For more than half the history of life on Earth organisms seem to have done perfectly well without it. Cs, Gs, and Ts, manuals written out in the alphabet of life in competition with other similar manuals published by other firms. The sockeye salmon exhaust themselves swimming up the mighty Columbia River to spawn, heroically hurdling cataracts, in a single-minded effort that works to propagate their DNA sequences into future generation. The moment their work is done, they fall to pieces. They've served their purpose.
Nature is unsentimental.
Death is built in.