D___h, that word of Germanic origin, which is simultaneously a fact, an instance, a state, an action.
I’m not a very technical person. My understanding of the . . . physical aspect of death is a little fuzzy and is in many ways limited to what I knew as a child. I wrote a book report on the subject, copied straight from the entry on “Death” in the encyclopedia. I can recall key aspects of that report.
Death means the end of life. The heart stops beating and after that, the brain is the first organ to go, something to do with the cells of the cortex being susceptible to the end of the flow of blood and oxygen. When we die, all our memories gurgle out of us; all our thoughts die with us. It’s as if the brain is relieved; that coordinating center of soft nervous tissue that is said to have the consistency of hamburger meat can finally stop wondering about death, speculating, fretting—the irresistible, poetic practice of thanatopsis—and just . . . get on with it. The other organs follow suit, bit by bit, cautiously, systematically.
The hair may continue to grow for several hours after death. Then it stops, though I’m attached to my childish belief that the hair keeps growing, not just for a few hours but for eternity: everyone in the afterlife has long hair; the dead are no better than hippies, Death Metal heads, Romantic composers. In some extreme cases, a skeleton’s hair gets so long it has been known to creep in the crack between the coffin lid and the coffin and curl around the coffin’s handles.
Certain structures in the body are constantly decaying, dying, and being replaced by new structures. This is all part of something supposedly natural called the cycle of experience. Certain structures inside us die while we’re still trapped in the relative comfort of the womb. Death completes the cycle. I never figured out what these structures are exactly, but the implications of what I read and regurgitated onto paper stayed with me.