We embarked on an epic journey this session, Biology III: Embracing Life and Facing Death, where we dove deep into what it means to die, biologically, spiritually, how death is taken into account in the medical field, and how we can truly embrace life, and when the time comes, face death.
We started this Quest to find out how we can, as a community and as individuals, embrace life. Watching the ‘last lecture’ on how this middle-aged man, who is going to die within months, isn’t afraid of death, and on the contrary, welcomes it as he has fully embraced his life, lived it to the fullest, and has even completed his bucket list. After this, we wrote our own bucket lists of the small and large tasks we hope to accomplish in our lifetime. Another way we learned about embracing life was spending time with the elderly and interviewing them to learn about their life. Along with this we got to research hospice and how to communicate with those who are dying, roleplaying to step in those heroes’ shoes.
Not only did we really reflect on our deaths, by writing eulogies and obituaries on how we would want to be remembered, which drives us to fulfill our wishes and become better people, planned our funerals, and analyzed different poems on life and death, but we learned about the different moral dilemmas which take place in the medical field, regarding death. We debated over medical directives, which are instructions written by a patient, beforehand, so that if they are no longer able to communicate, their wishes may be fulfilled. We researched and discussed when doctors should tell a patient that they are going to die, we found this great TED Talk on the same topic. Not long ago these difficult topics became a part of medical biology, and during the Quest we used our biology knowledge to back up these ethical dilemmas. It was fascinating to not only get a glimpse of what doctors are taught and have to handle in their fast-paced field, but to be able to roleplay different scenarios that doctors go through on the daily.
In this session we also began exploring what the time of death actually is. Is it when your heart stops beating, or when your brain ceases to work? This question is constantly debated world-wide in the medical field as different technologies, like CPR have allowed us to resuscitate people and have enabled us to transform what it means for us to truly die and leave this world. With such rapid advancements, will it ever be possible for us to become eternal, through cryogenics, cloning, and organ transplants?
Click the image to play the Virtual Autopsy Game
We also put ourselves in the doctors’ shoes and thought of, at what point would we pull the plug? Who would make the decision of pulling the plug? And is a persistent vegetative state, enough to pull the plug? These questions really brought forth the reality of all the different ethical dilemmas that plague the medical field and gave us a sense of how this integral part of biology plays out there.
Another aspect of death that we covered were autopsies. We spent time virtually investigating the causes of different deaths by looking at the bodies, organs, background information, etc to come to the conclusions. This allowed us to step into the shoes of coroners and see how they actually work in the field.
Death, the final stage of life is usually hidden from sight in these modern times, but this Quest really allowed us to connect with this natural, and inevitable part of life, understanding it even better. The final part of this session was watching the harvesting of a goat, which sacrificed its life for our needs. We witnessed a death before our eyes, and were able to fully grasp the complexity and sacredness of the process. After, we sat around a fire and read out our prepared pieces on how we will embrace life and face death: personal stories, eulogies, stories on loss and everything in between, were shared. This was the most sacred part of the whole Quest, the most impactful end.
Biology, the study of life, includes the final part of life, death, and being able to explore the different notions on death, individually, community-wise, and globally, really gave us a sense of what it means to embrace life, and in the end, face death.
