To die is not nice. That is clear, and medicine as a research and treatment discipline is doing everything to postpone the finiteness of human beings at least a little. That is good and right, and people and patients can only be grateful when resources such as a modern hospital or evidence-based research are available as an alternative to doing nothing or to oath healers.
So death, that’s for sure, has to wait a little longer, that’s basically the core idea of health care. On the one hand.
On the other hand, aging and dying are part of everyone’s life, interestingly not until the mid-90s, but from the beginning. Without death, that is the perspective of biomedicine, life is not possible at all. For example, programmed cell death, apoptosis, is a central component of embryogenesis, i.e. the development of a child in the womb. The body is formed – like a sand castle, which is first roughly heaped up and then refined further and further. Another shell here, another little hole in there. Nature does not use a bucket and shovel for this, but the principle of cell growth and cell death.
The idea that one’s own death follows the rules of nature can be comforting
Even later, in the middle of life, the body sorts out cells that are broken, that become annoying or even scary. Faulty copies are repeatedly created during cell division, and these have to be thrown away before they can continue to multiply into a heap and thus become a threat. Cancer, if you will, is a failure of the body’s death mechanisms. So without death there is no life.
From the point of view of evolution, the continued existence of all living beings would be unthinkable without death. The earth would be bursting at the seams, but above all mutations in the genetic material of animals or plants, which actually lead to death, could be carried on. Adaptation to the environment cannot be achieved without dying. No life without death.
Admittedly, all of this sounds theoretically very good and in practice a bit sobering, because what use is the perspective of cell biology if you understandably want to live rather than die? Probably not much, and maybe a little. In any case, many people manage to die a little better at the end of their life, as palliative medicine has known for decades, if they do not rebel against dying. Death, as bitter as it sounds, is a force of nature that cannot be countered. But that doesn’t mean that the end of your life has to become a tragedy per se. The idea that one’s own death follows the rules of nature can be consolation. And consolation is medicine that may not prevent one’s own death, but can at least make it a little bit more bearable.