Schrödinger’s cat is thought experiment on an interpretation of quantum physics. The interpretation is that in quantum physics, something can exist simultaneously in two different states.
In Schrödinger’s cat, a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor detects radioactivity, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison, which kills the cat.
Using the previous interpretation it implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead, because you haven’t observed it. So, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat is either alive or dead, not both alive and dead.
My son understood this and recently told me something, that is like this cat that is both dead and alive.
His answer was a ghost. A ghost is someone that died, so it’s dead. But it’s “alive” because it’s being a ghost. It’s both dead and alive both at the same time.
After thinking more about it, any organism, alive or dead, is in a sense alive. When animal “dies” it’s body is full of life as it composed. Even when only the bones are left, what makes up the inside of the bone lives on for some time. Of course, most people wouldn’t think of bones being alive.
If you look at the world around you with this abundance of live around you, it would harder for thinks like death and the environment to affect you. It all depends on how you frame things.