Death Does Not Happen at Once
by Bill Stinson
Dying takes time.
Whether you slide out gradually,
As genetic insult inflicts cumulative harm
Upon your working parts,
Til they flail in the face of a stinking canker –
Or you’re thrown out suddenly,
As the sickening crunch of metal and glass,
Your former automobile,
Deforms your forehead and splatters your tonsils
On the roadside.
Long haul or quick hit,
Dying takes time.
No matter how long it takes,
There’s always a point after which
You are irretrievably gone,
If not to death’s dream kingdom,
At least to life’s unfettered scrap heap.
Cremation and decomposition are one-way streets.
You’re not coming back.
So, what’s going on
At the edge of being and nothingness?
Take a moment
To consider a time you’ll never know:
When you’re absolutely, positively,
Undeniably and reliably
Dead.
Now take the halfway point in time
Between the living you here,
And the dead you there.
If at the half point you are dead,
Then repeat with the new dead time and the previous living time.
Or, if at this point you are alive,
Then repeat with the new living time and the previous dead time.
See if you can pin it down –
The moment you permanently checked out.
Maybe don’t do this forever
(As you will surely die).
But if you could,
Would you ever truly know
Exactly when you died?
Maybe you’d get lucky
And strike upon the precise moment of your death:
The beacon extinguished,
Your personal mic drop.
But finding the singular crack of death
In an eternity of moments
Might just be an asymptote’s errand,
Never to finish.
And maybe there are simply no discrete moments
To find anyway:
After all, an occurrence of zero duration
Has never been observed
(The merely theoretical can be artfully elusive).
So, if the outbreak of death
Is not discrete, but in fact spans time,
Would a deeper dive reveal
An infinity of death sandwiches
Stacked endlessly between each other?
The Dagwood of perpetual demise!
Better to reflect on the infinities of life –
Not just waiting for your toast to pop,
But transubstantiating continuous time
Into the eternity of true moments.
You may ask: What good
Are countless moments
When the finite sample rate
Of biologically appointed senses
Throttle our access to them?
I say: All the edges of life and death
Bear scrutiny
As the possible nesting grounds of everlasting life.
For how could you ever die,
When you’re free to transit
Beginning and endless moments,
However small and tender?
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NOTE 1
In October 2021, Reinhard Dörner at Goethe University in Germany measured the shortest event ever recorded: at 247 zeptoseconds (a trillionth of a billionth of a second), the time it takes for a photon of light to traverse a single Hydrogen atom.
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NOTE 2
Planck time is the smallest possible unit of time, approximately 5.39×10−44 seconds, derived from the fundamental constants of gravity, quantum mechanics, and the speed of light. It is the time it takes for light to travel one Planck length, and it marks a limit beyond which current physics theories are expected to break down.
The Planck length is the smallest possible measurement of length, at approximately 1.616×10−35 meters, where our current understanding of physics breaks down. It is defined by fundamental constants: the speed of light, the gravitational constant, and the Planck constant. Trying to observe something at this scale would require so much energy that it would create a black hole, making it the smallest distance we can currently probe experimentally.​
