“Determining when someone has definitively died has proven difficult.”
– Wikipedia
WELCOME TO THE BEGINNING of The Meaning of Death. I’d like to start with a definition of death.
Historically, death was demarcated as the cessation of blood circulation; if there was no blood moving around the body and the person wasn’t breathing, they were dead. Because, historically, this situation could not be changed. But with the dawn of defibrillation, drugs, cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), injections and other wondrous inventions, cardiac arrest – no pulse, no heartbeat, no breathing – came to be called clinical death.
About three to six minutes after clinical death, brain cells start to die from the loss of oxygen. Currently, the generally accepted legal definition for “dead” is brain dead or biologically dead. This is the termination of electrical activity anywhere in the brain. Here in the United States, there is a Uniform Determination of Death Act; it favors the phrase “irreversible cessation of all functions.” While it is possible to resuscitate some people during clinical death, that isn’t going to happen during biological death.
Among the longest anyone has been legally clinically dead and then returned to the living is six hours. In November 2019, Audrey Schoeman’s heart stopped while hiking in the Spanish Pyrenees. Her body temperature had fallen to 64 degrees. When she eventually got to the hospital, doctors thawed her out, pumped oxygen into her blood, and jump-started her heart. Audrey made a full recovery within a couple of weeks.
Remember Lazarus, the guy who died and then, thanks to Jesus, emerged to tap-dance his way out of a cave four days later? Since 1982, there have been many documented cases of Lazarus Syndrome. My two favorites are:
(1) a 78-year-old Mississippi man who was declared dead because he had no pulse. He awoke the next day in a body bag at the morgue, and
(2) 91-year-old Janina Kolkiewicz whose heart had stopped beating, and she was no longer breathing. She awoke eleven hours later in the hospital mortuary with a hankering for tea and pancakes.
Of course, these folks are unusual. Without special treatment after circulation is restarted, full recovery of the brain after more than three minutes of clinical death at normal body temperature is rare. (Sadistic scientists have discovered that dogs can recover after sixteen minutes of clinical death with practically no brain injury, and cats can return from clinical death after an hour.)
This widespread definition is not likely to be permanent. Tomorrow we might be able to define death for ourselves by specifying under what circumstances we want to be considered dead. This is already the case in some countries.
So, let’s say a person is dead. What happens if they, like these Lazarus Syndrome examples, return to life? According to Dr. Bruce Greyson, one of the doyens of the life-after-death movement, if the person is revived, 17 percent “remember vivid and detailed near-death experiences that occurred while their hearts were stopped.” In the next few columns, I’ll explore the similarities of these near-death experiences and how those who have momentarily died now view life.
Bottom Line: Currently, “dead” means “brain dead.” But the definition of death is no more permanent than life itself.
Excellent! So interesting. Am looking forward to your next column.
I’m really glad you are doing this research because I don’t want to, but I do want the answers.