I have learned that one of the professors who served on my dissertation and qualifying committees has suffered a fall, is declining medical treatment, is now mostly sedated, and is not expected to recover.
Marc Pilisuk is one of a number of brilliant and accomplished professors I have had on my journey through academia whose legacy I have not lived up to. He was quite elderly when I worked with him and I am increasingly aware that some treatments and some hospital stays take a toll that he must have judged unworthwhile.
And so I hope to take this opportunity to talk about death. And life, really, because as systems theorists will tell you, the paradox of life and death is one of many inseparable pairings.
Most of my surviving elderly relatives have given up on religion. More than one has told me they believe that you die, they put you in the ground, and that’s it. Lights out, nothing more. Indeed, like my recent experience with general anesthesia, but without the coming to in which I did not even perceive having gone under and immediately had to realize that the context had changed—because I had no other indication.
In this view, which may yet be correct, you are born, you live, and you die. There is no hereafter, no reincarnation. You’re gone. That’s it.
Shorn of discredited organized religion, we are left with biology, whose purpose for our lives seems to reduce to procreation. Spread those genes, baby. Why? Who the fuck knows. Spread those genes. Good, bad, or indifferent, spread ‘em!
That was a memo I missed when I got my vasectomy, in part because I worried about the world I would be bringing children into.
The trouble with this view is that there are a couple odd little bits that don’t reconcile with it neatly. There is a story I read—and cannot now locate—of a woman who died accidentally, was out for a while, longer than many other accounts, who was saved because her husband acted correctly quickly, and who tells us that her experience was of her consciousness dissolving into warmth.
That description, by the way, does reconcile neatly with a notion of consciousness as an emergent property—the difference between the whole and the sum of the parts that systems theorists keep pointing to.
There are the numerous “near-death experiences (NDEs) . . . described in Moody (1975) [and elsewhere], reporting the descriptions of hundreds of near-death survivors who expressed pleasant experiences in which they left their body, viewed themselves from above, and passed down a tunnel toward a light that helped them to evaluate their life to then decide to return back to life instead of a peaceful death. These experiences reportedly left the individuals with reduced fear of death and focused on less materialistic but more life-fulfilling needs. . . . The hallmarks of NDEs include a recall of life, memory flashbacks, out-of-body experiences, meditative states, and altered levels of conscious perception and awareness. . . . Memory recall is a hallmark of NDEs. Recurrent descriptions of near-death survivors include the experience of autobiographical memories; NDEs themselves are also remembered well and subsequently described in much detail (Martial et al., 2020).”[1]
There was also a report I read somewhere of a neural signal sent throughout the brain at death that seemed to induce an orderly shutdown.
And there are questions: “Are these experiences survival after death or did the individuals not actually die and the experiences were part of life? If there is life after death, these experiences may provide clues but they cannot be definitive evidence that there is. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that these experiences are invented or accidental given their similarity across so many different ages and cultures. Why are these features often reported so similar?”[2]
But the big question is the one I always ask: Why? If our sole purpose for existence is reproduction, then why is this important? Why does it even exist?
It’s that ‘why’ that makes me suspicious. In many ways, life is cruel. I will never forget one evening I was arriving home. A monster pickup truck of the sort driven by toxic men had stopped for a raccoon in the road. I stopped to offer the raccoon a way out.
Instead, the raccoon, on its hind legs, shrieked defiance. The driver of the truck, who couldn’t see the raccoon, eventually gave up and pulled forward, running over the raccoon, fatally injuring them. I pulled into my parking space and watched as the raccoon writhed on the pavement, feeling a duty to act, but knowing there was nothing I could do. That raccoon suffered horribly. And I will never forget.
Both human and non-human animals do sometimes suffer enormously. It’s easy to just say that life is cruel. Because it is.
The non sequitur lies in any inference from that experience to what, if anything, happens after death. This, we ultimately cannot know, obviously because, séances aside, we cannot reliably communicate with the dead.
But there is also an arrogance—another non sequitur—that no real scientist would indulge, that simply because something cannot be proven to exist, it must not. I see this with some atheists who insist that “science” “proves” that “God” does not exist, but it also applies to the hereafter: We cannot prove the hereafter exists, so the fallacious reasoning goes, therefore it does not. In essence, nothing can exist that we don’t know about. Which is pretty weird reasoning.
We end up, really, where we began. We don’t know. We can’t know. We will likely never know. But that’s really the point: Not knowing means we can’t simply assume they bury us, we rot, and that’s it. We have to leave mental space for the possibility that there’s more to it.
[1] Nathan A. Shlobin, “What happens in the brain when we die? Deciphering the neurophysiology of the final moments in life,” Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience 15 (2023), doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2023.1143848
[2] Nathan A. Shlobin, “What happens in the brain when we die? Deciphering the neurophysiology of the final moments in life,” Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience 15 (2023), doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2023.1143848