The lizard story

My mother told me this story when I was older, so this is as she remembers it. One day she saw me playing with something on our back patio. I was probably 5 or 6 years old. As she got closer, she realized I had a lizard. It was dead, but I was playing with it as though it were alive. My mother tried to tell me it was dead, but apparently I argued with her, and tried to show her how it was still alive by making it move.

This story has always made me question what death actually is. It’s not as simple as the ceasing of movement, growth or change. Indeed, the lizard itself was not alive, but as it decomposed, it was changing just as much as a growing tree or a living animal, and it certainly was a host for other organisms that are very alive in that process. It sort of raises that question of whether or not death is really an end, or just a stop in the road.

In a culture that seems fairly ego-centric, it can be easy for us to think that it is our end in this physical world, but I wonder if that method of thinking is something that only adds the the fear of it for most people. The main thing that disappears in death is our consciousness, or so we think, and for most that is an awful fate. I wonder if there is not another way to conceptualize with what we know happens, i.e. without religious explanations of the afterlife. Perhaps there is a way to suggest that it is not a stopping of things, but a kind of changing over, like moving to another state (pun intended?). Just some thoughts. Comments?