Frayed

Why is it that the bodies natural response to death is to cling to life?

Today I saw two different women gulping for life. One had entered Cheyene-Strokes or gasp-breathing with periods of about a minute with no breathing. The only way I could tell she was alive was that I could see her heart beat in her chest. Her son sat beside her. He no doubt prayed that his mother wasn't going to leave this world but at the same time prayed that the inevitable would come quickly so her pain would be no more.

She couldn't get down the medicine, she was in an un-responsive state, trapped in her body that didn't know how to give up. For days she'd been gasping for life, or bodily life at least. She's unresponsive to sound and touch. Slowly though she has gone through the expected stages of death so far, whatever those are.

Can you really go through expected parts of death? Isn't death not being able to live and taste the freedom life has to offer? If she has been unresponsive for a while isn't her soul dead and her body the memory of that soul?

The other sat curled in bed. Moans and hushed "yeses" were all that could spring from her being. She could respond, but only in the broadest sense of the word; her face was furrowed and left no question of how she was feeling. I looked at her and wondered what she had lived and done in this life. Was she a young girl wrapped in the change of the 60's or did she live for the taste of adventure... Her soul was there but only by a fatigued thread.

Why do their bodies not know how to give up when pain is all-consuming and the soul is no more?