The heart stops and the body does not know it yet. There is a lag. A delay between the moment of death and the moment every cell understands.
I have been thinking about what the body thinks when it is dying. Not the person. The body. The meat and the bone and the chemistry that somehow became a person.
When the heart stops there is no circulation. No oxygen. No glucose. The brain goes first because it is greedy. It uses twenty percent of the body’s oxygen for two percent of its weight. A selfish organ. And when the oxygen stops the neurons keep firing for a few seconds from whatever reserves remain and then they stop. Not because they want to. Because they cannot help it. They are machines. And the fuel is gone.
(the brain does not know it is dying. It knows only that ATP is low and the sodium potassium pumps are failing and the membrane potential is collapsing. It does not know that it is the brain of a person who loved someone. It knows only biochemistry.)
The cells begin to swell. Without the pumps the sodium stays inside and water follows. The mitochondria which are the power plants start to leak. They release cytochrome c into the cytoplasm and this is the signal. The signal for apoptosis. Programmed cell death. The body begins to dismantle itself from the inside.
(the cells have been preparing for this their entire existence. Every cell carries the machinery of its own destruction. A failsafe. A kill switch. They do not know why they have it. They just do.)
The heart muscle cells last longer than the brain. Fifteen to thirty minutes. They keep trying to contract even without blood. Even without oxygen. They switch to anaerobic metabolism and produce lactic acid and the acid builds up and the pH drops and still they try. The heart does not know the person is dead. It knows only rhythm. It was built to beat.
(the body does not understand finality. It understands only process. The liver keeps processing. The kidneys keep filtering. The skin cells keep dividing for hours after the rest has stopped. They do not read the news. Nobody told them.)
The lysosomes burst. These are the sacs of digestive enzymes that every cell carries. They are meant to break down waste but when the membrane goes they break down everything. The cell digests itself from the inside out. Autolysis. Self-eating. This is the true death. Not the heart stopping. Not the brain flatlining. But the moment when the cell turns on itself because there is no energy left to keep the wolves at the door.
(the body dissolves itself from within. A quiet surrender. No screaming. No fighting. Just the slow work of enzymes doing what enzymes do.)
And here is the strange thing. None of it knows. The neuron does not know it was part of a person who had a name and a mother and a favorite song. The cardiac myocyte does not know it was part of a heart that raced when someone they loved walked into the room. The hepatocyte does not know its person drank whiskey on Friday nights and regretted it on Saturday mornings. They do not know.
They are just doing what they have always done. Producing protein. Synthesizing energy. Making calories. Maintaining the gradient. Pumping the ion. And then one day the instructions stop coming and they cannot make sense of it because there is no sense to make. There is only chemistry.
(the tragedy is not that we die. The tragedy is that we are the only ones who know we will. The cells drift in ignorant bliss and we carry the weight of the ending every single day.)
You go through this world stressed and anxious because you are an animal who became bipedal and developed language and became conscious. That is the curse. That is the gift. You are a bag of meat stuck to bones and somehow you can look at the stars and feel small. Somehow you can hold someone’s hand and know that one day you will not be able to. Somehow you can sit in a quiet room and feel the weight of your own existence pressing down on your chest.
(the cells do not feel that weight. They do not feel anything. They are busy. They have work to do. They will keep working until they cannot and then they will stop and there will be nothing. No regret. No relief. Just the quiet cessation of process.)
The body fights until the end. Not because it wants to live. Because fighting is all it knows. The heart fibrillates. The lungs gasp. The brain releases a flood of neurotransmitters in one last desperate electrochemical sigh. Agonal breathing. The death rattle. These are not signs of consciousness. These are the twitches of a machine winding down. A clock spring slowly releasing its tension.
(you think of the Ancient One stretching one moment into a thousand just to watch the snow as i wrote about before. The body does the same thing. It stretches every last microsecond into a thousand more just to keep the process going. It does not know why. It does not need to know why.)
But the time comes when the ATP is gone and the pumps cannot work and the calcium floods in and the mitochondria collapse and the nucleus fragments and the cell dies. Not a dramatic death. A quiet one. A death of depletion. A death of running out.
And then you are no longer a person. You are a collection of cells that used to be a person. And then you are a collection of molecules that used to be cells. And then you are nothing that was once something.
(the body does not mourn itself. Only the mind does that. And the mind is already gone. It was the first to go. It went quietly. It went without ceremony. It went because the sodium potassium pump failed and there was nothing else to be done.)
What is consciousness then. What is this thing that makes us know we are dying. It is an accident of evolution. A byproduct of a brain complex enough to model its own existence. The cells did not ask for it. They do not benefit from it. They only benefit from the ATP and the glucose and the oxygen. Consciousness is overhead. A luxury the body never needed.
(and yet here we are. The only species that knows what is happening to it. The only species that can sit with the dying and understand. The only species that can be afraid of the silence.)
The cells do not know they are dying. They cannot. And in some way that is merciful. The body goes without understanding. The mind goes with full understanding. And the gap between those two things is what it means to be human.
(we are the universe’s way of watching itself end. One cell at a time.)
“I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution. We became too self aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody. I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.”
- Rustin Cohle (True Detective)