Book Review: Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death by Bernd Heinrich

There is something captivating about death and dying. It is this final mystery we can’t prove. It is the atonement of our life and what has been left behind. To us, it means to be put in a casket and lowered on the ground to preserve or to rot or to be consumed by the flames and burned into ashes. But to animals, it is part of the cycle of nature. A beetle births its offspring inside a mouse’s corpse, a vulture consumes the carcass left behind, and decay brings forth life. That’s nature for you. Dead leaves are there for a reason, not only to remind us of the changing seasons and the fact that nothing lasts but also to give life to the little critters.

To us, death is not about changing seasons. We fear it. We use chemicals to keep our lawns green, we use antibiotics to mass-produce our cattle, and we let it all seep into nature that is barely coping by. We preserve our corpses to keep them as they are, but decay is inevitable, and it gets all of us in the end. That’s the point. We can only speculate why our universe is organized thus. What is the point of it all if, in the end, entropy erases all what was and all who we were? In a decade or two, most of us are barely remembered, and in thousands of years, the ruins of our cities are what is left of us.

And the animals. They seem to accept it. That there is an end, and so it goes. Or we could be fooling ourselves, unable to read what is spoken inside their minds. Nevertheless, Bernd Heinrich shows over and again that they make a life out of it rather than hide and build shrines for eternal youth. That’s the thing to be taken away from this book of essays about how animals deal with death and how our fear of it alters the course of nature and sometimes makes the vulture population collapse. I’m not more at ease with death and dying than I was before starting this book. Maybe I appreciate the offering death brings to our environment and its parts, but it is one thing to acknowledge it on an intellectual level than to accept your own mortality and of those you love. It is enormously hard, even how hard you think about our bodies providing for the soil to come.

Thank you for reading the review! Have a beautiful day ❤