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

by Caitlin Doughty

But the size of the dog doesn’t matter when it comes to postmortem mutilation. Take the story of Rumpelstiltskin the chihuahua. His new owner posted a picture on a message board to show him off, and added some “bonus info” which was that “his [old] owner was dead for a considerable time before anyone noticed and he did eat his human to stay alive.”

The answer here is yes, dead bodies can move by themselves, but the movements are small, and caused by science! Not ghosts. Or demons. Or zombies. Just be glad you’re not an attendant at the Leichenhaus.

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.

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, if a person has lost a lot of blood, you might not find any livor mortis at all.

This technicolor show is happening alongside all the other visible effects of putrefaction, like swelling, “purging,” and blistering or peeling of the skin. The color will change so profoundly that you will no longer recognize the person or be able to tell the age or complexion they were in life.

It takes just a little over an hour for all the organic material in the human body to disintegrate and vaporize.

talking about cremation

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 are totally sterile, which means you could roll around in them like a snowdrift or a sandbox and be perfectly safe.

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.

“…use as tattoo ink,” whaaaaat?! That’s fuckin badass.

Since fat falls into the category of organic material, it will burn up during the cremation process. 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.

It can feel like there is nothing special about Grandma’s ashes, nothing left of her special “Grandma-ness.” Not true! There are differences, even if we can’t see them. Maybe Grandma was a vegetarian who took multivitamins. Maybe Doug lived near a factory for most of his life. These factors affect what trace elements are found in the ashes.

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.

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.

Though we’re not sure how conjoining occurs, we know that when it does happen, the prognosis is . . . grim. 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.

Gracie and Rosie Attard were born sharing a spine, bladder, and much of their circulatory system. Even if conjoined twins have separate organs, like two hearts or two lungs, the organs function in tandem. If one of the twins’ organs is much weaker, the other will compensate. Rosie’s heart was weak, so Gracie’s heart was pumping for both twins. But the strain of pumping so hard threatened to cause Gracie’s other major organs to fail. If Gracie’s organs failed, both twins would die.

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 makes the muscles incredibly stiff. Once it sets in, that body ain’t movin’ from whatever position it is in. 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 snapping bones; the sounds are coming from the muscles.

Perhaps we can use rigor mortis to create your post-death silly face? If you asked a friend or relative to set your face in a weird position during primary relaxation, it might get stuck there for the duration of rigor mortis. I’m sure your mom wouldn’t appreciate the prank, though. Poor Mom. You’re taunting her even in death!

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. It doesn’t sound like a chill situation, and frankly I don’t want that kind of bad death for you, my young friend. I don’t see any way for your silly face to be stuck like that forever.

Vikings performed cremations—on land. Sometimes the cremation pyre would be built inside stones that were outlined and stacked into the shape of a boat (which might be where this idea came from). If the dead person was especially important, their whole boat would be hauled up on land and used as a coffin, known as ship or boat burial. But no flaming-arrow cremation cruise.

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. The fire has to reach 1200 degrees and stay there for two to three hours. You have to keep adding wood close to the body throughout the cremation. Even stacked high with logs, a sixteen-foot Viking boat holds nowhere close to the amount of wood needed.

Have Grandma cremated in an ordinary cremation machine, called a retort. You can watch Grandma’s body being loaded into the machine and blast Norse battle chants while you press the button to start the flames. This is called a witness cremation. Then, you can take her cremated remains and put them on a tiny Viking boat and set that on fire, sending it out into a body of water. As the wee boat burns, the ashes will scatter into the water.

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.

And what about the cemetery in Florida? In this older, abandoned cemetery, why were there fresh graves, terrible smells, and body bags? It turns out that the graves had been dug by a local funeral home to bury homeless people. And because the “abandoned” cemetery didn’t have government oversight, the funeral home is alleged to have buried the bodies in extremely shallow graves.

It’s worth noting that in some U.S. states, Georgia for example, a landlord only has to tell you about a recent death if you ask. But if you do ask, they are required to answer truthfully. Sort of like how a vampire can only come into your house if you invite them in.

This sounds terrifying, but I want to be clear: only very specific infectious diseases (like cholera and ebola) can make a dead body dangerous in any way. These are diseases that are extremely rare right now in places like the United States and Europe.

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.

At the moment, the world’s tallest cemetery is in Brazil. Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica III contains thirty-two stories of graves, and also has a restaurant, concert hall, and gardens filled with exotic birds. When

In the nineteenth century, burial moved from overcrowded (read: smelly) urban graveyards to sprawling rural cemeteries. These rural cemeteries hosted picnics, poetry readings, carriage races. They were the places to see and be seen.

Scientists believe that seeing this light at the end of the tunnel is the result of retinal ischemia, which happens when there isn’t enough blood reaching the eye.

The corpse-nosher ranks are filled with diverse species. You have vultures, swooping down for a roadside snack. You have blowflies, which can smell death from up to ten miles away. You have carrion beetles, which devour dried muscle. A dead human body is a wonderland of ecological niches, offering a wide range of homes and snacks for those inclined to eat. 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.)

be fair, even Osedax don’t really devour the minerals in the bone. Instead, they burrow into the bone searching for collagen and lipids to eat.

High in the mountains of Tibet, where the ground is often too rocky and frozen for burial, and where not enough trees grow to perform cremations, a different kind of death ritual developed. To this day, bodies are laid out in an open area for a sky burial, a lovely name for the dead body being consumed by vultures. Your cat might eat you after you die, but a vulture can’t wait to rip you to pieces and carry you off into the sky.

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.

oof, that's the same smell as musty old houses.

When specially trained cadaver dogs are searching the woods for a dead body, they’re sniffing for VOCs. These smells also attract blowflies, which have scent receptors that lead them to the body.

Interestingly, humans were once much more accustomed to the stink of death, largely thanks to poor refrigeration and body preservation techniques.

When the body is flown home, a soldier is assigned to fly with the body and salute as the body is loaded in and out of the plane (even if the body is just being transferred between flights). Then, there is the American flag, draped over the casket. There is a specific way of folding and draping the flag. Funeral directors’ groups online have knock-down drag-out fights over what they say are improperly draped flags (correct way: blue field of stars over the person’s left shoulder.)

The mortuary workers there are divided into two groups. One group handles the soldier’s personal effects and identifying information, and the other group handles the physical bodies. The idea here is that no worker should become too personally familiar with any particular dead soldier. On one hand, that seems sad and depersonalized, but on the other, according to Stars and Stripes magazine, in 2010 “one in five mortuary affairs specialists sent to Afghanistan or Iraq returned with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.” That kind of bureaucracy and separation might be needed to deal with the trauma of war.

Nowadays, you’re Crazy Cat-Lady Caitlin if you to want to be snuggled up next to Mr. Paws forever. But that’s the wrong way to look at it! Humans have a long, rich history of being buried alongside their animals, and you and your hamster should be no different.

Other U.S. states are more progressive on the issue of humans and animals being buried together. New York, Maryland, Nebraska, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Virginia are good examples. These states will allow your hamster (whole-body or cremated) and you, its owner, to be buried together.

Fabulous!

In the nineteenth century, Europeans were obsessed with Egypt. People in England would hold mummy-unwrapping parties, for which hucksters would sell tickets to the public, so they could watch ancient mummies being unwrapped (destroying the mummy in the process). 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.”

Cuts or wounds that would heal easily on young skin like yours have a much harder time healing in someone very sick or much older. 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.