Death is not what it used to be

[Still Waters]

The boundary between life and death has become blurred by new medical treatments, writes Roger Highfield.

Recently, I found myself discussing what makes for a great literary death with my fellow judges of the 2012 Wellcome Trust book prize for medicine in literature, ahead of a debate we’re having at Waterstone’s next month.The contenders ranged from the last moments of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom in John Updike’s Rabbit at Rest to the mawkish demise of Little Nell at the conclusion of Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, which reduced the Victorians to sobs and Oscar Wilde to tears of laughter.

As we tried to separate the ludicrous from the lachrymose, I used an example from non-fiction to show how the reality of death can be more intriguing than anything in a novel. You won’t find an everyday deathbed scene in The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger’s account of the disappearance of a swordfish boat off Nova Scotia in 1991. We will never know exactly how the men died – so to recreate their plight, Junger turned to people who had been through similar experiences and survived.

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[CautiouslyOptimistic]

This is such a huge topic, but one obviously close to my heart right now, and reading this really made me think hard about what death really means to me. Obviously corpereal (pardon my poor spelling if I missed that one) death is a little easier for me to pin down because there are tests and science that can tell you if someone is dead physically, but reading this article has made me realize that even with all our advances and technology, being burried alive is such a constant threat in some places and thats very disturbing! Its like the more we know the more mistakes which become possible - like the example given where the family simply assumed the man was dead and simply sent him to the morturary without even thinking "Maybe theres a chance to help him, lets ring a doctor" I shudder to think of it happening to anyone I know. Stranger still to imagine this happens so often they install handles on the inside of the fridge doors now!!!

Strange that after so much forward progress in diagnostics, image scanning on MRIs and sophicated machinery that theres a real possibility of this happening somewhere today, tomorrow and the next day. I used to think its the wondering what happens after death which was most mysterious was an accepted idea world wide, then you read something like this and see that sometimes the question of confirming physical death can still be mucked up even now. I will be paying closer attention than ever in my CPR refreshers from now on thats for sure, I cant imagine how mortifying it must have been when that guy got home again and had to confront the ones who sent him off to burial without even calling for medical help: AWKWARD!

[mklsgl]

This is a great short story... http://thefloatinglibrary.com/2008/07/03/bullet-in-the-brain-tobias-wolff/ ...that reminds you that there is more truth in fiction than there is in history.

[eight bits]

Meh. I'm old fashioned.

http://fiction.eserver.org/short/occurrence_at_owl_creek.html

I know. Too done.

[kasiawroc20]

..... died ((

I always look here http://yourdeathdate.info/1/index.html

Death when it comes will have no denial.