What Happens to Your Body After You Die?

A woman is sitting in her apartment watching  TV when she smells something that puts her off her macaroni and cheese dinner. She  can’t quite work out what the smell is, but the first two things that come to mind are  rotten eggs and rotten cabbage. She’s tired, so she goes to bed, but when she wakes up the  next morning that awful smell is even stronger.

The stink is so bad that she gags. It feels as  if somewhere in the house rats are decaying in one big heap. Then she notices that the smell  seems to be coming from the apartment next door.

That’s enough to make her call the  cops, even though the young guy who lives next door looks healthy and  nowhere near his expiration date. When the cops enter that apartment, they too gag  when they see the bloated corpse in front of them. Let’s now go back in time.

The guy that died was named Jack. His  neighbor was right about him regarding her assumption he was fit and healthy.  His downfall was the fact he worked out too much.

Jack had injured himself and  had to take very strong pain medications following an ambitious attempt to clean  and jerk much more than his own bodyweight. This was Jack’s downfall because those medications  brought on severe and chronic constipation. Jack put up with it as best he could, but over  time his large bowel extended because of such a large build-up of feces.

This led to compression  in his chest cavity and that resulted in him dying from sudden cardiac arrest. We know this  because a pathologist performed an autopsy on him. We’ll get back to the autopsy  soon, but first let’s have a look at Jack’s last gasp of air in this world.

When Jack’s heart failed him, what happened  next was his brain didn’t receive the blood flow it needed to function. He passed  out, and after a few minutes something called “global cerebral ischemia” happened.  That is the term used for when the entire brain isn’t getting any blood flow.

Jack  then experienced something called brain death. He checked out and there was no  coming back. He jerked around a bit, but that was just the last bit of brain  activity performing its last dance.

Now it gets messy. What happened next is Jack’s body began the  first phase of its post-death performance. This is known as “primary flaccidity” and it  basically means that all his muscles relaxed.

At this point, his jaw dropped open  by itself. Around the same time that coffee he’d drunk in the morning  bloomed at the front of his pants in the form of urine. As for that backed-up  feces he’d never been able to eject, that left his sphincter and made a big mess on  the couch where he was sitting in his underwear.

Jack then started to turn a shade of white, which  is something in the death business they call “pallor mortis. ” It’s the process of  the blood draining from the veins. This usually happens at around the 20-minute mark.

Next up for Jack was the  stage known as “algor mortis”, which is when the body starts to cool down.  The human body is quite the toasty environment and usually has a temperature reading of anywhere  from 97°F (36. 1°C) to 99°F (37.

2°C). When someone is dead that temperature will drop and level  out at the temperature of the surroundings. Jack had left his window open,  so it was chilly in his room.

This actually slowed down his composition, but it also opened a door to insects who  saw Jack as an ideal host for their eggs. What happens around time is blood starts  to pool where it can. With Jack’s heart not pumping blood around his body, it is  gravity that rules blood flow.

In Jack’s case, he was sitting so the blood started to pool  at the lower half of his body. This process, called “livor mortis”, starts after only about  20 minutes but those purple patches on the body usually start to form at around the two-hour  mark. They become more pronounced as time goes on.

Jack sat like this for a while and then after  about four hours his muscles started to get very rigid and he started to look pretty damn  scary. This is the part of the process called “rigor mortis”. It’s basically due to biochemical  changes in the body.

Jack’s mouth was all twisted. He looked like someone who’d died after seeing  a ghost, but it’s actually a myth that people die with expressions of fear on their faces. The  weird, sometimes pained expression, is just the body going through the rigor mortis process.

That  process starts with the eyelids, hence those scary open eyes you see on dead people, and moves all  the way down the body until it reaches the toes. Jack’s body was extremely stiff at the 12-hour  mark, at which point it would have been hard to move his limbs around. He remained looking like a  statue for a good two days, which is quite normal.

After that, his body started decaying some more  and the stiffness gave way to another relaxation stage known as, “secondary flaccidity. ” It’s at  this stage that the skin starts to shrink a bit, and if you’d have seen Jack at this  point you might have thought his hair and nails were growing. That wasn’t  happening, it was just his skin receding.

Ok, so Jack’s been dead over two days now. He’s  pooped his pants. He’s relaxed and he’s stiffened, and he’s relaxed again.

Now  it’s time for the massacre, what some people call the  cannibalization of the body. It depends on the temperature, but in  general, people will start to show the signs of decomposition after around three days. People  start decomposing pretty much as soon as they die, but it usually takes a few days for that  decomposition to start making the dead look very dead.

You see, Jack’s body used to be  maintained when it was a living organism, but when Jack died his immune no longer worked and all  the bacteria in his gut and elsewhere were free to explore his body. You could say that Jack started  eating himself. Proteins started decomposing, and all that bacteria started to digest his body.

This  stage of decomposition just made Jack turn a shade of green at the beginning, but it soon started to  make him look pretty ugly and smell really bad. After about five days, Jack started to bloat and  blisters formed at various points on his body. What was happening is he was fermenting,  and that’s because the feeding bacteria was creating gases in the body.

It’s generally  what happens when you ferment stuff, including the human body. It’s  why a dead body sometimes emits a foul stench through its mouth.  That gas has got to go somewhere.

If you want to know why dead bodies smell so bad  you need to know what gases are emitted from the corpse. One called "cadaverine" is renowned for  having the malodor of rotten fish. "Putrescine" also has notes of dead fish.

"Skatole" smells like  poo, "hydrogen sulfide" smells like rotten eggs, "dimethyl disulfide" smells like  acrid garlic mixed with dead fish, and "methanethiol" has the distinct smell  of rotten cabbage. Altogether this medley of gases makes dead people not the  best folks to have as housemates. After around 12 days, parts of Jack’s body were  turning black and those terrible smells were worsening.

This is about the time that  his neighbor first noticed the stench. What the cops found at the scene was  what’s known as an “unattended death”. These can be viewed as suspicious deaths, so  the first thing law enforcement wanted to know is if natural causes were  to blame.

Only around five percent of deaths in the U. S. require  an autopsy, and Jack was one of those.

The medical examiner received Jack’s body along  with notes written by people who’d seen him in his apartment. The notes said he was sitting on the  couch and that there was nothing at the scene that suggested foul play or suicide. The pathologist  also had information about Jack’s medical history, so he saw that Jack had been prescribed strong  painkillers.

This was a big deal of course. The examiner then got to work, externally  going over the body from head-to-toe to look for anything that could suggest the cause of  death. There was nothing remarkable to see there, so the examiner opened Jack up after cutting from  his sternum to his pubic bone.

Jack was still a little bloated, so the examiner had to take a  step back when some gas escaped from the body. Once he’d cut through the skin, fat, and  muscles, the examiner opened Jack’s rib cage. He actually used a pair of shears to  do this, a tool not unlike ordinary garden shears.

Now that he had the keys to the  kingdom he could start removing Jack’s organs. The first removal saw Jack’s heart,  lungs, throat, and tongue go. Then he took out the stomach, the liver,  and the pancreas, followed by the bladder, bowels, and reproductive organs.

The tricky  bit can be removing the tongue without causing a scar that will upset grieving family and  friends, but every medical examiner knows how to get to the tongue without making  a visible scar someone will later see. So, now Jack’s hardly himself at all  as the examiner looks at, weighs, and slices open various organs. He’s pretty  much looking for anything out of the ordinary, and in Jack’s case, it was pretty obvious what had  happened.

Once the cause of death was determined, Jack’s organs were put back into his body  and he was sewn up. The reconstruction job doesn’t mean everything goes perfectly back into  place, far from it, but an examiner will put the organs close to where they came from. In some  cases the organs may be kept for research, or they might be cremated if the family gives their  consent.

All we can say is that Jack got his back. The examiner signed the death certificate and  completed the forms so Jack could be buried. It must be said that because Jack had spent  quite a lot of time decomposing on the couch, he looked pretty rough – even for a corpse.

Now we come to the funeral home where Jack will  spend a bit of time before his big day. The first thing that happened there  was the spa treatment. This consisted of washing the body and making sure all  his limbs were lying in the right place.

Jack didn't need much limb massaging because  the rigor mortis stage had already passed. His eyelids were then closed with glue and  his jaw was wired shut. After a little bit more tinkering with his mouth, he was made  to like as though he was resting in peace.

Next up was embalmment, which consisted of  removing Jack's blood and pumping him full of chemicals to preserve his body. After that, Jack’s  abdomen was drained, as was his chest cavity, and once that happened the embalming chemicals were  pumped in. The last thing was to make Jack look presentable to those who’d see him in his open  casket, so makeup was used to give him more of a glow than he had when he went into the funeral  home.

His hair was styled, his nasal hair cropped, and his nails were cut. He was then dressed and  placed in a coffin, ready for the big send-off. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,”  and Jack was in the ground.

What next? The answer is a lot of waiting. If Jack  had just been left to rot above ground in the open air things would have been different. 

There he would have been feasted on by insects and within a matter of weeks, he would  have very likely become a liquified mess. It’s a different story 6-feet under,  embalmed, and housed in a wooden box. How a person will decompose depends  on a lot of factors.

Those factors include what kind of coffin someone is sealed in,  the environment in which the coffin is placed, and also on the body of the person that has died. After just a few weeks underground, Jack no longer  had any kind of greenish complexion and instead, he had a dark brown tint to his skin. That nice suit he wore to his own funeral  was hanging off him after a few months and once a year had passed there wasn’t much of it  left.

This doesn’t mean the suit was badly made, but that the suit was being degraded  by the fluids coming out of Jack. Ten years have now passed and Jack is  now on his way to becoming human soup, which isn’t a very good look for him. Things  could have been very different.

Some bodies have been exhumed after many years and they didn’t  look too different from when they were buried. You just don’t know what you are going to get  when you open a coffin that has been dug up. For instance, if the body is buried in  very dry conditions it could mummify, which is probably a nice outcome  if you’re an exhumer by trade.

It might take many years, but there’s  no getting away from the fact that one day we will all become a skeleton  if we’re not specially preserved. So, that's the story of unlucky Jack,  but it's also partly the story of most people on this planet. We all have the  same ticket for the same destination, although none of us know when our bus is due.

Now you need to watch this, "What  Happens To Your Body in a Coma? ” Or, learn more about death by watching this,  “What Actually Happens During an Autopsy.