Death Is A Certainty

Everyone dies. At least, that's what most people are inclined to believe. That is, they believe that everyone is mortal, so they will die. However, how true is that? Can people truly die? What is death, then? Is it the body? The mind? The memories? Clearly not the spirit (where applicable), since the consensus seems to be that spirits are by definition dead already so they can't die again.

Most associate death with the death of the body. The person everyone once knew suddenly keels over and is dead. Yet what is it about the body that allows it to die only at that very moment? Cells are grown and die in a continual cycle. Even those cells that "died" did not die all at once at the moment of the person's death. Clearly, cellular death is not true death, or a preserving someone's immortal cancer cells will keep that someone from dying. Perhaps death lies in the person's award-winning personality instead.

That is quite flimsy an assumption, unfortunately. One's award-winning personality is unavailable when one sleeps. If one assumes that the personality would return after someone wakes, then it makes little difference if that same person went to a far off land. The assumption holds. And the person becomes effectively immortal till proven that the personality has faded. More importantly, the person is also effectively dead as soon as the person is brain-dead.

Yet personalities change, so the concept becomes yet blurrier. If the said personality were to change significantly that it no longer resembled the original, has the original person died? If that person "died", then the physically immortal may "die" as well. Would death not be a certainty, then?

Divorcing death from the body is probably not the idea that most hold about death, but it is one form of immortalization that many seek. After all, Elvis has not effectively died as long as people still remember that award-winning personality and everything related to it. As long as the memory persists, Elvis never died.

Unfortunately, the literal avoidance of death may be far more undesirable than anything. Like a new car, the novelties of life may rapidly fall away. What happens when one becomes ultimately sick of living? Will death, then, become a certainty?