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

by Caitlin Doughty

To future corpses of all ages

Don’t worry, Snickers McMuffin hasn’t been biding his time, glaring at you from behind the couch, waiting for you to take your last breath to be all, “Spartans! Tonight, we dine in hell!”

Mr. Cuddlesworth is a sweetheart, you say? “He watches TV with me!” No, ma’am. Mr. Cuddlesworth is a predator.

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

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