In the wet heat of an early morning south-east Texas June, I made my way out to the pasture to check on her. My father had told me to make sure she was okay after I finished the milking. He left early for another job - no one was actually able to make a living off a farm in Texas.

"She looks like she might have some trouble," my father had said. I had just turned 14 and felt up to the challenge.

The clean-up was completed; now only this task was left before breakfast. It was that time of the day, in that season in Texas just before the dew had completely lifted from the grass, leaving its trace, soaking in my jeans.

She was down when I arrived. She did not try to get up as I approached her the way most do when giving birth. She looked to me as if she knew something. I had seen that look in a cow's eyes before. Cows are stupid except when death is near, in that brief moment before they die. It is as if they finally know something other than grass. This one was aware of herself, of her pain, of the life slipping away inside her.

"She should be showing her calf by now," I thought. "Where is the nose?" She was lying on her left side. I knelt beside her at her rear, along her back so as to avoid being kicked by her. Normally, a cow would get up and move away if she was strong enough. I touched her fleshy back gently at first, gradually applying pressure to let her know I was there. Still, she did not get up.

I slid my hand downward toward the birth canal and placed my fingers inside her. I wanted to see where the calf's nose was, or to find a hoof that I could get a hold on. I had done this a few times before with my father's assistance. I slipped my hand gently - but with some force, as the pressure is immense - along the calf's nose upward toward its head.

I was frightened by what I felt. This was no calf's head. It was a monster. The head bulged outward and upward, too high. It was too big to pass through the birth canal.

As anxiety gripped my chest, I felt the burn of sweat drip into my eyes. I slid my fingers under the calf's chin to see if the front legs were there - they must emerge at roughly the same time as the snout, if the calf is to part the canal easily.

I worked moving the calf's snout upward and downward, then to the left and to the right hoping to stretch the canal enough to reach further down to catch hold of a hoof. If the cow had any chance of living, I would have to get the calf out as soon as I could. The life inside her was already slipping away.

Sweat, humidity, blood and membranes covered my clothing and body. Finally, the canal gave just enough, the head slipped past the vaginal introitus, and the dead calf spilled out in water mixed with blood.

I was tired, weak, hot, and angry. I was outraged that death seemed the natural state of things.

The modern frame

The ancients believed that the world was itself alive. For them, there was no hard and fast distinction between living and nonliving matter. One way of reading the history of the rise of science is that the world came to be understood as a mechanism.

For us moderns, life is really just nonliving matter moving in very complicated ways. For us, motion is primarily about forces carried within matter, or energy added by another force: light energy. There is then a kind of violence at work on this understanding of the life. One non-living body forces another body to move, either by direct contact or by electrical, magnetic, gravitational force, or the electromagnetic force of the sun. There is a kind of violence in the powers at work in matter.

Organic life is understood as inorganic matter, moving in complicated relationship with other bits of inorganic matter. Dead matter acts forcefully upon dead matter when another force, usually light energy, is added to the mix. Put in a slightly more philosophical language of ancient philosophy's four causes: formal and final causes become deflated as there is not an originating purpose in mechanism, leaving material and efficient causes as the object of scientific inquiry - dead matter in motion.

While evolutionary theory has reintroduced formal and final causes back into the science of life - though in a very different mode - the violent aspect of the efficient cause remains in this modern metaphysics of life. Under this new metaphysics of life, the death of the competitor creates the condition by which the survivors flourish in the world.

Within our modern understanding, nonliving matter is forced into being alive, animated by the death of competitors; the successful flourish for a time, only to die another day.

An older frame

It has not always been so. The world has not always been dead - beginning in nonliving matter, animated by dying matter, bombarded by light energy, ending in dead matter.

Hans Jonas pointed out that, for the ancients, life was the given state of nature. Life was a matter so obvious, it hardly needed to be stated. Life was a property inherent in matter. Earth, wind and water were so much more than "mere matter." The world was full of anima, full of soul. The world was full of life.

If we moderns but narrow the scope of our vision and look only at what appears before us, we see a world moving toward life. Just a walk through the forest can be very revealing. Earth and rock are coated in algae; new growth springs from every crevice. Or on a walk along a city street, one might see a seedling poking through cement and pavement, resisting the death dispensing activity of humans. Even in the furthest depths of our oceans - the harshest of environs - where no light travels, we find organisms, strange and beautiful, and alive.

Life seems to be the rule of nature, its norm.

With the dawning of the early-modern period, we broadened the scope to the universe. It seemed that at the heart of the universe there was only nonliving matter, not even matter at all, but energy moving toward entropy, toward death. And yet even in the vastness of the dead universe, we still hope to find life. Life is what we most want to find on other planets.

Jonas points out that the great surprise to ancient humans was not that there is life in the midst of a dead universe, but that death was even possible. Death was the great riddle in the midst of a living and animated world. Death called for explanation, not life. Jonas notes, "As early man's practice is embodied in his tools, so his thought is embodied in his tombs which acknowledge and negate death at the same time."

Framing our actions

For the ancients, then, the general rule, the theoretical universal, was life. Death was a particular fact in need of reconciliation with the truth of life in the world. For us the general rule, and the theoretical universal is that all is dead, and life is the particular fact in need of reconciliation with the theoretical stance.

I wonder to what extent these different frames shape how we live today. Surely if we think the rule is death, that the world is dead, it affects the way we behave toward it.

Since the vast majority of the universe is dead, does preventing life from coming into being seem less problematic? Since there was a time when we did not exist, and since there will be a time when we will not be, does that change the way we think of death dispensing activity? Does it not seem easier to make the inevitable a reality now, rather than to witness the miracle that we are alive, even in our dying?

Since the world is dead, is it not also a vast energy sump, a source of power to our whims? Is the world not just a dead body awaiting us to pick up any valuables left behind? Is this not the justification for our devastating action toward our planet for our own purposes?

How we behave toward the world depends on the kind of thing that we think the world is. If the world is nonliving, there is little outrage at death. It becomes our law, our rule, our norm.

Grace and life

However, in my experience, the world exceeds our frames. Dying is such hard business; but it might be that dying is more than just work against entropy. It might be that dying is hard because death works against the norm of life. That we do not see it in this way might have something to do with the way that we have framed it. That we cannot imagine the world in any other way might only be the illusions that we have placed ourselves under.

Thinking of life as the norm seems so foreign - indeed, it strikes us as a kind of magical and mythical form of thought, a kind of religious and mysterious approach to life, born in premodern confusion. And yet, certainly in biological thought, a new mode of thinking has been born. Life is beginning to be seen as an emergent property of matter. Perhaps there is more to the world than just dead matter; perhaps the world cannot fit into our concepts without exceeding them. Perhaps ancient panvitalism, panpyschism and panentheism are not so far from the truth. Perhaps life is the norm.

Soaked in my own sweat, and with water mixed with blood, I was overwhelmed with exhaustion and sadness in assisting in the birth of that dead calf. I pulled the dead calf to its mother's head. Like all cows, she licked the afterbirth from her calf, the living instinct being so very strong.

I knelt down beside her, stroking her head and she bellowed as if outraged at her offspring's death, and at her own dying. I picked up her heavy head and laid it in my lap. I stroked her head as she died. I wailed with righteous anger against death that day. I would not let it have the final word, and I refuse to believe that death has the first word of the world.

After some thirty years, it seems to me that the excess that is the life of the world overwhelms our capacity to frame it with death, and that grace already saturates all that there is.

Jeffrey Bishop is the author of The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying. He directs the Albert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics at Saint Louis University and holds the Tenet Endowed Chair in Health Care Ethics.