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Everything in the world dies, but we only know about it as a kind of an abstraction. If you stand in a meadow, at the edge of a hillside, and look around carefully, almost everything you can catch sight of is in the process of dying, and most things will be dead long before you are. If it were not for the constant renewal and replacement going on before your eyes, the whole place would turn to stone and sand under your feet.
There are some creatures who do not seem to die at all; they simply vanish into their own progeny. Single cells do this. The cell becomes two, then four, and so on, and after a while the last trace is gone. It cannot be seen as death; barring mutation, the descendants are simply the first cells, living all over again.
The cycles of the slime mold have episodes that seem as conclusive as death, but the withered slug, with its stock and fruiting body, is plainly the transient tissue of a developing animal; the free-swimming amebocytes use this organ collectively to produce more of themselves.
Who ever sees dead birds, in anything like the huge numbers stipulated by the certainty of the death of all birds? A dead bird is an incongruity, more startling than an unexpected live bird, sure evidence to the human mind that something has gone wrong. Birds do their dying off somewhere, behind things, under things, never on the wing. It is a natural marvel.
All of the life of the earth dies, all of the time, in the same volume as the new life that dazzles us each morning, each spring. […] I have lived all my life with an embarrassment of squirrels in my back yard, they are all over the place, all year long, and I have never seen, anywhere, a dead squirrel.
I suppose it is just as well. If the earth were otherwise, and all the dying were done in the open, with the dead there to be looked at, we would never have it out of our minds. We can forget about it much of the time, or think of it as an accident to be avoided, somehow. But it does make the process of dying seem more exceptional than it really is, and harder to engage in at the times when we must ourselves engage. There are 3 billion of us on the earth and all 3 billion must be dead, on a schedule, within this lifetime. The vast mortality, involving something more than 50 million of us each year, takes place in relative secrecy.
We speak of our own dead in low voices; struck down, we say, as though visible death can only occur for cause, by disease or violence, avoidably. All of that immense mass of flesh and bone and consciousness will disappear by absorption into the earth, without recognition by the transient survivors.
Less than half a century from now (2024), our replacements will have more than doubled in numbers. It is hard to see how we can continue to keep the secret, with such multitudes doing the dying. We will have to give up the notion that death is catastrophe, or detestable, or avoidable, or even strange.
We will need to learn more about the cycling of life in the rest of the system, and about our connection to the process.
Everything that comes alive seems to be in trade for something that dies, cell for cell. There might be some comfort in the recognition of synchrony, in the information that we all go down together, in the best of company.
—Lewis Thomas
The Lives of a Cell, 1974, excerpts
(treasure)
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