Lazarus Sign

...and other horrifying stuff we get up to when dead.

(This morning the alarm went off and I said “Is that 7?” and A. said yes and that in her dream I’d just asked her if she was thinking about me. Something she doesn’t know is that I’ve been borderline “planning” on creating a character for a story who is a successful writer of books on a theme. Here is copy/pasted the note I made of his titles some couple or several years ago:

Are We Thinking About Each Other Enough?

Are You Thinking About Me Right Now?

Sandwich Emperor

What Am I Not Thinking About?

What Am I Not Thinking About?

If You Think I’m Thinking About You, You’re Right!

Below this list appear in unexplained isolation the names “Doctor Vehuvahoven” and “Doctor Vantattenhove.”)

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Asleep, we appear inert to the world, and we largely are, but it’s an imperfect inertness. Let us consider three degrees of inertness: 1. Asleep; 2. Comatose; 3. Dead. While there is some controversy about death and when to consider a person dead, brain death is an enduring gold standard. Deeper than a coma (which, there’s a spectrum) there’s no coming back from brain death. The body appears asleep, may even breathe and have a heartbeat thanks to artificial measures, but fails to respond to exterior stimuli (being choked, even, which is called testing for apnea).

It isn’t hard to imagine things carrying on for a while after we’ve become insensible. We train nightly in death, take sips of it throughout the day, return constantly to the world. We stretch, have our routines, vent our various nozzles, “rub the sleep from our eyes” etc., but it is not necessary except in extreme cases to relearn our basic functions, which pump within us almost flawlessly all our lives like the thrumming of an idling engine, continuously, even once we’ve cut the strings for the night. We aren’t wholly unautomated beings, thank god. We don’t typically have to remember to respire. In fact we are founded in systems that run on autopilot. Why do we blink with our eyes closed? Why didn’t you realize you were tensing your shoulders like that?

Brain dead, you don’t blink, your muscles relax. But residual electrical impulses entrained in the spinal column can touch off spooky behavior. I have just this minute seen footage of a freshly dead child exhibit “Lazarus sign” on his hospital bed. You are familiar with the configuration of the mummy’s arms in an X across the chest? Lazarus sign is when a dead body arranges its arms just so. In the video, which as of one minute ago per this writing can be viewed on the eponymous Wikipedia entry, the doctor turns the child’s head a little and first the right and then the left arm fractionally behind it float up and resettle across his unrising chest, knuckles caged loosely together, the whole operation sublimely gentle. About forty seconds of death confirmation ensue, then the doctor tips the child’s head forward, chin to sternum, and it happens again, as though the sorcerer decants motion into the body from the spinal column.