Death, Revisited

I write many entries on death. It is an endlessly fascinating topic, given how much weight people grant this one great unknown. Yet, the conceptualization of death's boundaries seem quite indistinct. What, exactly, constitutes the death of a person?

The common answer is unsatisfactory. There are many specific signs of clinical death, but such definitions are guidelines at best. I believe the specifics of this were covered in an earlier entry. My aunt's tasted death before, and so have I, so that much doesn't necessarily hold true.

What does fascinate me is the idea of cellular death. Now, all cells die eventually, so everyone is likely to have experienced complete cellular death at least a few times in each normal lifetime. What is there to fear from experiencing that one more time right at the end? After all, when the human is defined as clinically dead, a goodly number of the cells still live on (as cells do live) for significantly longer before they finally expire as well.

Death seems to be a fuzzy concept that is really about the gestalt of an entity. Specifics like cellular death do not matter, because the gestalt entity remains consistent even though the precise cellular composition has been nearly completely overhauled after 50 years. The gestalt of the entity goes beyond the cellular, towards the conceptual understanding (for example personal memories) of the same. As long as the gestalt endures, death as a concept does not apply. However, should any key portion of the gestalt perish, then conceptual death occurs.