What is Death? : A Scientist Looks at the Cycle of Life

An exploration of the meaning of death and its profound implications about the meaning of life In the winter of 1997, biologist and critically acclaimed science writer Tyler Volk began suffering from mysterious physical ailments that would bring him face to face with his own mortality. This experience led him to explore what death means to us-and to discover that our mortality is, paradoxically, extraordinarily life affirming. In What Is Death? Volk shows how we deal with death psychologically and come to inner peace; how as a culture we find our funeral rituals a tremendous comfort and a revitalization of community; and how death evolved at the cellular level and stands as one of the most beautiful necessities in our biosphere. Here is death that is at once an end and a beginning, a source of dignity and a revelation, the basis of who we are as people and as a people.

TYLER VOLK, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in the Department of Biology at New York University. He is the acclaimed author of Metapatterns: Across Space, Time, and Mind and Gaia’s Body: Toward a Physiology of Earth.