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The baby was born.
The baby died.
That is how we English-speakers typically describe birth and death. We typically use the verb to be with the event of birth, but with death we almost always treat it as a verb.
Imagine if we flipped it:
The baby borned.
That’s just awkward, right? Partially that’s because we don’t have a verb for birth except to describe the action the mother takes (giving birth, or birthed). I don’t think it would make much sense to have a verb to describe the action the baby takes in the birthing process because the baby’s not really helping much—it’s kind of a passive passenger in the process. It is in the state of being born, we could say, which is why the verb to be makes sense.
I’m going to re-write the last two sentences but this time replacing “birth” with “death”:
I don’t think it makes much sense to have a verb to describe the action the baby takes in the death process because the baby’s not really helping much—it’s kind of a passive passenger in the process. It is in the state of dying, we could say, which is why the verb to be makes sense.
The baby was born.
The baby was died.
It’s awkward, but it shouldn’t be. The baby was in the state of the death process, and now it’s not.
The baby was died, and now the baby is dead.
It makes perfect grammatical sense to say “the baby is dead,” but we rarely put it that way because it seems terribly insensitive (or unpleasant?) compared to the verb form of saying “the baby died” or “the baby passed away” as if death is just some action the baby took on the way to other actions. Saying the baby is dead is dangerously and uncomfortably close to saying that the baby is in an end state in perpetuity.
I don’t want this to come off as grammatical nitpickiness. I’m not trying to be the language police here. I’m trying to understand what our language says about our relationship with death and deadness.
I don’t even particularly like the word “dead” because I think it’s misleading. It describes the absence of something as if it is not an absence. You are either alive or you’re not. “Unalive” would be fine, but giving it a whole separate word assigns it this mystery and scariness that it doesn’t deserve.
The baby was alive, and now it’s not.
If I have any neat conclusions from this (I don’t), it’s that, on the one hand, we want to describe death as a verb rather than a state presumably because it makes it seem a little bit more like we have some control over the situation rather than being helplessly plunged into a state of nothingness, and on the other hand we use a word like “dead” presumably because we want to assign deadness this special status apart from being unalive, where possibilities of actions and golden harps and whatnot persist beyond the death state/verb.
Personally, I’m more comfortable viewing it as being died and then being unalive.
