Brain death as a moral definition and an act of love: the tale of Moon, Nehviel and Fate.

The vital status of people with a destroyed brain is one of the most discussed topics in medical literature. According to the current legal narrative, people whose brain is destroyed are dead. Nevertheless, a clear biological rationale to support with certainty such a narrative is still lacking. The purported rationale of the "the brain as the central integrator of the body" has proven to be biologically untenable. Persons with a destroyed brain can be maintained viable for long periods of time, showing clear signs of good biological integration. This fact stirs up a continuous seething of heated discussions among scholars, and generates uncertainty among lay people, loss of trust towards the medical community, and highly controversial cases in the media. To try to settle this unresolved situation, we propose a moral narrative, according to which people whose brain is destroyed should be considered as dead. Defining those people as biologically dead is impossible. Their clinical condition is neither life nor death; it is something in between, an artifice created by modern medicine. Yet, we can well state that the irreversible loss of all brain functions is a clinically and scientifically useful point of no return in the process of dying which can guide sound decisions. Through a personal reinterpretation of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, we would like to show that the choice to consider people with a destroyed brain as dead is a sound moral decision and an act of love.