When do we die? Do we die as soon as our heart stops? Do we die the moment we are cold, the moment that warmth and light that was our walking days ceases to be? Do we die when, mourned but unreachable, we are lowered slowly into the ground? Do we die when the worms eat out our eyes? Or do we feel nothing?
Do we die when our ashes scatter out on the winds, stinging in the eyes of those yet living? Do we die when the last man, the last woman, the last tree, who knew of our coming passes away as surely as we have? Are we kept alive by the presence of a name? What about when that passes away? What then? What about our souls? Is our body a cage, or a sanctuary? Once it is rot, are our souls freed, or do they disappear?
Or does it not matter? Can we, as Steven Galloway puts it, become "the walking dead," long before our skin becomes a fertilizer for the sustenance of posterity? Can humans do to each other what even death cannot do? Can we render each other as warm as any child, but as cold and abstract as a lightless moon?
The legal definition of death is "Irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions and of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem." Interesting tidbit: people have literally died, and then come back to life. They recalled a "tunnel of light," which is how the popular myth came into being.
ReplyDeleteI think that you make two separate but valid points in your last paragraph. Does it matter what happens to us when we die? We will all die anyway. But "the walking dead" are a totally different issue to me. The walking dead are, to me, people who have had so much trauma, or have become so removed from the world that their souls no longer seem present in their still animated bodies. The biggest difference about the weather souls remain when we die and the living dead is that very few people need to worry about becoming the living dead, where as everyone will eventually face death.