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CAUSE OF DEATH

December 11, 2008

 

There was a little item on Yahoo yesterday about cancer claiming the top spot for causes of death by the year 2010. I have mentioned elsewhere (on more than one occasion I am sure) that I do not put a great deal of stock in the science of medicine. Consequently, I have a different take on the matter. Other than accidents or quirks of fortune (like murder or suicide), there has always been—and always will be—only one cause of death: life.

It is life that both makes and unmakes us. I suggested as much in my fable, Old Man:

You see, it's like this. Life brought you into this world, and Life's gonna take you out. Death is bullshit. There's no such thing. It's just some fucked up idea people came up with. They like to sit around being afraid for some reason, just like you sat around your whole life waiting for death. Jesus Christ. Do you have any idea how fucked up that is? But don't worry. There's a lot just like you. And the next place you're going is temporary too. They're all temporary. You just gonna sit around and be unhappy there too? Just because it's gonna end?

Cancer is but a particular behavior of life; so is any other disease, mortal or otherwise.

Death is like the zero digit, a place holder. It does nothing.

The only action taking place in the universe is the action of life, an action that is usually unpredictable and completely erratic. In my first book, The One Thing, I suggested that the nuclear force was in fact a living force.

It is not unreasonable to surmise from this that Life, in its own way, could also be a product of mass and the speed of light, and to further muse whether all living things, when traced to their finest essence, might be manifestations of some kind of highly organized (controlled) nuclear activity.

I have also offered the opinion that DNA does not make life, but that life makes DNA.

The article in Yahoo is an example of something else that I have previously carped on, our penchant to engage in convenient speech. To express it in terms that are not quite so convenient (and thus always more awkward), what it really said was that the leading cause of death in human beings will be a particular behavior of life that those same human beings have grown accustomed to calling cancer.