Gratis

I'm getting tired of working for free, especially with paid opportunities abound. You can just get by on so much good will and good intentions. If nothing improves, I might have to make drastic moves I never thought I would do.

Death in the family

A beloved relative passed away recently due to natural causes. Prostatic malignancy with spinal metastases to be specific..

There were plenty of coming-of-age moments I encountered because the last death in the family occurred when I was still quite young and not yet taking part in the responsibilities of family logistics.

I was able to watch an embalming process for the very first time. I have seen my fair share of cadavers and patients who passed away in front of my eyes, so I was no stranger to death. However, since this struck a little closer to home, it made me be a bit more introspective with my musings. My father commented while we were watching the process that when someone passes away, the body is reduced to a mere shell.

He was right, of course. The person, the very essence that defines who we are leaves the world with death. The body left behind is a mere representation of the person who once was.. It suddenly dawned on me that this was going far beyond the physiologic concept of cellular death..  

What makes a person alive? Is "living" just a summation of all the different specialized cellular processes that occur inside everyone every single day? It kinda baffles the mind to think that we have evolved from a single-celled organism, that eventually banded together with other cells forming aggregates. Eventually the mass of cells developed particular functions for different parts of the cellular mass, like digestion, circulation, sensory perception, higher intergration, etc.. So if this is the case, is the very essence of who I am (well, at least the cognitive part of me), defined by the mass of neurologic tissue situated within this bony skull? Am i just a living brain, subserved by masses of other organs that work with the single goal of sustaining the brain? If this last statement were true, then why do bodies still work in the case of comatose patients or those who have already suffered ireversible neurologic injury? Could we say that a person is still truly alive when the brain is gone? I'm not talking about cellular life or death here, but the essence of who the person is..

Does that body become just a living shell, able to sustain basic life functions but unable to truly live?

I still find myself going back to the evolution from a unicellular organism. In essence, the eukaryotic cell, with all its specialized organelles, is a microcosm of the multicellular creatures with different organ systems. No wonder the multicellular organisms evolved like this, they were just following a pattern inherent to nature itself.

Does my brain organically define who I am, since it is the source of all voluntary acts, and is the repository of information for all my experiences?

I'm still struggling to fathom how a densely packed bundle of gelatinous material capable of electrical conduction could be the cause of so much in this world, both good and bad..

Going one step further, why would the brain mass be so concerned with pursuing things that would only serve to pamper the shell which it it housed?.. But yeah, I re-read that sentence and it seems to make sense after all..

I think I'll stop here for the meantime.. All these cellular concepts are making my protected cellular mass hurt :P