The inborn germ

Death is the cessation of life as well as the absence of life in something previously alive. In The 42nd Parallel (1930), the first novel in John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy, a character named Joe Williams, walking and thinking in the streets of New York, is hit by a truck and « that was the end of Joe Williams. » Death, here, is an event. But « dying » is a process, often a long one, and hard to define.

There’s no unanimity about criteria of death. The traditional criteria were crude: absence of respiration, movement, and heartbeat was death’s hallmark. In the twentieth century, though, emergency medical techniques — defibrillators, resuscitation, and life-support devices (ventilators, blood circulation pumps) — demanded a redefinition of those criteria, since people whose hearts or lungs had failed could remain, clearly, alive. So the brain came to the fore. In 1968, The Harvard Medical School created an Ad Hoc Committee to Examine the Definition of Death. It added the criterion of « irreversible coma » to the traditional criteria of irreversible cessation of respiration and circulatory activity. Brain death is now a reason for hospital personnel to stop maintaining cardiac and respiratory activity. It also triggers the medical and social practices related to death in our societies: organ extraction and transplant, mourning, inheritance, etc. Yet an active brain, even in a comatose state, leaves intact the possibility that the person may come back to life, which happens in ten or fifteen percent of cases of coma. Some US states refused to adopt the Harvard definition. Kansas was the first state to include a reference to brain death in its « Act Relating to and Defining Death ». Hence, someone could be dead in Kansas but alive in a neighboring state.

« Why death? » When philosophers ask this question, they tend to arrive not at an explanation, exactly, but at a justification — a story that makes sense of death as necessary and meaningful. Without death, life would have no meaning: meaningful choice would be impossible since no action irreversibly precludes another one. Does this help? Death’s fictions have taken up this theme. In Borges’s short story, « The Immortal », the narrator tells of his many experiences in many places and times, and eventually we realize that he is Homer, the narrator from whom narration originated, who is always there to tell the stories. But because he is immortal, he is experiencing a deep despair about the impossibility of an ending.

What death is depends, of course, upon what « I » means, or more generally, upon what is referred to when I talk about a person. When do such questions become biological questions? …