As living creatures, it seems obvious to us that death is what happens when a living creature or plant looses the ability to manage the daily or yearly cycles of feeding itself, coping with the cycles of the environment, and reproducing. It stops functioning and begin to–well, rot. Dust to dust. For living humans, the prospect can be terrifying.

So it has brought me some small consolation to learn that dying is not quite so monolithic. It is not purely and solely a terminator. Depending on the particular organism, dying consists of different processes that take place for different purposes.

If you ever come across John King’s book Reaching for the Sun: How Plants Work, be sure to take in the last chapter, “Getting Dead.” The chapter, without making a big hulabaloo about it, dislodges a common assujmption: that all living things die–plants and animals–and that they all go about it in roughly the same way: by running out of energy to fight off disease, recover from injury, or to renew themselves enough to avoid ceasing to function.

King sets us straight. “Some kinds of organisms appear to be immortal.” Bacteria divide in two. Pieces of sponges become new sponges. Such clones never “die.” Buffalo grass goes about thwarting death differently; it sprouts underground stems which may have been growing for the last 15,000 years. As for particular plants whose longevity has been studied, the oldest known specimen is a Bristlecone Pine named Methuselah in California, coming up on its 5000^th birthday. Methuselah in the Old Testament lived a mere 969 years, and his age was mythic. The tree of the same name has lived almost 5000 years and is real.

King’s point is that dying is not the looming Grim Reaper for plants that it is for us, and that once a plant has done its best to meet its primary directive of reproduction, dying varies greatly depending on the environment. Most plants fall into one of two categories biologically. Some live one or two years, bloom once, and die. The grains and many of the vegetables that we eat are the result. Such plants die through senescence, the genetic program for the decay of all or part (such as a tree’s “autumn leaves”) of the plant.

Other plants, including trees, shrubs, and perennial flowering plants, produce seed repeatedly. King explains that these multi-blooming plants are more like us humans than the blooming-once plants; they produce seed often and they don’t die by program. Instead, they get worn out, broken down, infected, failing to function. In other words, they get old, as we do. Death from attrition and vulnerability, not design.

Reading King’s chapter, I found the varieties in the dying of plants making death itslef seem less monolithic and irreducible. We think of life and death as a pair, like many other pairs that are also opposites, like tall and short or on and off. Death, the noun, is always “dying,” the verb, always a variable process for “getting dead.” Dying seems less conspiratorial to me now, and more part-euthanasia, part-scavenger, coming around for different purposes, with many different procedures, sooner or later or almost never.