer store to the farm. The whole interconnected world is involved in the fertilizer getting there, and this produces a tremendous number of stress points and vulnerabilities. An agriculture embedded in a specific, local ecosystem is more flexible, but it is less productive, at least in the short term. A number of indigenous peoples have developed an agriculture that does not involve clear cutting, but works within the forest to plant and harvest crops.

The consequence of fleeing from localized ecosystems, from the birth-death pulse of nature, and to impose on it our fantastical technological world, is tremendous vulnerability. Our systems are brittle, single faceted, and jerry-rigged. Ultimately, the wisdom of nature, no matter how cold and indifferent it seems to our mere human concepts and desires, is more profound than anything humans can come up with. However, this natural wisdom is quite different from human wisdom. It is not conceptual. Even describing it as a birth-death pulse, as I have, seems to do violence to what may be going on. What that is, I'm not sure, but I sense it is vaster, more intricate, and more wonderful than our grandest conceptions and technologies, including artificial intelligence. 

I am as afraid of death as anyone. I am afraid of my loved ones dying. I am afraid of dying myself. Obviously, the death of a person is not the same as the death of skin cells. When a loved one dies, I am devastated, as are almost all human beings. Why is this? I suspect it's because we are not isolated, individualistic selves. We contain each other and others contain us. We are irreducibly relational. 

When someone close to me dies, it's as if one of my arms were cut off. This is because a part of my self has been severed, the part of my self that included my concept of and intimate regular interactions with the loved one. The self doesn't end with the skin; it begins there. The skin, eyes, ears, nose, tongue and mind reach out into the world beyond us, and this includes the things and people there in our sense of self.

This goes much deeper than "knowing" another person. An intimate becomes a part of our biology, like an arm. This may be literally true in terms of the neural network of our brain becoming attuned to interacting with specific people. When we stop seeing one of these people forever, a part of our physical brain may be shocked. Grieving may be, in part, about physically repairing a shocked brain. 

As awful as death is, I wonder if we have not, in this culture, fled from it in various ways, one of them being a doomed attempt to dominate nature with its birth-death pulse. This is evidenced, I think, by the way we embalm dead bodies with toxic chemicals. Some other cultures actually feed their dead to wild animals that they consider sacred. Perhaps we could become more attuned to nature if we notice and come to terms with how death supports us, helps us, and allows us to live for a time on this beautiful planet.