Apoptosis

I awoke early in the morning thinking about apoptosis. There is some precedent for me waking up early. I’ve had the repeated experience of waking up early on Friday mornings with a kind of incredible mental clarity. I seem to know things. I’ve awoken thinking about people, relationships, groups, ideas and the world. I have what I have come to call a kind of truth sense, I know things, things I wouldn’t have guessed I knew, things about how I should act, things I wasn’t aware I was thinking about. This morning it was apoptosis.

I am somewhat familiar with the word: it stands for voluntary cell death. I don’t know how it came to me. What made that word, which was not in my conscious thoughts, suddenly come into my awakening mind? I don’t know. This exegesis is not about that strange occurrence, it is about the mystery of apoptosis, and what it’s appearance brought into my life.

Let’s start with a true story. I had an accident last month (9/15). I lost control of my car and drove into a tree. I totaled my car, hurt my passenger (not too seriously, Thank God!), and scared myself. Since then I have been wrestling with the idea that my driving career is over. I don’t want to face this possibility, but I cannot be sure that I can keep anyone (myself included) safe on the road.

For about a month I’ve been without a car, and researching the possibility that I could avoid the termination of my driving career by acquiring an electric street vehicle. I found a vehicle (a street legal souped up golf cart with a top speed of 25 mph), someone who would customize it for me (and my wheelchair), someone who would even store it over the winter, so I could qualify for a federal tax break, and convince my community to put in a few charging stations. My mind went to work, and found a viable driving option that would allow me to maximize my freedom. I was pleased, imagining a locally expanding orbit, compensating for the inaccessible world I was coming to.

Then I awoke thinking about apoptosis. I knew apoptosis was an evolutionary breakthrough, the voluntary death of some cells enabling multi-celled beings to grow new and more capable. Death led to new life. I wasn’t sure what this thought was doing in my mind, or how it got there, but I noticed something unexpected: I was ready to give up driving!

Apoptosis, I later learned is the voluntary, “programmed” cell death that lets larger organisms survive and evolve. I discovered, to my chagrin, that I was willing to let this capacity (driving) go for the sake of not feeling anxious that some other part of life was going to be put in jeopardy. I realized, that if I could let this imagined freedom die, I, and the rest of life, would be free of one more possible threat. My beloved community would be a safer place to be part of.

This was just the beginning of how apoptosis is affecting me. I have been concerned about death, harboring some fear that this unknown transition would be painful, debilitating, and the end of the road. In my depths I’ve been fretting about how my fear of death has been shaping how I show up in life. Then I began to think about how apoptosis represents the awareness that cells have. Life for the larger organism, to which they are a part, their larger self (if you please), is aided by their voluntary death. I began to think of death as a part of a larger life-form.

I don’t know about how you deal with your personal death, but for me, the idea that my death might be part of life, that my death could be a service to the larger whole, is changing everything. I am not a suicide bomber seeking some kind of paradisiacal solution to end all problems, instead I am willing to live, and surely to die, for the sake of helping Life find a way to go on. I find re-assurance in the sense I have; that this life is not mine, it is Life’s, and that my death insures that Life has what It needs to keep going, and to keep evolving.

Apoptosis —“ voluntary programmed cell death that gives a larger, more complex organism, the capacity to grow and evolve.” That seems to me to be an excellent description of human death. Life benefits, it goes on, and confers upon all of us, who’s passing enables It, a little taste of being as eternal as It is. Ripening, like I think I have been doing, especially in these latter years, seems to be a way of becoming as richly endowed with the complex stuff of Life, so that with my passing something of this life goes on.

I also like the feeling I have that comes with apoptosis being somehow in my mind. I seem to be more connected than I realize. Apparently, probably like everyone else, I know more than I think I know. That now makes sense to me, I am connected, a part of a larger organism, that knows things, I can only marvel at, and sometimes be informed by.