What Is Death?
How the pandemic is changing our understanding of mortality.
This year has awakened us to the fact that we die. Weve always known it to be true in a technical sense, but a pandemic demands that we internalize this understanding. Its one thing to acknowledge the deaths of others, and another to accept our own. Its not just emotionally taxing; it is difficult even to conceive. To do this means to imagine it, reckon with it and, most important, personalize it. Your life. Your death.
Covid-19s daily death and hospitalization tallies read like ticker tape or the weather report. This week, the death toll passed 300,000 in the United States. Worldwide, its more than 1.6 million. The cumulative effect is shock fatigue or numbness, but instead of turning away, we need to fold death into our lives. We really have only two choices: to share life with death or to be robbed by death.
Fight, flight or freeze. This is how we animals are wired to respond to anything that threatens our existence. We havent evolved morally or socially to deal with a health care system with technological powers that verge on godly. Dying is no longer so intuitive as it once was, nor is death necessarily the great equalizer. Modern medicine can subvert natures course in many ways, at least for a while. But you have to have access to health care for health care to work. And eventually, whether because of this virus or something else, whether youre young or old, rich or poor, death still comes.
What is death? Ive thought a lot about the question, though it took me many years of practicing medicine even to realize that I needed to ask it. Like almost anyone, I figured death was a simple fact, a singular event. A noun. Obnoxious, but clearer in its borders than just about anything else. The End. In fact, no matter how many times Ive sidled up to it, or how many words Ive tried on, I still cant say what it is.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-death.html