… Death to a cardiologist means that your heart has stopped, and he can’t get it to restart. But to a neurologist, it might mean something else.

Medical journals continue to fill with conditions that mimic death but which are not death at all.

Often we’ll say ‘death is the absence of life,’ but then we have to define ‘life’ and that’s almost impossible. All we can really do is set criteria for who’s dead.

Death comes […] when the stability of the human body breaks down, and the system no longer works as a whole. Does that happen when the heart goes? The lungs? The lungs and heart together? The brain? That’s the debate. […] Brain-dead pregnant mothers can continue to gestate and give birth to their babies long after being declared brain dead.

An MRI that twenty years ago was considered a ‘photograph of death’ is now just an image of a sick but reparable brain.

Because ‘irreversible’ is locked into our present definition of death, I don’t think we can ever truly define it.

Death is the unknown and shall always be the unknown. We don’t know where we’re going, if anywhere. […] We all have to face the fact that at some point, the universe will exist without us. We are not special and are not ultimately needed. Neither science nor medicine is of much help here, and neither is most egocentric religion. […] In the end, it is of some comfort to know that whatever inequities exist in the world, we are all equal in this regard, and we all share the same fate.”