Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? And Other Questions About Dead Bodies

by Caitlin Doughty

Here’s the deal: It’s normal to be curious about death. But as people grow up, they internalize this idea that wondering about death is “morbid” or “weird.” They grow scared, and criticize other people’s interest in the topic to keep from having to confront death themselves. This is a problem. Most people in our culture are death illiterate, which makes them even more afraid.

Cats tend to consume human parts that are soft and exposed, like the face and neck, with special focus on the mouth and nose. Don’t rule out some chomps on the eyeballs—but Snickers is more likely to go for the softer, easier-access choices. Think: eyelids, lips, or tongue.

Snakes and lizards, for example, won’t eat you postmortem—unless you happen to own a full-grown Komodo dragon.

Your dog might not nip and tear at you because she’s starving, however. More likely Fifi Fluff will be attempting to wake you up. Something has happened to her human. She’s probably anxious and tense. In this situation, a dog might nibble the lips off her owner, just like you bite your nails or refresh your social media feed. We all have our anxiety busters!

did you know that “forensic veterinarian” is a job?—

Take the story of Rumpelstiltskin the chihuahua. His new owner posted a picture on a message board to show him off, and added some “bonus info” which was that “his [old] owner was dead for a considerable time before anyone noticed and he did eat his human to stay alive.” Rumpelstiltskin sounds like a bold little survivalist to me.

Many wild animals will also scavenge a corpse. Even some of the creatures we think of as the most skilled predators—lions, wolves, bears—will happily chow down if they encounter a dead animal in their territory.

Like the vast reaches of space, the fate of an astronaut corpse is uncharted territory. So far, no individual has died of natural causes in space. There have been eighteen astronaut deaths, but all were caused by a bona fide space disaster.

Soyuz 11 (three deaths, air vent ripped open during descent, and the only deaths to have technically happened in space),

The human body is used to operating under the weight of the Earth’s atmosphere, which cradles us at all times like a planet-sized anti-anxiety blanket. From the moment that pressure disappears, the gases in Lisa’s body will begin to expand and the liquids will turn into gas.

The lack of pressure will also cause nitrogen in her blood to form gas bubbles, causing her enormous pain, similar to what deep-water divers experience when they get the bends. When Dr. Lisa passes out in nine to eleven seconds, it will bring her merciful relief. She will continue floating and bloating, unaware of what is happening.

The pressure inside and outside her lungs will be so different that her lungs will be torn, ruptured, and bleeding. Without immediate help, Dr. Lisa will asphyxiate, and we’ll have a space corpse on our hands. Remember, this is what we think will happen. What little information we have comes from studies done in altitude chambers on unfortunate humans and even more unfortunate animals.

If Lisa’s crew had a Body Back system on board, here’s how it would work. Her body would be placed in an airtight bag made of GoreTex and thrust into the shuttle’s airlock. In the airlock, the temperature of space (–270°C) would freeze Lisa’s body. After about an hour, a robotic arm would bring the bag back inside the shuttle and vibrate for fifteen minutes, shattering frozen Lisa into chunks. The chunks would be dehydrated, leaving about fifty pounds of dried Lisa-powder in the Body Back. In theory, you could store Lisa in her powdered form for years before returning her to Earth and presenting her to her family just like you would a very heavy urn of cremated remains.

We like to imagine that Dr. Lisa will drift forever into the void (like George Clooney in that space movie I watched on the plane that one time), but more likely she would just follow the same orbit as the shuttle. This would, perversely, turn her into a form of space trash. The United Nations has regulations against littering in space. But I doubt anyone would apply those regulations to Dr. Lisa. Again, no one wants to call our noble Lisa trash!

Humans have struggled with this challenge before, with grim results. There are only a few climbable routes to climb to the top of Mount Everest’s 29,029-foot peak. If you die at that altitude (which almost three hundred people have done), it is dangerous for the living to attempt to bring your body down for burial or cremation. Today, dead bodies litter the climbing paths, and each year new climbers have to step over the puffy orange snowsuits and skeletonized faces of fellow climbers.

There’s the smallest of small possibilities that if Lisa’s body was sent out into space in a small, self-propelled craft like an escape pod, which then departed our solar system, traveled across the empty expanse to some exoplanet, survived its descent through whatever atmosphere might exist there, and cracked open on impact, Lisa’s microbes and bacterial spores could create life on a new planet. Good for Lisa! How do we know that alien Lisa wasn’t how life on Earth started, huh? Maybe the “primordial goo” from which Earth’s first living creatures emerged was just Lisa decomposition? Thanks, Dr. Lisa.

assuming your intentions are good, you’re looking at three major hurdles to clear before Dad’s brainpan can hold jellybeans on your coffee table: paperwork, legal control, and skeletonization.

is extremely difficult to get legal permission to display a relative’s skeleton. In theory, people get to decide what happens to their bodies after death. So, in theory your parents could create a written, signed, dated document explicitly stating that they want you to have their skull after they die. It would be similar to the document a person signs if they want to donate their body for scientific research.

Your average funeral home (really, any funeral home) is not set up to handle such a request, legally or practically. As a funeral director, I honestly have no idea what equipment a proper decapitation requires. The subsequent de-fleshing is far beyond me.

Dermestids are happy to wade into a gruesome, sticky mass of decaying flesh and delicately clean around even the tiniest of bones. But don’t worry about visiting a museum and accidentally falling into a vat of dermestids: despite being “flesh-eating” beetles, they aren’t interested in the living.)

Even if I could remove it, my funeral home could not legally hand over the decapitated head because of a topic that will come up multiple times in this book: abuse of corpse laws.

Abuse of corpse laws vary from place to place, and can sometimes seem a little arbitrary. For example, the law in Kentucky says you’re committing corpse abuse if you treat a dead body in a way that “would outrage ordinary family sensibilities.” But what is an “ordinary family?” Maybe in your “ordinary family” Dad was a scientist who always promised that when he died he wo...

Abuse of corpse laws exist for a reason, however. They protect people’s bodies from being mistreated (ahem, necrophilia). They also prevent a corpse from being snatched from the morgue and used for research...

Then there are cases like that of Julia Pastrana, the nineteenth-century Mexican woman with a condition called hypertrichosis that caused hair to grow all over her face and body. After she died, her embalmed and taxidermied corpse was taken on world tour by her awful husband.

Because of abuse of corpse laws, nobody’s dead body can be claimed as property. “Finders keepers” doesn’t apply here. But unfortunately, those same abuse of corpse laws prevent you from plopping Mom’s skull on your bookcase.

In the United States, there is no federal law that stops the ownership, buying, or selling of human remains. Well, except if the remains are Native American.

At least thirty-eight states have laws that should prevent the sale of human remains, but in reality the laws are vague, confusing, and enforced at random.

In one seven-month period in 2012–13, there were 454 human skulls listed on eBay, with an average opening bid of $648.63 (eBay subsequently banned the practice). Many skulls for private sale have questionable origins, sourced from the thriving bone trades in India and China.

These plucky bone sellers will tell you that it’s not human remains they sell, but human bones. Most state laws prohibit the sale of “remains,” but bones are totally legal and in keeping with the law, they will say. (Note: they are selling remains.)

Even if you exploit fuzzy legal arguments in your quest to get your hands on Dad’s skull, you’re still going to run into a big problem: there is currently no way in the United States to skeletonize human remains for private ownership.

skeletonization only happens when a body is donated to scientific research. Even this isn’t explicitly legal (authorities just tend to look the other way for museums and universities).

under no circumstances can you just skeletonize your dad and plop his head among the decorative gourds in...

In every state, funeral homes use something called a burial and transit permit, which tells the state what is going to be done with the dead person’s body. The options are usually burial, cremation, or donation to science.

In other words, Dad’s skull is supposed to be in the cemetery, and you’re committing a crime if you put it anywhere that’s not a cemetery, such as your garden.

Right after a person dies, their nervous system may still be firing, which can cause small spasms and twitches of the body. These spasms usually happen in the first few minutes after death, but sometimes they’re observed up to twelve hours later.

As for noises, when a recently dead body is moved, air can be pushed out of the windpipe, creating an eerie moan. Most nurses have experienced some of these things, so after a person has been declared dead, their response to a twitch, movement, or moan tends to be calmer, not “Dear God, it’s alive, it’s ALIIIVVE!”

After you die, your gut is party central, with billions of bacteria eating away at your intestines before moving on to your liver, your heart, your brain. But, with all that feasting comes waste. Those billions of bacteria produce gases like methane and ammonia, which bloat your stomach. That bloat means internal pressure, and if the pressure builds up enough, your body can purge, releasing vile-smelling liquid or air.

In Germany, in the late 1700s, there were physicians who believed that the only way to tell if someone was truly dead was to wait for the person to start rotting—bloating, smelling, the whole works. This belief led to the creation of the Leichenhaus, a “waiting mortuary,” where dead bodies would hang out in a fire-heated room (heat encourages decomposition) until no one could dispute that the dead person was 100 percent dead.

By the late 1800s, most of the waiting mortuaries had ceased operations. A Dr. von Steudel said that a million bodies had passed through the mortuaries, and not a single one had woken up. The answer here is yes, dead bodies can move by themselves, but the movements are small, and caused by science!

Egypt, for example, is known to have sandy soil, which can preserve bone very well. It’s also known for being very hot. That combination, dry and hot, could have dehydrated Growler and mummified him. In the scorching sand, his skin would have dried so quickly and thoroughly that not even bugs could chomp through it. Animal mummies are more common than you might think.

In 2016, a zoo in the Gaza Strip had to be abandoned due to war and the Israeli blockade. As the animals died one by one, they mummified in the dry, hot air. Pictures from inside the ghost zoo show eerily preserved lions, tigers, hyenas, monkeys, and crocodiles.

Hundreds of years ago, across Europe, people afraid of witchcraft would seal cats inside the walls of their homes, believing they would ward off supernatural threats. Builders and contractors have been finding random cats in European walls for years. A shop owner in England had a customer bring in a box c...

Notably, there was a dog named Stuckie found in Georgia in the 1980s. Stuckie was likely a hunting dog that ran up the inside of a hollow tree after a squirrel. As Stuckie climbed, the trunk became narrower and (you see where this is going) Stuckie got stuck. Loggers found his mummified body in the tree years later, teeth bared, eye sockets empty, toenails still intact. They could see all of Stuckie’s bones showing through his thin mummified skin and fur. Normally he would have decomposed quickly in the Georgia woods, but since no creatures could get access to eat him, and the tree bark and tannins sucked moisture from his skin, Stuckie became immortal.

The ideal gardening soil is loamy: silt, sand, and clay mixed together. Loamy soil is also ideal animal decomposing soil. If Growler was buried in summer, when temperatures are high, and close to the surface, where the soil has just the right amount of moisture, oxygen, and microbes, the loam might have decomposed all of Growler’s soft gooey tissue, skin, and organs, and even his bones!

The location and depth of soil you choose will determine your dog’s postmortem fate (or your gerbil’s, or ferret’s, or turtle’s). Do you want him to become part of the garden? If so, bury him close to the surface or in rich soil, where he has the best chance of decomposing fast and completely. If you want him to stay around longer, wrap him in plastic and place him in a sealed box, buried deep down in the soil. Although if you really want Growler to stick around for the long haul, may I recommend taxidermy?

The trees use that resin as protection against various pests and animals that might harm them. Say it’s 99 million years ago, and an ancient ant is crawling up a tree and becomes stuck in the resin. The tree’s trap has worked; the ant is done for. Soon, more resin covers the poor creature and solidifies. Normally, this resin will be disintegrated by wind, rain, sunlight, or bacteria over time—crumbling along with Monsieur Ant inside. But every once in a while, the resin is protected and preserved so that over many millions of years it fossilizes into amber.

Here is a short, but awesome, list of things that have been found preserved in amber: a roughly 20-million-year-old male scorpion dug up by a farmer in Mexico, a roughly 75-million-year-old set of dinosaur feathers found in Canada, a roughly 17-million-year-old group of anole lizards found in the Dominican Republic, and a roughly 100-million-year-old insect (now extinct) with a triangular head that could turn around 180 degrees—something no modern insect is able to do. There’s even a chunk of amber that holds a roughly 100-million-year-old spider paused in mid-attack on a wasp.

At least, we think it will take several million years; there is no firm answer as to just how long the process of turning resin into amber takes.

Scientists now pretty much agree that getting useful DNA from animals in amber is not possible. DNA just disintegrates too quickly. Oxygen levels change, temperatures change, moisture levels change, all of which cause the puzzle pieces that make up your genetic code to fall apart.

The first colors that appear after death have to do with blood. When a person is alive, blood pumps through their body. Take a look at your fingernails right now. If they’re pink, that means your heart is pumping blood. Congratulations, you’re alive! Hopefully you don’t need a manicure. My nails are a horrific mess right now. That is neither here nor there, so . . . moving on.