Chapter 18 On Natural Death

There are so many new books on death that bookstores now have dedicated shelves for them, alongside paperbacks on health food and home maintenance, and sex manuals.Some of these books are so full of detailed information about dying and step-by-step instructions for performing this function that, you might think, this is a new technique that we all have to learn by now.The strongest impression a casual reader gets as he glances through the pages is that normal death has become an unusual, even exotic experience, something only for the specially trained. You will also be led to believe that we are the only living beings conscious of death, that when the cycle of life in all other parts of nature reaches the point of death from generation to generation, it is a different process, an automatic one. Trivially done. "More natural", as we say.

An elm tree in my backyard got blight this summer, and died almost overnight, and all its leaves fell off.Over a weekend it looked like a normal elm, maybe a little sparse in places, but nothing surprising.The next weekend, it's gone, gone, gone, gone.It is more accurate to say that it was taken away, because the tree doctor came yesterday, brought a group of young helpers and a forklift, sawed down the branches one by one, and got them pulled away by the back of a red truck. go. A field mouse, dying under the jaws of a lovely house cat, is a scene I have seen many times.That scene used to make me unbearable.At first, I always throw a stick at the cat to make it put down the mouse.But it has long since stopped doing so.Because the rats I put down usually run a little way and then have to die, but I always have to yell some angry noises at the cat to show it what a beast it is.Nature, I think, is an abominable thing.

Recently, I have been thinking about the rat.I wondered if its death must be any different from the death of our elm tree?If there is a difference, then the most important thing is the pain.I don't believe that elms have pain receptors, but anyway, I figured that if the tree had nerve endings - which it doesn't - the blight would still be a less painful way to end it.But then again, the mouse with its tail drooping under the sharp teeth of a big gray cat was another matter.You would think that the unbearable pain pierced through its small body. Now, there are some valid reasons to think that this is not the case at all.You could, if you wanted, tell a whole different story about that mouse and its death.At the moment of being caught and pierced with teeth, the cells of the hypothalamus and pituitary gland release peptide hormones; these substances, called endogenous hormones, immediately attach to the surface of other cells that specialize in pain perception; these hormones have Opium-like pharmacological properties; thus no pain.Therefore, the mouse always seems to hang lazily under the cat's jaw, and when it is turned over, it always lies there so quietly, and dies from its own trauma without struggling.If it can twitch, the mouse will twitch.

I don't know if this is true, and if it is, I don't know how to prove it.Maybe if you could get there fast enough and administer Naloxone, a specific morphine antagonist, you could block the hormone and watch the pain reestablish.But I don't want to do such a thing, and I don't want to see it.I think, and I'm resigned to saying this, as a comfortable conjecture about mice eaten by cats, and perhaps a general conjecture about death. Montaigne had an idea of ​​death based on his own detailed recollections of falling from his horse.He was so badly wounded that his companions thought he was dead.Everyone cried and carried him home. "He was covered in blood. The gushing blood stained his whole body."He remembered the whole episode, just not the "two hours dead" part.His memory is full of curiosity:

Later, in another essay, Montaigne returned to the subject: The worst scene I saw was in Okinawa.That was in the early days of Landing.A jeep hit a troop truck and almost flattened itself.There were two gendarmes in the jeep, caught in the bent steel, both mortally wounded, only their heads and shoulders visible.We had a few conversations as people with the proper tools tried to pry them out.Sorry what happened, they said.No, they said, they felt fine.Is everyone else okay?one of them said.Well, said the other, there is no hurry.Then they die. Pain helps with avoidance and escape when there's time to escape, but if it's the end game and you can't repent, the pain is likely to be turned off, and the mechanism for doing this is wonderfully precise and quickly.If I were to design an ecosystem in which organisms must depend on each other and death is an integral part of life, I can't think of a better way to control this.