Death: An Exploration

Chapter II: Why Don't We Die Like Salmon?

"That which is so universal as death must be a benefit." —Friedrich von Schiller

I have often thought about the cycle of our lives and how it fits into the broader cycles of nature. Many creatures have cyclical spawning migrations, which lead them back to the place of their birth, where they will give life to the next generation. Human beings are not beholden to such patterns, which makes the nature of our birth, life, and death cycles different from those of many other creatures. Although many of us have children, it is not an imperative. It seems that much of our lives are spent searching for meaning rather than being tethered to an innate urge to fulfill a natural pilgrimage to reproduction and death. Although reproduction has a strong presence in our lives, it is not as inextricably linked to death as it is for other species. We are part of the animal kingdom but our evolution has placed us in a different rhythm. This makes us consider how we are linked to the greater picture.

Eva Saulitis is marine biologist and writer who has deeply considered these questions, and her experiences give her a unique perspective on life and death. Every September for twenty-six years, Saulitis visited the same scene of black humpback salmon fighting their way upstream to spawn and die. Each year was a unique variation of a gory slaughter, with salmon ripped apart by bears, carried to death in the talons of bald eagles, or smashed against rocks by currents and members of their own species. Propelled by a mysterious, innate sense of duty, the salmon would give their utmost in order to birth a new generation. They were destined to spawn new life or feed the fire burning in the stomachs of the predators that flourished on their flesh.

Are the salmon aware of their impending doom? Do they, like humans, have to live with the central existential angst, stemming from the fact that one day they would cease to be? It is important to recognize that, in one way or another, all creatures are beholden to death.

The salmon scene in Saulitis's twenty-sixth year of observation was very different in her perception than it had been before, for she had been recently diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, a terminal condition. In her most recent bout with the disease she'd had surgery as part of a six-day stint in the hospital where she endured untold pain and the difficulty of being hooked to various machines. This led her to observe: "In the hospital, I learned to fear something more than death: existence dependent upon technology, machines, sterile procedures, hoses, pumps, chemicals easing one kind of pain only to feed a psychic other. Existence apart from dirt, mud, muck, wind gust, crow caw, fishy orca breath, bog musk, deer track, rain squall, bear scat." She continues, explaining her observation by offering a philosophical reality with far-reaching dimensions: "The whole ordeal was a necessary palliation, a stint of suffering to grant me long-term physical freedom. And yet it smacked of the way people too often spend their last days alive, and it really scared me."

We can't say with certainty that we are the only species that is aware of its own death. But there are no experts on what lies beyond the boundaries of the living world. There are people who have had near-death experiences and can recount, in great detail, what they believe they have seen beyond the curtain. As Saulitis says in her article "Into the Wild Darkness," we are still in the dark because "we know more about the universe and the mind of an octopus than we do about death's true nature. Only that it is terrible and inescapable, and it is wild."

Here it is important to remember a fact that was not mentioned in Saulitis's article about this natural deadly dance with eternity. It is the law of the conservation of energy: energy cannot be created or destroyed. As far as we know, all the energy that exists in the universe always has and as far as we can tell always will be, so perhaps we do not die; we simply lose our human bodies and change form.

In the United States, we often prolong people's lives far beyond the point that they can function in a dignified way. We force people to live as human puddles, hooked into tubes feeding them medications that are imperative to survival, slowly ebbing away until eventually passing over to the other side. About 32 percent of the U.S. Medicare budget goes to end-of-life care. To wither away in a hospital bed jammed full of tubes, needles, and chemicals does not do justice to the dignity of the person who was once a fully functioning human being.

Saulitis eloquently lights on this uncomfortable truth as she meditates on her own condition and how different it is from the salmons' last stand. She says that "facing death in a death-phobic culture is lonely. But in wild places like Prince William Sound or the woods and sloughs behind my house, it is different. The salmon dying in their stream tell me I am not alone. The evidence is everywhere: in the skull of an immature eagle I found in the woods; in the bones of a moose in the gully below my house; in the corpse of a wasp on the windowsill; in the fall of a birch leaf from its branch. These things tell me death is true, right, graceful; not tragic, not failure, not defeat."

There is something so natural about death because it is all around us; every living organism has to dance with death. In the end Saulitis eloquently captures this truth: "Death is nature. Nature is far from over. In the end, the gore at the creek comforts more than it appalls. In the end—I must believe it—just like a salmon, I will know how to die, and though I die, though I lose my life, nature wins. Nature endures. It is strange, and it is hard, but it's comfort, and I'll take it."

I have long meditated on death's role in the cycles of nature. I have often contemplated the mysterious interior lives of animals. Why do salmon return to their birth to spawn a new generation and end their own lives? Why are these choices made? Why is there so little deviation within other species, in comparison to the myriad of ways our species chooses to live? How far has our society removed us from the rhythms of the natural world? It seems to me that contemplation is often most mystical when it is enveloped in nature, leading to deeper insights. With heightened understanding one comes to see death as part of the lifecycle; an experience we all share. From this one can glean some solace.

Eva Saulitis, "Cancer: Into the Wild Darkness," accessed August 5, 2015.

"End of Life Care," Dartmouth Atlas of Medical Care, accessed August 18, 2015.

Saulitis, "Cancer: Into the Wild Darkness."

Ibid.