Every death has an origin. Every death has an inciting incident.
If death is the effect, there is a cause. Heart disease, lung cancer, HIV and every other biological disease starts somewhere. However someone dies, there are circumstances, and it's these circumstances that leave us asking 'What if?' in the days following the incident.
What if we could know the precise moment a disease is putting itself in our bodies, even though we may not feel the effects for months or even years later? What if a cure for a person's disease is found only a few years after death? These questions imply that death can be prolonged, that it need not happen so quickly. What if we could live twice as long as what is considered a normal lifespan?
Last semester, I was on the Ball State speech team, and I performed a piece about Saul Kent, the infamous life extension activist and leading pioneer of cryonics. Cryonics, according to Wikipedia, is 'the low-temperature preservation of humans and animals that can no longer be sustained by contemporary medicine until resuscitation may be possible in the future.'
Kent answers the 'What if?' question by avoiding it altogether. Instead of confronting death with as much resolve as we can muster, he purports there is no reason for people to die at all. Moreover, Kent suggests it's possible to grow younger versions of ourselves, younger versions of our bodies and, after this new body is finished growing, it's possible to transplant our brain from our old, sickly body to this new young body, which we can use until we need another.
The first time I read the Kent piece, I thought he was fascinating, if not deranged. The concepts of body farms, brain transplants and the idea of natural deaths being obsolete is preposterous, right? Or is it?
Scientific and medical researchers are incessantly investigating diseases to understand them, to create antibodies, to cure people; this kind of research has already prolonged our lives whether we consciously consider the fact or not.
In his book 'The Ghost Map,' Steven Johnson exquisitely chronicles a bout of cholera as it rampages along Broad Street in mid-nineteenth century London. At the time, cholera wasn't scientifically identifiable and the afflicted often expedited their deaths by drinking more contaminated water. Many scientists attributed the deaths to the foul-smelling environment, believing something in the air was causing everyone to die.
Not until John Snow, a rational scientist of the time, considered the circumstances completely and logically did a kind of resolution occur and the breakout cease. Although the Londoners who died didn't necessarily die in vain, because it was their deaths that led Snow to discover cholera, their deaths could have been avoided if they'd had the scientific knowledge. Now that we have that knowledge, people don't die of cholera as often; we live longer because they didn't.
But cholera and death itself are two different entities. Cholera is a kind of death. There is a cure for that kind of death. What about HIV, late-stage cancers or other incurable and terminal diseases? Those don't have cures. Not yet, anyway.
Who's to say that HIV won't be as easily curable in a few decades as cholera is today? What may seem ridiculous now - the freezing of people and the gardening of new bodies - may be science that isn't developed to its fullest potential. That doesn't mean such science won't eventually be implemented and that what we now consider life-threatening will one day be treated as trivial.
That leads me to wonder how definite death really is: how, why and if it's really unavoidable.
People like to say death and taxes are the guarantees of life. But based on scientific developments, we understand that what's considered to be terminal in one century isn't always in another. Do these scientific developments prolong life or delay death? If we understand death not as a final moment, but as a series of events leading to a moment, can we stop it before it starts?
Certainly, there are 'unnatural deaths,' those resulting from car accidents, explosions or gunfire, but do we need to die from 'natural' causes ever again? One day, could there be enough cures and preventive methods that people only die by accident?
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