It struck me while watching my religious friend's smallest child whacking a zombie play-action toy and gleefully yelling: "Brain...I want to eat your brain!" while his parents were bundling their little darlings into the van for the regular Sunday church outing...it struck me that zombies are the answer to one of humankind's profoundest questions.  Is there life after death? Is death, as my friend always solemnly pronounces, merely a doorway to something else?

If so, I reflected almost banging my head on the sagging lintel of my porch door, then it's the most peculiar doorway imaginable; a door that lets absolutely everybody through...with the exception of zombies. Unless you fire a high-velocity bullet into the zombie's brain; but that is a pop culture affectation that doesn't alter the fundamental reality implied by the postulated existence of the zombie, that there is a mode of life? animation? that arrests the normal progression of an originally living entity, or biological organism, at some point in its path from new-born babe (could there be zombie fetuses, or zygotes?) to senescent invalid teetering at the edge of death's door (there's that damn door again.)  Given the absence of some violent external action applied to the zombie, like being hit by a cannon ball, burning up in an oil well fire, etc., our friend the zombie will continue perambulating ad infinitum...and would thus be an important piece of evidence supporting the idea that death is in fact a doorway. Why you ask? Because the zombie's failure to physiologically evolve and age, gradually passing through life's stages, and more importantly its failure to die as a result of not being able to physiologically change or progress in the first place means that aha! we have found that singular occurrence in the history of life where a being (zombies are beings after all) has not managed to pass through that vaunted doorway of death and into another realm.

It is after all the presence of a failure to successfully progress from one major stage of regular life to another...for the zygote to undergo gastrulation, the fetus to pass through many developmental stages, the full-term baby to be born, the infant to thrive, the child to grow, or pass through puberty, and the adult to age without cancer, massive infections, organ failures, etc. ... that marks the organism's descent into death, or alternatively, the passage through death's doorway. But death is ubiquitous and supposedly 100% guaranteed...until the advent of the zombie.  If death were really a door to something else then it should function as all the other passages in life from one stage to the next.  All those other passages are marked by a certain failure rate...a measurable statistical frequency in a population for X number of individuals not to make it through any given stage...and if death is just another such doorway then there should be a rate of failure on the part of some individuals (our zombie friends) to also  make it through to the next stage. A doorway cannot be a doorway if everybody makes it through...a doorway after all is defined not just by those it accommodates but also by those it excludes ( as a literal doorway exludes those too tall, too corpulent, etc.; as a metaphorical doorway excludes passage to the next stage of life those with defective genes, or exposed to virulent infections, toxins, etc.) It is precisely because zombies get turned away from death's door that makes death a door. Proof by use of the absence of the  complementary quality (impassage) that is opposite to the nature of a door to cast doubt on the existence of the ur-quality (passage). Take that vampires! I thought...you Nosferatu couldn't have provided thatfigure-background, point/counter-point (door/door frame and surrounding wall) tension necessary to the deconstruction of life's greatest mystery.

Death of course is the most special door or portal there is because it occurs at every stage where there is failure by an organism to pass from one stage to another. All other passages, all the stages from fertilization and feotal development to birth and puberty, etc., are unique in the organism's career; they do not recur at different points in the developmental trajectory. Death on the other hand is the only doorway that is both final and ubiquitous...occurring as the end stage at every place where the normal physiological changes fail in some dramatic way to take place. Which should have given the kiss of death to this idea that death is a portal/doorway/transition in the first place. But now we can see how our faithful zombie friends have stumbled and shuffled to the rescue of this old human metaphor for the grim reaper since zombies, everything else being equal, don't make it through the portal/transition/door. They restore the credibility of the metaphor and should be considered a godsend by the believers to their cause.

I couldn't wait to try my theory on my believing friends and see if I could use the little tyke's zombie doll as a teaching aid; but they were busy and instead I only got a chance to talk to my lugubrious, darkly-minded English-lit prof friend who's a great Heidegger buff. He came to my place that evening in his hearse-like conveyance. After quickly topping off our energy drinks we skirted under my back door overhang, my friend having to stoop his skeletal frame to get his dome like skull through unscathed. In that dome there nestled  many profound truths that could hone and polish my theory I reflected.

We sat in my ratty lawn chairs. The first insects of spring were buzzing in the unkempt hedges and bushes and no doubt killing each other and voraciously sucking out the juicy bits inside their exoskeletons. A kaleidoscope of life/death/life danced around us. As I recounted my hypothesis my friend's brow beetled and I saw him growing visibly more agitated.

"Heidegger saw, reasoned, that death is an absolutely unique experience in the life of every human being. In fact, using the word 'experience' or 'event' is grossly misleading. Death is not JUST an event or experience. And you can't have anyone else die for you. There can always be a someone else, theoretically, to do everything for you. Do your thinking, even chewing your food, or digesting it for you, etc.  Technology can always, in principle, be discovered that will allow AN OTHER to substitute for all your functions...except  DYING! Your death you will always have to do yourself. Which makes death ontologically (I thought he said gynecologically for a second, but I knew he wasn't a smoothie with women) DIFFERENT. In an absolutely unique category." My companion was red in the face. I had transgressed one of his sacred postulates. There was more buzzing around us.  Our empty energy drink cans lay at our feet. The sun was setting...there was a feeling of entropy in the backyard, in the neighbourhood, in the city.

"Our culture's love/hate relationship to death has made the zombie such a poweful pop-culture trope" (I thought he said tripe, but I knew he did not like to eat meat...like Hitler.) "The zombie both reaffirms and negates the concept of death. It's an expression of our attraction/repulsion to the ultimate question." He got up wearily. "Well, go find your zombies then. Make a mockery of one of life's profoundest mysteries." He left me in my chair (for a moment I thought it might be an electric chair.) So death was supposed to be so profound...but if it was so profound how come it was so easily accomplished, like falling off a log for those who were lucky and did not linger and fight for one more breath. How come the least reflective, the dullest, the uneducated, accomplished death as easily as the genius, the artist, etc. Maybe death was the simplest event imaginable...a return to the inorganic, the base state, as Freud had put it. Inexpressibly profound, or dull as dust, common as dirt?  Black-white, yin-yang? If our idea of death could reasonably occupy either extreme end of the spectrum from trite banality to ineffable profundity we were all in trouble, trying to grasp death intellectually. What this country needs is a cadre of top thanatologists I mused.

I heard screeching sounds coming from inside my dilapidated house. The bluish light of the TV, my beacon, was flashing through the window. My room mate had come home and was probably watching 'Night of the Living...Doorways.'