By PETER STARK

[…] For all scientists and statisticians now know of freezing and its physiology, no one can yet predict exactly how quickly and in whom hypothermia will strike—and whether it will kill when it does. The cold remains a mystery, more prone to fell men than women, more lethal to the thin and well muscled than to those with avoirdupois, and least forgiving to the arrogant and the unaware.

The process begins even before you leave the car, when you remove your gloves to squeeze a loose bail back into one of your ski bindings. The freezing metal bites your flesh. Your skin temperature drops.

Within a few seconds, the palms of your hands are a chilly, painful 60 degrees. Instinctively, the web of surface capillaries on your hands constrict, sending blood coursing away from your skin and deeper into your torso. Your body is allowing your fingers to chill in order to keep its vital organs warm.

You replace your gloves, noticing only that your fingers have numbed slightly. Then you kick boots into bindings and start up the road.

Were you a Norwegian fisherman or Inuit hunter, both of whom frequently work gloveless in the cold, your chilled hands would open their surface capillaries periodically to allow surges of warm blood to pass into them and maintain their flexibility. This phenomenon, known as the hunter’s response, can elevate a 35-degree skin temperature to 50 degrees within seven or eight minutes.

Other human adaptations to the cold are more mysterious. Tibetan Buddhist monks can raise the skin temperature of their hands and feet by 15 degrees through meditation. Australian aborigines, who once slept on the ground, unclothed, on near-freezing nights, would slip into a light hypothermic state, suppressing shivering until the rising sun rewarmed them.

You have no such defenses, having spent your days at a keyboard in a climate-controlled office. Only after about ten minutes of hard climbing, as your body temperature rises, does blood start seeping back into your fingers. Sweat trickles down your sternum and spine.

By now you’ve left the road and decided to shortcut up the forested mountainside to the road’s next switchback. Treading slowly through deep, soft snow as the full moon hefts over a spiny ridgetop, throwing silvery bands of moonlight and shadow, you think your friends were right: It’s a beautiful night for skiing—though you admit, feeling the minus-30 air bite at your face, it’s also cold.

After an hour, there’s still no sign of the switchback, and you’ve begun to worry. You pause to check the map. At this moment, your core temperature reaches its high: 100.8. Climbing in deep snow, you’ve generated nearly ten times as much body heat as you do when you are resting.

As you step around to orient map to forest, you hear a metallic pop. You look down. The loose bail has disappeared from your binding. You lift your foot and your ski falls from your boot.

You twist on your flashlight, and its cold-weakened batteries throw a yellowish circle in the snow. It’s right around here somewhere, you think, as you sift the snow through gloved fingers. Focused so intently on finding the bail, you hardly notice the frigid air pressing against your tired body and sweat-soaked clothes.

The exertion that warmed you on the way uphill now works against you: Your exercise-dilated capillaries carry the excess heat of your core to your skin, and your wet clothing dispels it rapidly into the night. The lack of insulating fat over your muscles allows the cold to creep that much closer to your warm blood.

Your temperature begins to plummet. Within 17 minutes it reaches the normal 98.6. Then it slips below.

At 97 degrees, hunched over in your slow search, the muscles along your neck and shoulders tighten in what’s known as pre-shivering muscle tone. Sensors have signaled the temperature control center in your hypothalamus, which in turn has ordered the constriction of the entire web of surface capillaries. Your hands and feet begin to ache with cold. Ignoring the pain, you dig carefully through the snow; another ten minutes pass. Without the bail you know you’re in deep trouble.

Finally, nearly 45 minutes later, you find the bail. You even manage to pop it back into its socket and clamp your boot into the binding. But the clammy chill that started around your skin has now wrapped deep into your body’s core.

At 95, you’ve entered the zone of mild hypothermia. You’re now trembling violently as your body attains its maximum shivering response, an involuntary condition in which your muscles contract rapidly to generate additional body heat.

It was a mistake, you realize, to come out on a night this cold. You should turn back. Fishing into the front pocket of your shell parka, you fumble out the map. You consulted it to get here; it should be able to guide you back to the warm car. It doesn’t occur to you in your increasingly clouded and panicky mental state that you could simply follow your tracks down the way you came.

And after this long stop, the skiing itself has become more difficult. By the time you push off downhill, your muscles have cooled and tightened so dramatically that they no longer contract easily, and once contracted, they won’t relax. You’re locked into an ungainly, spread-armed, weak-kneed snowplow.

Still, you manage to maneuver between stands of fir, swishing down through silvery light and pools of shadow. You’re too cold to think of the beautiful night or of the friends you had meant to see. You think only of the warm Jeep that waits for you somewhere at the bottom of the hill. Its gleaming shell is centered in your mind’s eye as you come over the crest of a small knoll. You hear the sudden whistle of wind in your ears as you gain speed. Then, before your mind can quite process what the sight means, you notice a lump in the snow ahead.

Recognizing, slowly, the danger that you are in, you try to jam your skis to a stop. But in your panic, your balance and judgment are poor. Moments later, your ski tips plow into the buried log and you sail headfirst through the air and bellyflop into the snow.

You lie still. There’s a dead silence in the forest, broken by the pumping of blood in your ears. Your ankle is throbbing with pain and you’ve hit your head. You’ve also lost your hat and a glove. Scratchy snow is packed down your shirt. Meltwater trickles down your neck and spine, joined soon by a thin line of blood from a small cut on your head.

This situation, you realize with an immediate sense of panic, is serious. Scrambling to rise, you collapse in pain, your ankle crumpling beneath you.

As you sink back into the snow, shaken, your heat begins to drain away at an alarming rate, your head alone accounting for 50 percent of the loss. The pain of the cold soon pierces your ears so sharply that you root about in the snow until you find your hat and mash it back onto your head.

But even that little activity has been exhausting. You know you should find your glove as well, and yet you’re becoming too weary to feel any urgency. You decide to have a short rest before going on.

An hour passes. at one point, a stray thought says you should start being scared, but fear is a concept that floats somewhere beyond your immediate reach, like that numb hand lying naked in the snow. You’ve slid into the temperature range at which cold renders the enzymes in your brain less efficient. With every one-degree drop in body temperature below 95, your cerebral metabolic rate falls off by 3 to 5 percent. When your core temperature reaches 93, amnesia nibbles at your consciousness. You check your watch: 12:58. Maybe someone will come looking for you soon. Moments later, you check again. You can’t keep the numbers in your head. You’ll remember little of what happens next.

Your head drops back. The snow crunches softly in your ear. In the minus-35-degree air, your core temperature falls about one degree every 30 to 40 minutes, your body heat leaching out into the soft, enveloping snow. Apathy at 91 degrees. Stupor at 90.

You’ve now crossed the boundary into profound hypothermia. By the time your core temperature has fallen to 88 degrees, your body has abandoned the urge to warm itself by shivering. Your blood is thickening like crankcase oil in a cold engine. Your oxygen consumption, a measure of your metabolic rate, has fallen by more than a quarter. Your kidneys, however, work overtime to process the fluid overload that occurred when the blood vessels in your extremities constricted and squeezed fluids toward your center. You feel a powerful urge to urinate, the only thing you feel at all.

By 87 degrees you’ve lost the ability to recognize a familiar face, should one suddenly appear from the woods.

At 86 degrees, your heart, its electrical impulses hampered by chilled nerve tissues, becomes arrhythmic. It now pumps less than two-thirds the normal amount of blood. The lack of oxygen and the slowing metabolism of your brain, meanwhile, begin to trigger visual and auditory hallucinations.

You hear jingle bells. Lifting your face from your snow pillow, you realize with a surge of gladness that they’re not sleigh bells; they’re welcoming bells hanging from the door of your friends’ cabin. You knew it had to be close by. The jingling is the sound of the cabin door opening, just through the fir trees.

Attempting to stand, you collapse in a tangle of skis and poles. That’s OK. You can crawl. It’s so close.

Hours later, or maybe it’s minutes, you realize the cabin still sits beyond the grove of trees. You’ve crawled only a few feet. The light on your wristwatch pulses in the darkness: 5:20. Exhausted, you decide to rest your head for a moment.

When you lift it again, you’re inside, lying on the floor before the woodstove. The fire throws off a red glow. First it’s warm; then it’s hot; then it’s searing your flesh. Your clothing has caught fire.

At 85 degrees, those freezing to death, in a strange, anguished paroxysm, often rip off their clothes. This phenomenon, known as paradoxical undressing, is common enough that urban hypothermia victims are sometimes initially diagnosed as victims of sexual assault. Though researchers are uncertain of the cause, the most logical explanation is that shortly before loss of consciousness, the constricted blood vessels near the body’s surface suddenly dilate and produce a sensation of extreme heat against the skin.

All you know is that you’re burning. You claw off your shell and pile sweater and fling them away.

But then, in a final moment of clarity, you realize there’s no stove, no cabin, no friends. You’re lying alone in the bitter cold, naked from the waist up. You grasp your terrible misunderstanding, a whole series of misunderstandings, like a dream ratcheting into wrongness. You’ve shed your clothes, your car, your oil-heated house in town. Without this ingenious technology you’re simply a delicate, tropical organism whose range is restricted to a narrow sunlit band that girds the earth at the equator.

And you’ve now ventured way beyond it.

There’s an adage about hypothermia: “You aren’t dead until you’re warm and dead.”

At about 6:00 the next morning, his friends, having discovered the stalled Jeep, find him, still huddled inches from the buried log, his gloveless hand shoved into his armpit. The flesh of his limbs is waxy and stiff as old putty, his pulse nonexistent, his pupils unresponsive to light. Dead.

But those who understand cold know that even as it deadens, it offers perverse salvation. Heat is a presence: the rapid vibrating of molecules. Cold is an absence: the damping of the vibrations. At absolute zero, minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit, molecular motion ceases altogether. It is this slowing that converts gases to liquids, liquids to solids, and renders solids harder. It slows bacterial growth and chemical reactions. In the human body, cold shuts down metabolism. The lungs take in less oxygen, the heart pumps less blood. Under normal temperatures, this would produce brain damage. But the chilled brain, having slowed its own metabolism, needs far less oxygen-rich blood and can, under the right circumstances, survive intact.

Setting her ear to his chest, one of his rescuers listens intently. Seconds pass. Then, faintly, she hears a tiny sound—a single thump, so slight that it might be the sound of her own blood. She presses her ear harder to the cold flesh. Another faint thump, then another.

by MARIA BUSTILLOS  l  The Verge, July 11, 2012

In the world of social media, it can feel bizarre that potent evidence of grieving from one friend is followed so quickly by pictures of oven-fresh cookies from another.

– Paul Ford, Facebook and the Epiphanator

My father died almost twenty years ago, after an illness spanning decades. My parents had enjoyed a very affectionate, happy marriage; prepared though we had been for long years before the end came, my mom was utterly shocked and devastated when he died. A protracted gloom overwhelmed her naturally sunny demeanor. But one day, maybe a year or so after my father’s death, I had a phone call from her, and she was laughing. Laughing quite hard, really.

“What is it?” I said, laughing too, just contagiously.

“Oh — oh, your father was called to jury duty, and I sent the form back saying ‘deceased’…”

“Yeah?”

“And they wrote him back.”

“What?!”

“It says, ‘Your excuse has been accepted.’”

The machinery of human affairs churns blindly on and on, no matter what, in a manner absurd enough to send even deeply grieving people into gales of uproarious laughter (years later, the phrase, “your excuse,” etc., still has the power to reduce both my mom and me to helpless guffaws.) The system, the bureaucracy, the forms to fill out. The alarm clock rings, appointments to keep. The crazy futility of it all is a little bit sad, too, the way perhaps all truly hilarious things have to be.

That Kafkaesque sensation of tragicomic futility has now acquired a new and larger dimension of weirdness, because the seeming permanence of the Internet is so crisply, coldly digital, and therefore so entirely at odds with the messiness of real life. You might say that human beings are analog creatures with certain digital tendencies, and that the digital and analog parts of our nature are inevitably at war with one another.

Efforts are underway to identify the issues surrounding death online in order to make better policy. Thanatosensitivity is a term formally coined by researchers at the University of Toronto, in a paper presented at the 2009 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. It means, “a humanistically-grounded approach to human-computer interaction (HCI) research and design that recognizes and engages with the conceptual and practical issues surrounding death in the creation of interactive systems.” Sounds simultaneously dry and far-out, but authors Massimi and Charise have some solid ideas:

One compelling example […] is the recent suggestion by American and British ambulatory care units to program into one’s mobile phone a contact named “ICE” (“in case of emergency”) so that rescuers can easily identify and call an emergency contact when the phone’s owner is possibly dying. The need for this type of preparation crystallizes how difficult it has become to unravel the data stored in highly personalized devices.

Broad implementation of standards like these will certainly be miles ahead of the private efforts I’ve seen, such as the “electronic safe deposit boxes” on offer at assetlock.net (formerly the unfortunately-named and no-confidence-inspiring “youdeparted.com”), where you can store sensitive information to be released to designated parties in the event of your demise. Top-tier access costs $79.95 per year (or $239.95 for a “Lifetime Membership” [?!]) for “unlimited entries and up to 5GB storage.” Or you could invest in a piece of paper and print out a list for your executors! Just sayin’.

Meatspace, as it is sometimes called — the analog, temporary, fleshly arena of the world — is inextricably linked with, or more like suffused with, the passage of time. We’re accustomed to think of “real life” as taking place there, though for many of us, the online world and the real one have begun increasingly to blur into one another. For those who have been known to fall asleep holding a smartphone, really, which world is the “real” one?

Meatspace equals entropy. Impermanence. The fading of anger or passion is analogous to the fading of a photograph, the yellowing of old newspaper, as we’ve seen in a thousand movies. Through time we mend, heal, alter our convictions, learn; what burned cools, and what froze melts; both grief and delight are fated to end, sometimes abruptly, yes, but more often gradually, even imperceptibly. Entropy is our enemy, but also our friend; it defines that part of us that is changing, coming into bloom and then, because we are mortal, fading.

The contrast between the magical perfection of recordings of the past, and that past’s ultimate irretrievability, is in itself nothing very new. It’s something like seeing Greta Garbo or James Stewart in old films, so vividly real, their particularities so peculiarly manifest; they breathe, talk, move, their gleaming eyes and moist lips parting to speak or laugh in an inimitably beautiful way. To rage, marvel or sigh. Though their clothes and manners might strike us as strangely old-fashioned, they might still be standing right beside us. But it’s a trick, and we know it; we know that in reality the remains of James Stewart (Wee Kirk o’ the Heather churchyard, Forest Lawn) and Greta Garbo (Skogskyrkogården, in southern Stockholm) are just that: dust, still, quiet, moldering for many years in the cold ground, and yet, something of them yet lives.

When someone dies nowadays, we are liable to return to find that person’s digital self — his blog, say, or his Flickr, tumblr or Facebook‐entirely unchanged. An online persona will date, but agelessly, without wrinkling or acquiring dust, and unless someone removes each separate element there it will stay, to remind us of that person’s favorite song, of all his minutest concerns, exactly as if he’d typed them in yesterday. Facebook doesn’t fade. It just stays cyanotically fresh and crisp forever.

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