With a title like this, I could easily write a spoof about how clerks at the Department of Motor Vehicles are brain dead, or even about the brain death we suffer by standing in DMV lines. No, this is about a more serious topic having to do with the most important question: To be or not to be? Or, when is a person really dead?

Just as there was uncertainty about when human life begins, before ultrasound imaging and fuller knowledge of DNA settled the matter (at least scientifically if not politically), so is there an ongoing debate over when a person is dead, in both the medical and legal senses.

Morally speaking, the Catholic Church defines death as the separation of the soul from the body, an occurrence that cannot always be observed or measured. Yet the Church has generally accepted the idea that brain death—that is, the complete, irreversible cessation of all brain function, including the brainstem—is true death.

John Paul II, who urged Catholics to be generous in becoming organ donors, stipulated that there must be moral certainty that the determination of brain death in an individual case truly indicates an irreversible state. Yet some Catholic scholars now are questioning the indications used to determine brain death, especially after an HHS study found some medical facilities were taking organs when patients still showed brain activity or other signs of life.

The risks of being an organ donor

These thoughts arose recently when I accompanied my son to our local DMV, where the line began on the sunny sidewalk and advanced slowly into the mildly air-conditioned office. Going through the metal detectors, presenting our documents for initial inspection, sitting for an hour on hard-plastic chairs with some 100 others, and watching the numbers run off on the wait-time ticker, I amused myself by viewing the public service messages on the video screens. I learned how to contest a moving violation summons (relevant, since I had recently received a summons for moving at 37 miles per hour in a 25 mph school zone), how to register my vehicle and order specialty plates, and that drivers over age 70 must renew their licenses in person (I turn 69 this summer).

Then the DMV videos presented a series of slides on how to sign up as an organ donor. As the messages discounted a series of widely held beliefs, the matter-of-fact tone of the messages changed to outright persuasion:

MYTH 1: Medical professionals will not seek to save your life if you are an organ donor. MYTH 2: If you are in a coma, medical professionals will take your organs before you are dead. The message explained: Doctors will not take your organs until the stage of “brain death or real death.”

WHAT?! I poked my son and told him to read the last line.

“They are admitting that brain death is not REAL DEATH!” I observed, a bit loudly, drawing attention.

I waited for the organ donor messages to come back in the video loop and read them aloud, no doubt embarrassing my son, who was poking me in the ribs. Undeterred, I read, “brain death or REAL DEATH!” An Ivy League–looking father, with his daughter who was wearing a George Washington University T-shirt, looked my way. I knew he wanted to say something, maybe call me an extremist prolifer, or perhaps agree with me from his own research—I couldn’t tell which. But their number was called and off they went to the waiting window.

Speaking now in whispers to my son, I said, “Brain death was a phony term with questionable medical measurements that was developed by some Harvard scientists to justify heart transplants in the 1960s, because you need a healthy, beating heart for transplantation.”

I had learned that background from reading articles by Malcolm Muggeridge in Human Life Review!

“John Paul II accepted brain death as real death,” I continued, “but apparently this DMV does not. They distinguish brain death from real death, although they are telling us that even if you are not really dead, and just merely brain dead, your organs can still be legally taken . . . and then you will be really dead.”

My son nodded.

Our number flashed on the screen and we rushed to the window with documents in hand, only to receive the disappointingly common DMV experience.

The address on my son’s apartment lease did not perfectly match the address on the electric bill, the clerk noted.

“That’s a typo on the electric bill, but he gets the bill anyway,” I pointed out.

“Sorry,” she said, with a smile. “Come back when your documents match.”

Guess what I was thinking.