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

by Caitlin Doughty

Dermestids are happy to wade into a gruesome, sticky mass of decaying flesh and delicately clean around even the tiniest of bones.

Maybe someday laws will change in your favor, and Your Momz Skull, LLC, will specialize in legally de-fleshing parental skeletons.

it’s . . . bacteria farts.

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.

Forget about what you look like on the outside; it’s the weight on the inside (your skeleton) that counts.

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.)

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.)

The lesson here is that even if you make it almost a thousand years in the grave, you never know when you’ll be uprooted by a lawless badger.

And 150 years after the Civil War ended, deadly arsenic is still seeping from the ground in Civil War–era cemeteries.

Aquamation uses water and potassium hydroxide to dissolve the dead body down to its skeleton. The aquamation process is better for the environment and doesn’t use natural gas, a valuable resource.

It is my sincere belief that you are never too young to ask the hard questions about cannibalism.

We may get to a place one day where lab-grown human is on your local restaurant menu (yes, someone is already developing this technology), but until then I think it’s best to stay away from the other red meat.

perhaps it’s time to join the rest of the world and—gasp!—recycle our graves. Once Grandma has had her time to decompose, her bones need to step aside for a whole new generation of rotting corpses.

They took the bones and ground them into flour to make what became known as Madame de Montpensier’s bread. Bone appetit! (Actually, maybe don’t bone appetit, as many who ate the bone bread died themselves.)

The human body is teeming with life, a whole ecosystem of microbes. As they break down their brand-new food source—your dead body—the microbes give off gas made of VOCs, or volatile organic compounds. The prime stinkers here tend to be sulfur-containing compounds, which makes sense if you’ve ever experienced an especially potent and sulfuric eggy fart. Sulfur is the culprit in many a stink.

Though we may not have one single way of describing the smell of a decomposing human body, we do know that dead human smell is unique. Even though our untrained noses aren’t likely to make that fine a distinction, researchers have found that humans have a “singular chemical cocktail,” our own eau de decomp. Of the smelly compounds found in putrefaction gas, eight compounds give us humans our own special stink. Well, not 100 percent “our own” or “special,” as pigs have those compounds, too.

This amazing capacity made it the first choice to receive dead bodies from the mass suicide at Jonestown, the bombing of Marine headquarters in Beirut, the Challenger and Columbia spaceship disasters, and the September 11 attack on the Pentagon.

Dover Port Mortuary at the Dover Air Force Base in Delaware

I’m not allowed to “bury” an animal in a human cemetery. Would I do it anyway? Umm, no comment. (tiny paw extends from your suit pocket)

yes, it’s not out of the question that you and your furry friend could be buried together, running hand-in-paw on that great big hamster wheel in the sky.

And keep in mind that, after death, a wound doesn’t scab or start to heal. Wounds you have when you die stay fresh wounds.

Sometimes funeral directors, worried about fluids leaking out of the skin, will dress the body in head-to-toe clear vinyl garments called unionalls, which look like those adult onesies.

Maybe what you saw was one of these unionalls. But many funeral directors turn to good ol’-fashioned Saran Wrap, the clear plastic wrap you use to cover your leftovers. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.