What John swallows is an immense loss; what the children swallow is sweet pastry. Children are often said to be innocent, but what are we to make of their laughter in the face of death? This disturbing scene makes us wonder whether the pain of death and the grief of loss are merely things we learn. The question is understandable: the way Linda's death is described and the way the children respond to it are radically different.
Yet the pain of death is not simply something learned. People may be conditioned not to feel it, but John's overwhelming grief at Linda's death, despite having lived his whole life on the Savage Reservation, suggests that mourning someone we love is profoundly natural. John loves Linda as his mother and therefore cannot help crying at her death. This, in turn, suggests that the world of Brave New World has fundamentally removed “love.” Because the pain of facing death presupposes love for the person who has died, perhaps that pain is itself one of the things that define a human life.
I hope, then, that we can move beyond defining death merely as “the cessation of breathing” or “the loss of a loved one” and recognize our grief as evidence that we are human. Of course, the death of someone beloved can feel like having one's insides torn apart. Yet a life that knows nothing of death has, in a sense, already lost its vitality. Death hurts, and parting is painful. But pain is itself a manifestation of human existence and proof of love. The anguish we feel when confronting death cannot simply be reduced to something learned.