Death becomes apparent very quickly. Almost at once the blood begins to drain from the capillaries near the surface, leading to the ghostly pallor associated with death. “A man’s corpse looks as though his essence has left him, and it has. He is flat and toneless, no longer inflated by the vital spirit the Greeks called pneuma,” wrote Sherwin Nuland in How We Die. Even to someone unused to dead bodies, death is usually instantly recognizable.
