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

by Caitlin Doughty

In the first hours after death occurs, a dead person will look paler than before, especially in places like their lips and fingernails. They lose their healthy pinkish color and start to turn colorless and waxy, because the blood that once ran right under the surface of the skin has started to succumb to gravity.

Around this time, you’ll also see a color change in the person’s eyeballs. Corpses will need your help in closing their eyes. In my funeral home, we recommend families do this fairly soon after death. In as little as half an hour, the iris and pupil cloud over and turn milky because the fluid under the cornea has stagnated, like a creepy little bog.

Once the blood starts to settle, you’re going to see more dramatic color changes. When you’re alive, your blood is made of different components mixed together. But when the blood stops moving, the heavier red blood cells fall slowly out of the mix, like sugar settling to the bottom of a glass of water.

Livor mortis is the pooling of blood in lower areas of the corpse, usually a person’s back. (Again, thanks, gravity.) The pools tend to be purple in color. In Latin, the phrase means “the bluish color of death.”

Interestingly, livor mortis can be useful to forensic examiners determining how and where someone died. The patches of color, and how intensely purple they are, make a difference. For instance, if the livor mortis is all over the front of the body, that means the corpse has been lying face-down for several hours, giving the blood time to pool there.

However, livor mortis patches won’t be found on the parts of the body pressed up against something—the floor, for example—because the pressure means the teeny tiny vessels near the body’s surface can’t fill up with blood. This is yet another way investigators can tell if a body has been lying in a certain position, or on top of something.

What if livor mortis is a different color? If the livor mortis is bright cherry red, that might mean the person died in the cold, or by inhaling carbon monoxide (maybe smoke from a fire). If the livor mortis is deep purple or pink, that might mean the person suffocated, or died of heart failure. Finally,...

Welcome to putrefaction. This is when the famous green color of death comes into its own. It’s more of a greenish-brown, actually. With some turquoise. You could call this color “putrid,” and you’d be totally correct.

Gut bacteria go wild, digesting you from the inside. The green colors appear first in the lower abdomen. That’s the bacteria from the colon breaking free and starting to take over. They are liquefying the cells of the organs, which means fluids are sloshing free.

Another decomposition process is called autolysis. Autolysis happens when enzymes begin destroying the body’s cells from the inside. This destruction process has been quietly occurring all along—since a few minutes after the person died.

You will start to see signs of a venous patterning, or marbling, of blood vessels near the surface of the skin. This is the classic “purple vein” effect that movie makeup people use to show somebody has been infected by a zombie virus. In a corpse, this marbling is the visible sign of blood vessels decaying and hemoglobin separating from the blood.

How come you don’t usually see bodies in extreme states of decomposition, except in zombie or horror movies? Well, in the twenty-first century, bodies aren’t usually allowed to decay to this point.

Because you almost never see bodies decomposing in real time, most people seem to believe dead bodies immediately bloat, swell, and turn colors. Not true; it takes days.

You know when you’re nervous about giving a big speech to a group and they tell you to imagine the audience naked? Here’s another fun exercise: imagine the audience as skeletons. Strip away all the skin, fat, and organs, because underneath it all, everyone’s skeleton is sort of the same. Some folks are taller, of course, some bones are thicker, some people have only one arm—but for the most part, a skeleton is a skeleton.

Here’s how the cremation process works. When the door to the cremation machine opens, a whole human slides in. They’ve probably been in refrigerated storage for a few days to a week, but overall things haven’t changed that much. They may even be wearing the same clothes they died in. But once the machine door closes and the 1500-plus-degree flames start their work, the body immediately starts to transform.

In the first ten minutes of the cremation, the flames attack the body’s soft tissue—all the squishy parts, if you will. Muscles, skin, organs, and fat sizzle, shrink, and evaporate. The bones of the skull and ribs start to emerge. The top of the skull pops off and the blackened brain gets zapped away by the flames. The human body is roughly 60 percent water, and that H2O—along with other body fluids—evaporates right up the machine’s chimney. It takes just a little over an hour for all the organic material in the human body to disintegrate and vaporize.

What are we left with at the end of a cremation? Bones. Hot bones. We call this pulverized mess of molten bones “cremated remains” or, more commonly, ashes. (Funeral directors like to call them “cremated remains” because it sounds fancier and more official, but “ashes” is fine.)

This isn’t a full human skeleton, mind you. Remember, the organic material in our bones burns during the cremation. What’s left behind in the cremated remains is a thrilling combo of calcium phosphates, carbonates, and minerals and salts.

They don’t have DNA left in them, either. It’s basically impossible to tell Grandma’s bones from neighbor Doug’s bones just by looking at them, which is why cremation was long considered the best way to cover up a crime.

After they’ve cooled down, the bone fragments are swept out of the cremation machine. Any big pieces of metal are removed (Did Grandma have a hip implant? We’ll find out when we cremate her!) and the bones are ground down into ashes. The crematory operator pours this light gray powder into an urn, which is given back to the family to scatter, bury, turn into a diamond, shoot into space, make into a painting, or use as tattoo ink.

But what about a person who weighs, say, 450 pounds? Surely those ashes will be heavier. Nope. Much of that weight is fat. Underneath, remember, their skeleton is pretty much identical to everyone else’s.

Cremations for very heavy people can take longer, sometimes over two hours longer. That gives the fat enough time to burn away. But at the end of the process, you can’t tell who went in the machine a 450-pound person and who went in a 110-pound person. The flames are the great equalizer.

The external anal sphincter is a voluntary muscle, which means our brain is actively willing our bums to stay closed. This is also how our brain tells the sphincter to relax when we safely reach the toilet. We appreciate having that control. It’s what allows most of us the privilege to walk through the world without pooping randomly like bunnies.

when we die, our brains no longer send these messages to our muscles. During rigor mortis your muscles seize up tight, but after several days they relax. The good ship decomposition has set sail, and all muscles relax at that point, including the ones that keep poop (and pee, for that matter) inside. So, if you happen to have feces or urine in the chamber at the moment of your passing, they’re now free to go.

I’m not saying everyone is going to postmortem poo. Many older people, or people who have been sick for some time, have eaten almost nothing in the days or weeks leading up to their deaths. When they die, there’s just not much waste in there to be released.

As a mortician, I most often encounter a surprise poo when I arrive to pick up a dead body to take it to the funeral home (this is called a “first call”). As a dead body is pulled upright, flipped over—whatever it takes to get the body safely on the stretcher—squeezing occurs, and some feces may escape the body. But don’t be embarrassed, dear corpse! Morticians are used to cleaning up poop, just like new parents are used to changing dirty diapers. It’s part of the job.

Besides, forensic pathologists have it way worse in the poop-interaction department. (This is one of the reasons their average yearly salary is roughly $50,000 more than us morticians.) If someone dies mysteriously, t...

A typical mortician fear is that a dead person will defecate, purge, or leak a bit when the family comes to visit the body. Who wants the final “memory picture” of Grandpa to be a vague eau de poop? Morticians have a host of tricks to prevent this from happening. Entry-level trick: a diaper. This is my preferred method because it’s non-invasive.

Mid-level trick: an A/V plug. (A/V doesn’t stand for audio/visual. It’s, um, more graphic than that. I’ll let you take that journey of discovery on your own.) The plug is a clear plastic contraption that looks part wine corkscrew, part plastic stopper for a sink or tub drain.

Master-level trick: packing the anal canal with cotton and sew...

The problem with the Biddenden Maids is that nobody is sure if they ever existed.

Almost 60 percent of conjoined twins will die in the womb before birth. If the twins are born alive, 35 percent won’t survive their first day.

Conjoined twins share an intense bond that not even non-conjoined twins can understand. Adult twins often say they prefer life with their twin. Margaret and Mary Gibb, born in the early twentieth century, had surgeons wanting to separate them since their birth, but they always refused.

Thus the depressing answer to the question “Do conjoined twins always die at the same time?” is “More or less, yes.” Sorry, but I don’t want to sugar-coat it. Doctors are developing new imaging technology which may help us better understand what’s going on deep inside conjoined twins. But the twins are connected in ways (physically and emotionally) that even the latest, most expensive technology will struggle to perceive.

(Furthermore, Mom, there is medical evidence all those scrunched, pinched faces are good for circulation.)

When you die, all the muscles in your body get loose—very loose. (You may recall that this is the time where you might take a small postmortem poo.) This first two-to-three-hour period after death is known as primary relaxation.

If you or your family is caring for your dead person at the family home or at a nursing facility, our funeral home recommends that the family close the mouth and eyes as soon as possible during primary relaxation. This will set the face in a peaceful position early, before the dreaded rigor mortis begins.

Rigor mortis is the Latin name for the stiffening of the muscles that starts around three hours after death (even sooner in very hot or tropical environments). I’ve been studying rigor mortis for years and I’m still not sure I totally understand the science of it.

The muscles in your body need ATP (adenosine triphosphate) in order to relax. But ATP requires oxygen. No more breathing means no more oxygen, which means no more ATP, which means the muscles seize up and can’t relax. This chemical change, collectively called rigor mortis, starts around your eyelids and jaw and spreads through every muscle in the body, even the organs. Rigor mortis makes the muscles incredibly stiff.

Funeral directors have to massage and flex the joints and muscles over and over to get them to move, a process called “breaking rigor.” This process sounds noisy, full of cracks and pops. But we’re not ...

A twenty-five-year-old woman in India was found dead, lying on her back. At first glance, investigators might have thought she was a living woman doing yoga or a stretching pose, given that both her legs and one arm were up in the air, seeming to defy gravity. The woman was still stuck in this position when they brought her in for an autopsy. After an investigation, the forensics team developed a theory that the killer may have first murdered the woman and then decided to transport her body to a different location. The killer perhaps placed the woman in this strange position (when she was still in primary relaxation) in order to move her body. During the transport, where she might have been in the trunk of a car or a bag, her body went into rigor mortis.

rigor mortis eventually goes away. Every dead body is different, and the environment plays a big role in the timing, but after about seventy-two hours your muscles will go all floppy again—along with your duck-face lips.

There’s a controversial phenomenon in forensic science called cadaveric spasm, also known as instantaneous rigor. Instantaneous rigor is exactly what it sounds like. When someone dies, they skip right over the floppy muscle relaxation stage and go straight into rigor mortis.

A cadaveric spasm usually affects only one group of muscles, most commonly the arms or hands. This means your arms might get stuck in a funny position after death. Some potential options include zombie arms, “YMCA” arms, or “walk like an Egyptian” arms. But I don’t know that zany “after death arms” have quite the same impact as a zany “after death face,” like tongue-out-googly-eyes or pig-snout-crossed-eyes.

Also, cadaveric spasms usually follow a stressful death. We’re talking seizure, drowning, asphyxiation, electrocution, gunshot wound to the head. They’ve been observed in soldiers who were shot in battle, or people who died following a brief period of intense struggle.

The Vikings, everyone’s favorite medieval Scandinavian raiders ’n’ traders, had diverse and interesting death rituals, but a flaming cremation boat wasn’t one of them.

As a warning, any time you try to tactfully bring up the historical inaccuracy of someone’s blazing boat corpse idea, you’ll be hearing from the “Ahmad ibn Fadlan guy.” The Ahmad ibn Fadlan guy is the person on the internet who insists that Hollywood versions of flaming boat cremations are real. AiF-guy spends a lot of time making this argument, and he supports his case with the writings of a man named Ahmad ibn Fadlan, an Arab traveler and writer from the tenth century.

According to Ibn Fadlan, the Rus’ stored their chieftain in a temporary grave for ten days. Because the chieftain was so important, his people pulled his entire longship ashore and hauled it onto a wooden platform. An older woman, who was in charge of the ritual and was known as the Angel of Death (hold on, Ibn Fadlan: I want to hear more about this Angel of Death woman), made a bed for the chieftain on the boat. The chieftain was taken out of his grave, re-dressed, and placed on the bed with all his weapons around him. His relatives arrived with flaming torches and set the boat alight, and the whole thing plus wooden platform burned along with him. Important: this all happens on land.

The reason that no culture has adopted the flaming boat funeral custom is because it doesn’t work.

Here’s the thing: after those first fifteen minutes of glorious flame, you still need several hours and a lot of wood to fully cremate that body. Your average canoe is between sixteen and seventeen feet. It could carry enough wood to start the pyre off, but I have it on good authority (the cremation pyre people told me) that a full cremation requires over 40 cubic feet of wood.