The Seven Mysteries of Life

by Guy Murchie

  The fact that doctors are apt to regard death as unhealthy, not to mention unpatriotic or vaguely contrary to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, only adds to the problem of dying - so much so that modifications in the Hippocratic oath are being proposed, which would have it say something like "Thou shalt not kill - neither shalt thou obstruct a healthy or needful death." Admittedly it will take soul searching to apply such a rule in particular cases, but its general acceptance would at least acknowledge the very common feeling that death is usually more congenial when it comes in a friendly, fertile home than in an efficient, sterile hospital.

  Another realization that may add to our growing understanding of death is the fact that a good many parts of our bodies, such as hair, nails and tooth enamel, are normally "dead" all the time. And the same is as surely true of feathers, shells, wood, fish scales and nerveless parts of other creatures. But were one to include such structures as human houses, cars and clothing in the same category it would likely be considered unreasonable, although it really shouldn't, because these are about as much a part of a human as is a hermit crab's shell part of a crab or a caterpillar's cocoon of a caterpillar. After all, is there any truly basic difference between a bee's cell and a monk's cell? A seed capsule and a space capsule? And why should a woolen coat made by genes on a sheep's back be considered much more alive than a woolen coat woven by man for his own back? Both coats are composed of the same elements, one put together by microscopic automation evolved long ago by nature, the other largely by macroscopic man-made machinery evolved recently by the same nature.

  Now to get back to the quantum nature of death, its many stages or degrees might be listed progressively as: relaxation, absent-mindedness, drowsiness, sleep, a hypnotic state, a coma, paralysis, amputation, breath stoppage, heart stoppage, cooling of flesh, cessation of growth and metabolism, congealing of blood, rigor mortis, and the decay and disintegration of tissues, the latter normally accompanied by the quiet foraging of a sequence of about 600 species of small worms, insects, fungi, bacteria, viruses, etc. By the time your body's vital parts have completely disintegrated, cell from cell, of course you may be considered unquestionably and irreversibly dead - even though some of your separate cells may find enough nourishment to live on independently for a time, this being a real possibility since biologists have repeatedly found that disintegrated tissue, such as separated cells of a chick's heart, often for some reason live longer and better singly than as coordinated parts of a body.

  My list by no means fathoms all the gradations of death, however, for death holds further degrees of a deeper kind. I mean that even when you are dead beyond all doubt, you may not be quite as dead as, under different circumstances, you could have been. For quite literally it is possible to be deader than dead. You may, in fact, be extinct. This would mean that death has come not only to you but also to all of your kind, perhaps signifying your clan or race. Beyond that there are any number of further possible depths of extinction, as when death successively eliminates your whole species, your genus, family, order, class, phylum, your kingdom and ultimately all life on Earth. Even beyond the earth of course, extinction might conceivably spread (by a drastic change, say, in the sun) to the whole solar system, then to other star systems, to the entire Milky Way or, for all we know, to other galaxies and supergalaxies - even, God willing, the universe.

  SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF DEATH

  Science up to now does not seem to have taken death very seriously as a subject for major investigation, presumably because the nonphysical side of it is so elusive and difficult to deal with in quantitative terms. But I think science should, and probably will, soon start applying some sort of workable measurement to death. Indeed through the inevitable interrelations among the growing and increasingly varied compilations of evidence that keep turning up relative to one aspect or another of it, a nucleus of solid fact has begun to materialize.

  In simple animals such as flatworms, for instance, death is not simultaneous all over the body, but comes in a regular progression, the parts with the highest metabolic rate being affected first while less active parts are more slowly involved. Indeed, if we accept the so-called metabolic gradient theory, death is something like a creeping epidemic that advances from cell to cell as from house to house in a vast population. Perhaps, if we knew enough, we could liken death's order to the geometric polarity of an inorganic crystal and it might even have characteristics like northness and southness, as in a magnet or a world.

  The absence of any absolute boundary between life and death is exemplified by the sap tube cells in a tree's wood, which aligned themselves with obvious purpose when they were alive in the cambium layer of growth but which remained linearly partitioned from each other by their cell end-walls until they died, after which these partitions disintegrated, enabling the cells for the first time to function collectively as life-serving water channels for the tree. Such a developmental sequence clearly suggests that in an organism life for the whole may depend on death of the parts, or at least of many of them. And the same dependence evidently holds throughout the animal kingdom, in which the feathers of a bird, for example, are completely alive only when they are growing, forming and unfurling. By the time they begin to serve the bird in flight, believe it or not, feathers have sealed themselves off from the rest of the bird and, being utterly without nerves, circulation or metabolism, they are, to all practical purposes, dead.

  Another area where biology deals with life beyond death is the phenomenon of pupation, as in the demise of a caterpillar. Of course science has to admit that the caterpillar probably doesn't die completely, but there is little reason to think the creature himself knows the difference, for when his time is up he spins around himself a coffin-like cocoon and fades away into a soupy, disorganized mass that never again will be a caterpillar and is no longer describable as an organism of any sort. To all obvious purposes he is dead and disintegrated. Yet in a few weeks the soup solidifes again and, under the direction of a different set of genes, reorganizes into an entirely new organism, a graceful butterfly who bears almost no resemblance to the caterpillar and, in relation to it, is a sort of materialized angel of the afterlife. Indeed Greek mythology suggests that this caterpillar-butterfly relationship was recognized thousands of years ago when the nymph Psyche, immortalized by Zeus as the personification of soul, was appropriately awarded the symbolic wings and form of a beautiful butterfly.

  I suspect also that the caterpillar-butterfly affiliation is not dissimilar to that between a salamander's original leg and the leg that grows to replace it if it is cut off, for biologists have discovered that the flesh of the stump appears to melt back to primitive embryonic tissue before reorganizing to regrow the leg, the once specialized leg cells (in a developmental sense) returning back upstream to their genetic source to find out how to renew their specialization, how to re-aim in this their second shot at life. A philosopher might even call it an extended application of Jesus' famous botanical observation: "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit."

  As we approach the level of microscopic animals, immortality increases significantly and we notice that death not only gets put off more and more easily, but eventually, there arrives a point where death may be avoided altogether. This is the hard-to-identify-with level of one-celled beings, beings who cannot possibly experience the separation of cells we term death as they have never even evolved the primitive conjunction of cells. Or, putting it another way: what was never together, logically, is in no danger of coming apart.

  In lieu of dying then, we can say, a one-celled creature simply divides into two. We can reasonably call it disintegration because it is just that in its simple way, but it is hardly comparable to human death while there is no corpse and both the halves go right on living, indeed are normally so rejuvenated they are more lively than before. Doubtless this sort of fission is what preceded death before death as we know it evol
ved. It is, I suppose, nothing less than incipient pristine immortality: cells dividing and dividing and dividing... omnis cellula e cellula. Of course a philsopher could argue that, from the viewpoint of the original one-celled creature, dividing is dying and, from the viewpoint of the two new cells, dividing is being born - both views being true in their own way - and the affair as a whole is an elementary orgasm compounded of the essences of birth, marriage and death all in one - virtually, one might surmise, an instantaneous compend of vital statistics.

  EVOLUTION OF DEATH

  So death is not really fundamental after all. The cell is dead: long live the cells. Certainly death is not inevitable to all life since our kind of death didn't even appear in evolution until about halfway along. What is death then? And when and why was it born to Earth?

  The answer seems to be that it evolved some billion years ago along with the first multicelled creatures. When individual cells started joining together, and began to specialize and organize themselves into complex organisms such as jellyfish and worms, and to diverge into sexes, there arose a need for death and this need steadily increased. Not only were body cells getting too specialized to go on being immortal through perpetual division but, among the new multicellular colonies and later semi-integrated organisms, a high percentage of them inevitably were in some degree ill equipped for Earth living - and all species that harbored such misfits suffered under the burden, just as a human family suffers from having to support any crippled, retarded or ill-adapted member. Moreover, the many species that failed to get rid of their misfit or worn-out dependents and their spent gamete-factories were weakened by keeping them and eventually faded away, while the few who learned (presumably by chance) how to disintegrate them benefited by the riddance, became more adaptable, grew stronger, had more offspring and survived in larger numbers. Thus did disintegration of a spent organism acquire survival value for its species. Thus did death become a handy tool of change and progress in evolution. For all the multicelled creatures that neglected to adopt it became extinct, while many of those that did adopt it are still living on Earth, which shows that death is not really as hateful and destructive as the legend of the grim reaper would have us believe and in fact serves such a vital purpose that we literally cannot live without it!

  You may wonder why I speak of death as something inheritable and therefore genetic when so often it is imposed from outside the body and therefore environmental. Well, the answer is that, even when triggered from outside, the essence of physical death is the final disintegration of our body cells, which has been found normally to be guided by genes. The number of death genes we possess, I must say, is extremely small compared with the hundred-thousand-odd other genes in each cell but still is enough to guarantee that once we are really dead we stay dead. So we learn again that death is not absolute and not the opposite of life but rather a part of it. And, from a genetic standpoint, it may be a mere detail.

  In certain cases, curiously enough, death (or something like it) is promoted by whole cells called lysosomes ("suicide bags"), filled with digestive fluid, which, at a gene-designated stage of development, commit suicide by digesting themselves. This may strike you as a less-than-pleasant way to get along in the world but it is normal in creatures such as amphibians, even young ones. There are millions of lysosomes, for instance, in a pollywog's tail which digest themselves away when the tail has outlived its usefulness, literally ungrowing the pollywog while regular body cells are growing the frog. There is even that frog Pseudis paradoxa who ungrows so much that at maturity he is scarcely a quarter as big as when he had just lost his tail. In humans something of the sort normally wipes out the millions of excess white cells swimming in our blood after a serious infection, a vital sort of suicide plague that dramatically explains leukemia as the rare exceptional case when the whole body must die because so many of its white blood cells somehow "forgot" to die. These (not leukemia) are examples of how death helps life, how the living body is sculptured by dying cells, by the simple wasting away of millions of no-longer-wanted cells as surely as a statue is shaped by the departing chips of chiseled "dead" marble - the positive, living, material body created primarily through the negative, nonliving, immaterial absence of whatever has been removed from it.

  MORTALITY AND IMMORTALITY

  This realization that mortality has survival value that progressively evolved out of immortality is far from new, for some of the ancient Greek philosophers seem to have realized it. Empedokles of Agrigentum, for one, declared that "those things became mortal which had been immortal before, those things were mixed that had before been unmixed, each changing its course. And as they mingled, countless tribes of mortal creatures were scattered abroad endowed with all manner of forms, a wonder to behold."

  Although we naturally assume that mortality means having a life expectancy that decreases as time goes by, there are important exceptions to this actuarial assessment. One is the tiny hydra (page 361), who dies young enough to be considered a mortal creature yet its life expectancy remains constant, for the reason that the hydra metabolizes so fast that it replaces almost all its body cells every two weeks, the tissue flowing straight threugh it like gas in a candle flame, starting at the head or wick end with a speed of a millimeter a day but steadily slowing down until it reaches the hydra's foot end and diffuses into the surrounding water like smoke. Because of this extraordinary flow of protoplasm, the hydra is virtually ageless and just as apt to die this year as next and, if its "luck" holds, could, for all we know, live on and on indefinitely.

  The compatibility of mortality and immortality is further demonstrated by their being easily exchanged, as when researchers J. F. Danielli and A. Mugleton at the University of Buffalo recently took an immortal species of ameba and, by transplanting cytoplasm from a mortal species, gave it the gift of old age and death. It is equally feasible, they say, to pass the gift of immortality back the other way. And this shifting of immortal gears reaches the human level when we come to consider parts of the mortal body like sperms and ova living immortally in offspring or the modern cases of organs transplanted from one person to another. Remember the grief-stricken father of the South African girl whose heart was donated in the famous first heart transplant in 1967, who was consoled with the thought that "part of my daughter still lives." And far more widespread immortality springs from single human cells such as those taken in 1951 from Helen Lane, a woman dying of cancer of the cervix, that started the noted HeLa strain of tissue culture, now immortal in research laboratories all over the world.

  A deeply significant aspect of death of course is its complementarity with life. We cannot help but observe the rotting grape reborn in sparkling wine, the ink that lies mortal in the inkpot until it is penned immortal upon paper, the sugar maple reaching its pinnacle of beauty in the October colors of its dying leaves. And is there not a less obvious counterpart in man, whose first taste of life comes in the womb? If an unborn baby boy could somehow become acutely aware of his twin brother inside their mother and the brother then suddenly slipped away in a flash of light, the boy would naturally miss his brother and, in his baby way, mourn his "death" - presumably only to discover, after a second flash, that he in turn had followed his brother, and that death in the womb world is but one face of a polar transcendence, the other side of which is birth in the greater world that all the time existed beyond and outside the womb. And who can say what is on the still hidden face of this outer world's death? Or how many more worlds or dimensions we may ultimately be born into?

  Did you ever wonder where a candle flame goes when you blow it out? Is it dead? Is it gone forever or may it still exist in some other form? A flame, as the hydra shows us, is a close analogue of life. Like an organism, it is composed of circulating substances with a measurable metabolism that keeps it "alive." Yet in an instant it can be extinguished by a puff of wind, as human life can be extinguished by an ounce of bullet or a drop of poison. It leaves neither cloak nor corpse behind as it
vanishes completely from this world. Yet bringing it back from the "dead" by relighting it again is easy while conditions remain about the same - and who can say the new flame is not the same flame as the old?

  The symmetry between living and dying, I think, must closely resemble that between the lighted and unlighted candles. Also that between mortality and immortality. And perhaps even between birth and death, which are comparably mystical, the only reason we are more awed by death being that we know people who die while those being born are still strangers. If you accept such symmetries and want to live, logically you must also want to die - because death is built into life, even as waxing and waning make a single curve (im) even as all beings grow older in the time field, their various ages drawing relatively nearer to the same age as finity draws nearer to infinity: (im)

  DYING

  Actual dying, according to medical reports available to me, seems to corroborate this, for more than four out of every five persons who die in the presence of a doctor are described as fading peacefully away into unconsciousness without pain and, more often than not, either unaware or unconcerned as to what is happening to them. Stephen Crane who died at twenty-nine in 1900 was fairly typical in attitude, though unusually articulate in his murmured last words: "When you come to the hedge - that we must all go over - it isn't so bad. You feel sleepy - and you don't care. Just a little dreamy - some anxiety about which world you're really in - that's all." In most cases among the elderly, dying seems to satisfy a very real and natural craving for rest in the form of relief from tension, such as the inevitable tension of organic molecules that have been tied together too long. And the dying person is almost always in a kind of premortal euphoria "suffused," as one doctor expressed it, "with serenity and even a certain well-being and spiritual exaltation," only slightly explainable as the effect of toxic substances in the body or "the anesthetic action of carbon dioxide on the central nervous system."