The thing in my shower is dying. It has become inflexible and brittle in parts that were soft, and squishy and malleable in parts that were hard. Its skin is loose and pulling away from its body. There is a thick sweetness to the smell of my shower; the ficus has begun to decay.

For want of a pot ten days ago, when I dragged a frozen ornamental house tree from the creek behind my apartment, I had thoughts of healing and alleviation of suffering running through my head. I placed it in my shower and ten days later my thoughts are of death; the slow and arbitrary death of a tree.

The distinction between life and death is difficult enough in people. Is a life before birth a life at all? Is a heartbeat a life, or is life a brainwave? Is life something that we must attain, and can not fully achieve without some realization brought on by the Lord God, or some good punk rock, or loving and caring the way that people must? What is life without a heartbeat? Without a soul? Without a brain? Without God? Without steak dinners? Without punk rock? Without dancing? Without nature?

But a plant; is there a specific time when we could pronounce the death of a plant? "Ficus benjamina: time of death: 8:53 pm." Is it the last chemical reaction? Of course not, what is decay if not chemical reactions. Then might it be, as it often is, something to do with entropy? Is the moment when the plant ceases to become more ordered and begins to become more disordered the time of death? That might be, except that any plant that loses its leaves will, thermodynamically, become more disordered until the day it can begin to gather the energy of the sun once again.

Many people will tell you that the life (and death) of a plant is purely a physiological one: death is the moment when all physiological processes of the plant stop. My problem with that is, first, that moment may be weeks or months, or even years, after we would consider the plant quite dead. Indeed, if this is our definition, every stalk of celery we chomp marks the end of its life, and every potato I have ever eaten was cooked alive. I'm not sure how you feel about that, but I don't like it very much. Second, the death of a person is no longer considered to be the time at which physiological processes stop. I'm not sure if we shouldn't give plants the same consideration.

Possibly plant death is the same death as I sometimes assume of people and other animals. The true time of death is the time at which the organism no longer desires to live. And while this allows for rebirth, it certainly satisfies my will to be slightly quantifiable, without being strictly rational.

Many people don't believe plants have desires, but when I see my girlfriend's daffodil reaching towards the single slit of light falling from between the drapes, I can't imagine where they got that idea.

"It's a physiological process, just chemicals affecting chemicals," one might say.

"So is your sex life," I might respond.

But is it the loss of a desire to live that marks the time of death? It would be nice and clean I suppose, but that answer is too circular, simply redefining death so that my conscience (and my intellect) can rest easier.

Anne Dillard just told me, in a chapter from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, that she once discovered a tulip tree limb growing new leaves a month after it washed up near her cabin.

"It was as if the woodpile in my garage were suddenly to burst greenly into leaf," she marvels.

Is Annie Dillard's woodpile dead just because it is not sprouting new growth? Shall I offer a ridiculous personification and indicate that the pops and whistles of moisture escaping a burning log are in fact the pained screams of an organism burning alive? I don't think I will. But I will tell you that my grandfather once almost died from burning a live tree. Ever had poison ivy? Imagine it in your mouth, nose and lungs. It is undeniable that that poison sumac tree died that day, and no matter what you think, it was vying for 'an eye for an eye.'

When I turn my head and look at the thing in my shower I see death, but I can't deny that I see life too. I see the drooping and wilting, but I also see the glossy green of the few still soft leaves, I see the roots branching from the trunk; organically fluid but physically immobile, and the depth and richness of the soil they cling to. It is still not finished dying and there will probably be functioning cells with active enzymes far into next month.

This slow conversion from life to death is giving teeth to ideas in my head. It is emphasizing the beauty, strength and absolute cheapness of life.

But the tree is my friend now, I hardly got to know it, and I'll venture it's been too busy with its own death to get to know me, but we froze our fingers in the same Montana stream, we showered together and slept in the same room for the past week and a half. And so, in that memetic way that humans hope they will live on, the tree lives on in my thoughts, my conclusions, my dreams, and my writing. That's more than any of the other hundred thousand, or so, trees I've seen in my life.

I doubt the tree minds terribly that it is dying. It has affected our world physically, genetically, and (amazingly) culturally and will continue that influence infinitely. Defining the death of the ficus only emphasizes a concept that does not necessarily apply to the world of the ficus. Death, I am starting to understand, is an animal's concept. In the world of the plant ripples of life and death constantly disturb and affect one another, flowing over, around and through everything...forever. Right now, it's just standing there. Reaching up over the frosted glass of my shower door looking down at me, passively continuing whatever processes it finds both possible and necessary. It is still doing whatever it can to stay alive, I can tell, but the tree understands better than any of us that its death is no end.