The Romeo Error

by Lyall Watson

  Clinical death has become a changeable and purely theoretical construct, and we are getting closer and closer to the point where it will be possible to replace all the vital functions, even that of the brain, with artificial equipment and postpone death almost indefinitely. Then what do we make of the United Nations definition of death as the permanent cessation of all vital functions? Permanency begins as soon as you turn the machinery off. Death will presumably then have to be defined as "something the doctor decides."

  It becomes increasingly clear that, far from being an irrevocable fact, death is much more a function of the doctor-patient relationship, or indeed of any relationship. It begins to seem that our observations of life and death depend more on somebody's perception of somebody else than on anything that really happens. We must perhaps stop saying things like "Poor Jud is dead" when we have only Fred's word for it. All that can really be said is that a death occurred between Fred and Jud. When the family doctor has been called in to certify this death, then the circle of those involved has been expanded to the minimal legal limits and Jud can be buried, but the responsibility rests heavily on the doctor. This is reflected in the wording of the British death certificate where the doctor fills in the cause of death "to the best of his knowledge and belief." The whole question remains at this level, one of current beliefs rather than of absolute facts. It is the doctor who has to decide and it is not an easy decision, but there is biological help on the horizon.

  Life and death seem to be inseparable, but if it is true that both are distinct from the state that we have called goth, and if instruments can be produced to measure this difference, the situation will be at least partly resolved. At the moment there are thousands of incurable patients all over the world lingering on for months or even years in severe states of debilitation and depletion, seemingly alive simply because of mechanical or clinical intervention. I believe that organisms under these conditions, like cells in isolation, run down into anonymity and cease to exist as individuals or even as living units. Emotionally we know this to be true. One only has to see how those looking after helpless cases, despite great kindness and the best of intentions, end up treating them like machines that require tending. The response and the analogy are fair, because I believe (although it has never been measured) that the organizers of life in these goth individuals will prove to be either qualitatively different or at least attenuated to the point where they become quantitatively negligible.

  As long ago as 1836, this quotation appeared in a manual of medical jurisprudence, "Individuals who are apparently destroyed in a sudden manner, by certain wounds, diseases or even decapitation, are not really dead, but are only in conditions incompatible with the persistence of life." [235] This is an elegant and vital distinction. Death is not "incompatible with the persistence of life." Our ability to bring all kinds of death back to life is limited only by the state of our technology. There are, however, conditions beyond recall -- and these are the ones characteristic of goth.

  One way of resolving our difficulties with death is to regard it simply as a disease. [293] In many respects it is a temporary state, one that like a sickness can be cured. Just as there are some diseases still beyond our control, so there are some levels of death with which we cannot yet cope. The terminology of disease becomes relevant. We can begin to speak of "attacks of death" and to distinguish between someone who is "only slightly dead" or "very seriously dead."

  Looking at death in this way helps to resolve a philosophical problem posed by two psychologists in their exhaustive and stimulating look at our reactions to death. [142] They asked the question "How long does death last?" and made it sound like a very reasonable query by adding the logical counter-question "How long does a creature have to be alive for us to consider it alive?" The answer to the second question is, obviously, just long enough for the necessary observation to be made. If the creature should then happen to die, this in no way invalidates the original observation that it was alive; but the same logic is never applied to death. If a creature is observed to be dead and then turns out to be alive, we assume that the original observation was in error -- someone must have made a mistake.

  The roots of the problem lie in our cultural, linguistic, social, scientific, medical, and psychological insistence that there is a rigid linkage between death and permanency. If death, however, is merely a disease and therefore curable, the problem no longer exists. The answer to the question "How long does death last?" is the same as the answer to the question "How long does cancer last?" -- until the organism either recovers or succumbs, until it changes from being dead to being alive, or to being goth.

  The comparison between death and cancer is a valid one. There is an experiment involving the culture of tissue cells from mice that suggests similarities between the two states. A single cell was taken from a mouse and grown in culture until two separate lines of cells could be established from it. After a long series of multiplications, one of the lines died at the Hayflick limit and the other kept running on past it. When cells from the surviving line were inoculated into mice of the same strain as the original donor, they produced malignant tumors which killed their hosts. The cells had become cancerous. It seems that cancer is produced by cells that have escaped from normal control, cells that, usually by mutation, have changed sufficiently to shrug off the species organizer and run riot in abnormally rapid growth. Cancer is thus a different kind of organization from that of normal cell growth and is in this way very similar to the disease we call death. Cancer is not a unitary disease like chicken pox; it cannot be cured in the same way and it is certainly not produced in the same way. There is no single cause of cancer, any more than there is a cause of death. Cures for cancer will be found, but they will not eliminate cancer. Cures for death are being found, but people will continue to die -- and to be treated for it. Cancer and death are both conditions of life.

  The one thing that makes death distinct from all other diseases and disorders is that everybody gets it. From that moment in evolution when bacteria invented sex and got us all expelled from the garden, every individual has been condemned to death. It seems to be man's unique pain to be aware and afraid of this sentence, of the fact that we live and therefore must die. Other species seem to lack this self-consciousness, but they are by no means unaware of the states of death.

  Eugene Marais, that enigmatic and brilliant naturalist who searched alone and so successfully for the souls of ants and apes, tells of a tame female chacma baboon whose infant had to be taken away from her for medical treatment. [176] The mother screamed almost unceasingly for three days while Marais battled to save the baby's life, but lost. When the dead young baboon was returned to the still distraught mother, she "approached the body, making the chacma sounds of endearment, and touched it twice with her hands. She then put her face close to the back of the dead infant, touching its skin with her mouth, at the same time moving her lips in the usual chacma manner. Immediately afterwards she got up, uttered a succession of cries, walked to a corner and sat down quietly in the sun, apparently taking no more interest in the body." The incident was closed.

  Gilbert Manley, while observing the chimpanzee colony at London Zoo, saw one female clasp an injured infant to her breast and carry it about with her everywhere for some time, refusing to allow the keepers to take it from her. [173] Eventually, while Manley was watching, the baby died and the mother simply put it down and never touched it again.

  The death of the young animals was as evident to their mothers as it was to human bystanders, but seemed to be no cause for fear. A noticeable change had taken place and the response in both cases was a loss of interest in the object. Robert Smythe, in his work on canine behavior, says, "I have frequently seen a dog pass over the dead body of another dog with which it had been playing a few minutes before with no sign of recognition or even a sniff at the carcass." [256] He adds that "in the old days when pigs were slaughtered in sight of their companions, those awaiting their turn would
rush in and drink the blood as it ran from the throats."

  In the case of these primates and domestic animals, disinterest was probably the appropriate biological response to the death of one of their group members. There is nothing the others could do about it and no value in their taking any avoiding action. What evidence there is from the wild shows that sudden death, such as that produced by a distant gunshot or a silent arrow, has in itself little or no effect on the survivors. If it is accompanied by sight or sound br smell of the predator that produced that death, the reaction is very different, but the flight of the remaining grouse or gazelle is a response to the killer and not to the killed.

  Animals on the whole seem to recognize that something has changed, but often are no better than we at pinpointing a critical moment. There are many accounts of mothers carrying around dead young individuals until they decompose. There are stories of elephants and buffalo remaining with a stricken herd member and attempting fruitlessly to lift the dead animal back onto its feet. [302] There are ways -- some of them may even be instinctive -- in which social animals can assist a young or injured group member. Konrad Lorenz describes how greylag geese will stand with outspread wings over a dying friend, hissing defensively. He adds, "I observed the same behaviour on the occasion of an Egyptian goose killing a greylag gosling by hitting it on the head with its wing; the gosling staggered towards its parents and collapsed, dying of cerebral haemorrhage. Though the parents could not have seen the deadly blow, they reacted in the way described." [170] The defensive behavior under these circumstances was appropriate; it had survival value for the gosling who may only have been temporarily concussed. There comes a point, however, where the species members can do no more for their fellow. Recognition of this moment may have to be learned.

  George Schaller, in his account of the mountain gorillas of Kisoro, tells of a young animal that refused to leave the body of its adult companion. "It was a brutal choice for such an infant to have to make: escape man and enter the forest to wander alone in search of its group, a task for which it was unprepared, or cling to the last vestige of its former happy group life, a dead leader who for the first time failed to protect it. Finally the youngster was captured, only to die later in London Zoo." [241]

  Compare that account with this one by Robert Kastenbaum of an eighteen-month-old human child's first contact with death in the form of a dead bird. The boy recognized it as a bird, "but he appeared uncertain and puzzled. Furthermore he made no effort to touch the bird. This was unusual caution for a child who characteristically tried to touch or pick up everything he could reach. David then crouched over and moved slightly closer to the bird. His face changed expression. From its initial expression of excited discovery it had moved to puzzlement; now it took on the aspect of a grief mask." [142]

  In both gorilla and human child we find incomprehension of death at first contact with it. A few weeks after David's first dead bird he came across another and his reaction to this was completely different. "He picked up the bird and . . . reached up toward a tree, holding the bird above his head. He repeated the gesture several times accompanying his command now with gestures that could be interpreted as a bird flying." When putting the bird back in the tree repeatedly failed to bring it back to life, David accepted that this was not going to work. "He looked both sober and convinced" and then lost interest altogether.

  There seems to be no predisposition in any species to behave toward death in a certain way. Exposure to death does not elicit any unusual behavior in any naïve young individual on the first occasion. What happens on subsequent exposures is determined very largely by experience of and since the first one. Human children are to a certain extent prepared for their first death contact by a variety of on-off experiences very early in life. Cycles of light and dark, patterns of waking and sleeping, games of hide-and-seek, all introduce the contrasting notions of being and not-being. Adah Maurer claims that the term "peek-a-boo" comes directly from an old English phrase meaning "alive or dead." [179] Gradually a child learns that although some things come and go with regularity, others go away completely and never return.

  The development of a child's awareness of death seems to pass through several clearly defined phases. First of all, very young children, less than five years old, do not recognize death at all. Everything is regarded as living. A child might bring home several pebbles at a time so that these should have company and not feel lonely, or perhaps turn a scarecrow around so that he should not always have to look at the same view. Children of this age assume a perfect continuity between all things; they make no attempt to differentiate between living and nonliving bodies. This may be because they possess no criteria by which to make such distinctions, because they, have not yet been taught the supposed differences, but it is very tempting to compare this primitive animism of the child with the new and increasingly widespread adult belief in the "interconnectedness" of all things. Knowing with what extraordinary clarity children often see even the most complex situations, I cannot help wondering how much truth there may be in this widespread early belief in universal life. When children from Hungary [203], China [123], Sweden [150], Switzerland [216] and the United States [234] all come up with the same notions, can we afford simply to dismiss them as childish?

  Later, as a child learns or is taught our interpretation of reality, early animism becomes slightly modified. Children are forced to recognize death, but between the ages of five and seven they negotiate a compromise and start thinking and talking about death as a temporary state. One five-year-old refers to his pet as "not very badly killed" and another of six explains that when someone is dead "he feels a tiny little bit, but when he is quite dead he no longer feels anything." [203] Maria Nagy makes light of these reactions in which children regard life and death as interchangeable, as though the whole idea were outrageous; but is it? Many adult communities keep right on believing that death is not inflexible. In the Solomon Islands the word mate is used for someone who has died, but burials are festive occasions because mate is a state like puberty that can last for years and merely leads on to other levels of life. [227]

  Then, under further relentless pressure to conform, children between the ages of about seven and nine give up their childish notions of harmony in life and death and seek an adult refuge in the personification of death as a skeleton or bogeyman. At about this time, too, a child starts trying death on for size by acting it out in games like cops and robbers that involve playing dead. This imitation of the death state in play seems to be the most effective way of accommodating the idea into a workable outlook on life, so that by the age of about nine most children have finally reached the point of accepting death as "the permanent cessation of all vital functions." [23] In the words of Don Juan Matus, the child knows the description of the world and has earned his membership in it "when he is capable of making all the proper perceptual interpretations which, by conforming to that description, validate it." [44]

  No serious study has ever been made of death or death-awareness in any species other than our own, but there are anecdotal scraps and odd experimental findings that fit together to produce an astonishing pattern. As this picture takes shape, the notion of universal continuity begins to look less and less childish.

  Rosalia Abreu, the first person ever to breed chimpanzees in captivity, tells of an incident that occurred on the death of a female in her collection. At the moment that this chimp died in an indoor area her mate, who was outside in the park, began to scream. "He continued to scream, looking about as though he saw something," and later, when another chimp died, he did the same thing. "He screamed and screamed and screamed. And he kept looking and looking with lower lip hanging down, as if he saw something that we could not see. His scream was different from anything 1 have heard at other times. It made my flesh creep." [298]

  Under most circumstances, animals apparently pay little heed to death, but there are some situations in which an ability to respond to dying would have survi
val value. Predators usually stop trying to kill their prey as soon as it stops trying to get away, but it is unlikely that they are reacting to death itself. Their innate killing patterns are designed to respond to key stimuli produced by the living, moving prey, and when these signals stop coming in, the behavioral sequence of catch and kill runs to its natural conclusion. After a lioness kills a zebra and she and her group have eaten their fill, others move in to finish off what is left. Hyenas and jackals are undoubtedly attracted to the site by sounds and smells, but vultures seem to use some other cue and often zero in on even a hidden corpse with uncanny precision. We know that they have superb eyesight enhanced by a grille structure in front of the retina which is designed to accentuate even the most distant movements, and that as soon as one vulture spots food others come spiraling down in his wake, but sometimes this just does not seem to be enough to explain their presence. I have seen vultures arriving in the dark to sit like impatient pallbearers around an antelope that had been shot, and on these occasions there were no mammalian scavengers around to attract their attention.

  I am not suggesting that vulures are able to diagnose death at a distance, but I do believe that in some situations a signal goes out from a dying organism and that this alarm is particularly strong when the attack on it is sudden and violent. It seems likely that the signal began as a warning and was originally intended only for members of the same species, but in time and evolution it has turned into an all-species SOS. Depending on the circumstances and the species involved, this signal can simultaneously be read as "Help, I need assistance," "Look out, there's a killer around," "Relax, he's eating someone else," or "Come on, dinner's ready." There is value in all these communications and economy in the fact that all are based on a single signal given by a single individual in trouble. I believe that there is now sufficient evidence to show that such a system does in fact exist.