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

by Caitlin Doughty

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.

dermestid beetles,

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In 2016, a zoo in the Gaza Strip had to be abandoned due to war and the Israeli blockade.

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 containing a mummified cat and a mummified rat, both over three hundred years old. The customer had found them in the walls of a Welsh cottage and wanted to sell them.

Notably, there was a dog named Stuckie found in Georgia in the 1980s.

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.

They couldn’t sign off on “sacrificing” their daughter Rosie, so they chose not to separate the twins at all, and leave things “in God’s hands.” But a judge, and then an appeals court, ruled against the parents, declaring that the surgery would proceed. Rosie died on the operating table during the twenty-hour separation surgery. Two surgeons both held the scalpel as the aorta was cut, so neither surgeon was solely responsible for Rosie’s death. Gracie is now a thriving eighteen-year-old who still keeps in contact with one of the surgeons who performed the operation.

The theory is that Angelo had been in a very deep coma which slowed his breathing way, way down. It was that slow breathing that allowed him to stay alive while buried.* Angelo recovered, lived a full life, and even invented a “security coffin” with a radio transmitter and a toilet.

The flight attendant would open the plane’s emergency exit door and toss your body out, attached to a parachute. Before you head out the door, they’d place a little card in your pocket that lists your name and address and says, “Don’t worry, I’m already dead.” (I’m being informed by fact-checkers that this is not official airline policy.)

Sitting next to a corpse all the way to Tokyo isn’t ideal, but I would prefer a corpse to a crying baby. No offense to babies, I just spend more time around corpses.

You’re more likely to die from your pajamas catching on fire than from ebola.

Like cooking and sports and storytelling and gossip, preserving corpses is a near universal human pastime.

bezoars, solid masses of accumulated indigestible material

1961, Jack Kevorkian, who later earned the nickname “Dr. Death”

I found out that one of my friends has tissue from a cadaver butt in her mouth. Turns out quite a few people do. When gums are receding, due to teeth grinding or health issues, they can be rebuilt by implanting cells from the butt of a human cadaver. So, cadaver butt is in, but cadaver blood is out.

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

In 1972, Pedro Algorta’s plane crashed in the Andes mountains.

Humans in the developed world prefer our meat maggot-, ailment-, and bloat-free. (Not always, though. There are cultures that consider putrid meat a delicacy. My favorite example is hákarl or fermented shark, which is a beloved national dish in Iceland. The shark is buried, fermented, and hung to dry for months until its debut as a pungent, rotten treat.)

I’m not personally religious, but I am 100 percent game for centaur Jesus riding a chariot coming to pick me up for my descent into death.

There are plenty of seats at death’s dinner table.

When Paris was under siege in the late sixteenth century, the city was starving. When people inside the city ran out of cats and dogs and rats to eat, they began disinterring bodies from the mass graves in the cemetery. 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.)

you love your hamster. Rightly so. Your hamster is probably more fun than most of the people you know. And a better conversationalist. People are awful, is what I’m saying.