As a D&D player, you encounter death a lot. Especially at low levels. We're currently level 1, and death is in every encounter. All but one person has dropped into the negatives, and three of us have stat damage. My bf's pally has fungus rot and it slowly dying unless we can cure her in time. It's pretty scary really. This maybe untrue of all players, but I get attached to my creation. I draw them, come up with stories, and give them something of a life of their own. When their hurt, or close to death, I worry.
There was recently a death among my family friends. Someone mother passed yesterday, and we went to an impromptu visitation in their home. I've seen dead bodies before, this is nothing new. I know more about what happens to dead body that the average person. It...was strange none the less. She was laying there, as if asleep. I was just waiting for her to cough and wake up. She was always coughing, and being in the house and not hearing it, was...strange. Someone I had been talking to less than a month ago. It's not so much a thing of remorse, but a thing of...realization. Thinking? I'm not sure.
What defines something as alive? There's the biological sense of it, but we can keep people who's hearts have failed, and people who's brains have kicked it 'alive'. When ever I think about someones passing, it's rarely about the passing it's self, but about what I remember about them alive. Despite I know they're physically dead, aren't the technically still alive? What about a child who doesn't understand the ramifications of death, who view them as simply gone away? Isn't all we are, beyond a lugging physical form, memories, and what we have derived from the? Even though someone is gone, their ideas, philosophy, and ideals continue via those who where near them in biological life. We as a consciousness are a compilation of memories and what we've derived from said memories, in addition to what has been set in us from those around us, who where a compilation...and so on.
So, dose someone die when their physical body ceases to function, or do they die when every memory of them no longer remembered?