On Death and Resurrection
Through the ages, sages and philosophers have waxed poetic on the topic of death and the afterlife. What can we add to this mystery that has been heavily monopolized by superstition and fear so far? Assorted thoughts from an old discussion on death.
The writer John Updike referred to the passing from life to death as “perfection wasted”. He called it the ceasing on one’s “own brand of magic that took a whole life to develop”. I think of death the way Forrest Gump does: that death is a part of life.
Throughout our lives, there is a constant exchange between life and death. The food we consume was part of some recently deceased form of life — regardless of whether it was plant or animal based. That which had been breathing and abounding with life the previous day, was killed and cooked to be eaten by you and me. The atoms and molecules that formed a plant or animal the previous day, now form a living part of you and me. In some vague sense, the atoms are “alive” again — albeit in a different form from the previous day.
Similarly, when I die, I hope to be buried and then the carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen, that form my cells, will be stripped off to nourish microorganisms and grass in the soil, and the atoms that formed me will transmute into a new life form once again. Maybe a goat or a cow will eat that grass, and then the atoms and molecules that formed the grass will travel through the stomach and gastric juices of those animals to eventually be absorbed into their cells.
None of the concepts I bring up here are either new or original.
We learnt these concepts at school under the sections called carbon cycle, and nitrogen cycle , but because many of our teachers did not realize the profound implications of these lessons, we were not taught to appreciate these concepts as much as we could have.
This exchange of the compositions of life and death from one form to another is the closest to reincarnation/afterlife that we know is guaranteed to every single one of us as it is to plants, animals, and microbes.
Some of our scriptural texts claim that we will continue to have the same body in our afterlives. In the transfiguration scene mentioned in the New Testament, Elijah and Moses are claimed to have come back to earth, with their physical bodies identical to their earthly ones but upgraded with some supernatural abilities like the ability to appear, disappear, and give off radiating light. The burden of proof always lies on the ones making the claims.
According to science, every 9 years or so, the atoms in our body are replaced with newer ones. So no atom that is in our bodies now, was part of our infancy.
The question about what death is, is very closely linked to what life is. Biologists are at the frontier of some of these questions constantly studying life in all its diversity and variety. Things like viruses, for example, are not considered living things — by some biologists — in the sense that they’re considered particles. Viruses exist as non living things when they’re outside a host, but switch to come alive as living things once they enter a host. Viruses blur the line between the living and the dead.
A related question to ask would be, do all living things die? To which the quick answer is no. Many microorganisms when they run out of food, do not die. Instead, they go into a state of dormancy to form what biologists call endospores. Once food becomes available again, the microbe comes back to life. So as you can see, life and death are in a playful state of exchange.
This playful shuttling between life and death is not restricted to microbes alone.
A couple of years back scientists revived frozen worms recovered from the Siberian permafrost almost 42,000 years after they’d frozen “to death”. The thawing process lasted several weeks and was a very slow and careful process. The recovered worms went on to live again, and even reproduce to form other new worms.
Besides worms, there are a lot of microbes that come back to life after long periods of staying frozen. So this is not an outlier in the world of biology.
Perhaps one of the most interesting life forms known so far to biologists on the topic of longevity is a certain species of jelly fish called The Immortal Jellyfish (Turritopsis dohrnii). More about this fish on another article.
To summarize, life and death are far more complicated than we assume them to be, and as biologists study the diversity of forms that life and death take, we will hopefully understand more about this.
