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

by Caitlin Doughty

That’s why all the questions in this book come from 100 percent ethically sourced, free-range, organic children.

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.

But it’s also reality, and reality doesn’t change just because you don’t like it.

Death is science and history, art and literature. It bridges every culture and unites the whole of humanity!

At this point, some future sentient creature might find you and go, “Whoa, check out this gnarly human trapped in amber.” Maybe the creature will use you as a paperweight on their desk or something. Okay, so you’re a human, preserved

“Okay, fine, so my death plan is a little historically inaccurate. I wasn’t that into Norse history anyway. Let’s go ahead with the flaming boat thing!” Not so fast, my postmortem pyro. The

“Three and a half feet, you won’t become a treat!”

Three and a half feet is the standard at natural burial grounds across the United States, and there have been zero reports of animals digging up graves.

But stacking the rotting corpses in train cars and shipping them home wasn’t an option (the exasperated train conductors weren’t having it). And most families couldn’t afford the expensive iron coffins that the train companies would allow. So enterprising men, called embalmers, started following the armies around, setting up tents, and chemically preserving the soldiers killed in battle so that they wouldn’t decompose on the journey back home. The embalmers, who were still experimenting with their craft, used everything from sawdust to arsenic. The problem with arsenic is that it’s toxic to living humans. Extremely, wildly toxic—causing various cancers, heart disease, developmental problems in babies . . . the list is long. And 150 years after the Civil War ended, deadly arsenic is still seeping from the ground in Civil War–era cemeteries.

found that early species of humans, like Neanderthals or Homo erectus, had cannibalistic tendencies. But if they ate their own kind, it was for ritual purposes, not dietary purposes. Again, humans just don’t provide enough calories to compete with something like a mammoth, which would have provided a (totally worth it) 3.6 million calories.

Wonder if us being so few calories that is why animals don’t typically eat us?

Once Grandma has had her time to decompose, her bones need to step aside for a whole new generation of rotting corpses. I wonder if anyone has ever written that exact sentence before? I wonder that a lot.

They called it “good old hospital stink.” Quite simply, decayed corpse smell was a badge of honor they had no intention of removing.

about the graves being disturbed, either. President Theodore Roosevelt himself wanted the remains of his son, a military pilot, to remain in Germany, and said, “We know that many good persons feel differently,

but to us it is painful and harrowing long after death to move the poor body from which the soul has fled.”

Wow a Theodore Roosevelt quote… I love this girl

After the natron was removed, the embalmers filled the body cavities with sawdust, linen, and pleasant-smelling substances like cinnamon and frankincense. It’s possible that at some moments the dry body may have even smelled . . . sorta nice? Like a Christmas candle. Or a pumpkin-spiced mummy.

So many Egyptian tombs were looted that mummies were ground up and used as brown paint for artists or added to medicines: “Take two mummy pills and call me in the morning.”