The Death Chamber -How dead is Dead?

[Richard]

No: HPFGUIDX 81755

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Steve" <bboy_mn at y...> wrote:
<snip of much material not to the point I'm after here>
> So it's true dead is dead even in our every day mortal muggle world,
> but in that same world, people do return from the dead as I have
> described.

If you talk to doctors who deal with death, when they pronounce 
someone dead they mean something along the lines of "irreversibly non-
responsive, with acute, catastrophic and deepening or terminal 
collapse of essential bodily systems."  Sometimes they even refine it 
down to "irreversible brain damage leaving the body incapable of self 
regulation and the brain incapable of functioning above the medula 
oblongata."  (In other words, higher brain function completely and 
permanently gone and autonomic systems insufficient to sustain 
minimal bodily functions.)  But, the real problem is that "death" is 
still debateable in its definition.  For instance, cardiac surgery 
now routinely involves stopping the heart in a manner that the heart 
and brain are incapable of reversing, yet which can be medically 
restarted.  Surgeons don't see themselves as killing their patients 
when they do this.  Some hypothermia victims have survived and 
recovered from apparently complete cessation of both heart and brain 
function.  Still, when a brain turns to goo, it is definitely dead.

As for the portraits and ghosts, I've said elsewhere that these 
aren't really the people represented.  Even Nick says that he is more 
an image than the original Nick, and truly "neither here nor there."  
Even if you "return" as a ghost, you're still dead.  If there is a 
portrait of you somewhere, the portrait is really just a 
representation of you when you were alive, but not really you, and 
not capable of the things that define life, such as growing, 
developing, reproducing, etc.  As for James, Lily and others killed 
with the AK curse, the priori incantatum also produces an "echo" 
rather than the person.

Again, these echo are not really the people they appear to be.  They 
are just images of verying detail, and in the Wizarding World capable 
of some behavior consistent with the persons represented ... but the 
originals are still just as dead as if none of these things existed.  
They have passed "beyond the veil," at the very least as physical 
beings, and will not return.


Richard, who doesn't see a problem with saying that someone is dead, 
even if there is a ghost of that person still hanging around.