The Whole Death Catalog Read online

  Heard the final call

  Joined the heavenly choir

  Kicked the bucket

  Laid to rest

  Launched into eternity

  Met his Maker

  Passed away

  Remaindered (popular among publishing types)

  Rests in peace

  Taking the westbound (hobo slang)

  Transitioned

  With the angels

  “Timor Mortis

  Conturbat Me”

  Aside from the distinction of being the first person to use the F-word in print (in a poem titled “Ane Brash of Wowing”), the sixteenth-century Scottish author William Dunbar is best known for his poem “Lament for the Makers,” whose famous Latin refrain—“Timor mortis conturbat me” (“The fear of death distresses me”)—conveys the universal dread of that scythe-wielding “tyrant” whose “awful stroke” no human can avoid.

  The hundred-line poem, written in 1508, is too long to quote in its entirety, but here’s the first half, modernized for ease of comprehension:

  I that in health was and gladness,

  Am troubled now with great sickness,

  And feeble wit infirmity:

  Timor mortis conturbat me.

  Our pleasance here is all vainglory

  This false world is but transitory,

  The flesh is feeble, the Fiend is sly;

  Timor mortis conturbat me.

  The state of man does change and vary,

  Now sound, now sick, now blithe, now sorry,

  Now dancing merry, now like to die:

  Timor mortis conturbat me.

  No state on earth here stands securely,

  As with the wind waves the willow,

  Waves this world’s vanity;

  Timor mortis conturbat me.

  Unto death go all estates,

  Princes, prelates, and potentates,

  Both rich and poor of all degree;

  Timor mortis conturbat me.

  He takes the knights in the field,

  Armed under helm and shield;

  Victor is he at all melee;

  Timor mortis conturbat me.

  That strange unmerciful tyrant

  Takes, on the mother’s breast sucking,

  The babe full of benignity;

  Timor mortis conturbat me.

  He takes the champion in battle,

  The captain enclosed in the tower,

  The lady in bower, full of beauty;

  Timor mortis conturbat me.

  He spares no lord for his puissance,

  No scholar for his intelligence;

  His awful stroke may no man flee;

  Timor mortis conturbat me.

  I ♥ Death

  Not everyone sees death as a fearful prospect. On the contrary, there are people who talk about it as if it were the most beautiful and desirable thing in the world. Such types are technically known as thanatophiles: death lovers, the diametric opposite of thanatophobes.

  In his consistently fascinating study, Modern Man and Mortality (Collier, 1964), Jacques Choron cites numerous literary examples of this sentiment, from the French author Pierre de Ronsard’s “Hymn to Death” (“I salute you, blissful and profitable death”) to the American poet Mary Emily Bradley’s declaration: “O Death, the loveliness that is in thee, / Could the world know, the world would cease to be.”

  Of course, whether such seemingly heartfelt paeans to death can be taken at face value is an open question. Freudians talk of something called a reaction formation: a defense mechanism that blocks our awareness of deeply disturbing feelings by turning them into their opposite. (The classic case is the aggressively hetero, gay-bashing male whose rabid homophobia masks repressed homosexual desires.)

  In short, assertions like Bradley’s (or Walt Whitman’s insistence that “to die is different from any one supposed, and luckier”) may be just another way of coping with the overwhelming terror of extinction.

  “I HEARD A FLY BUZZ WHEN I DIED”

  What happens at the moment of death? In this famous poem by Emily Dickinson (reprinted from its first 1890 publication), friends and relatives keeping vigil at a deathbed expect something awesome to occur when the speaker breathes her last—perhaps the appearance of God Himself come to carry the departed soul heavenward. The reality turns out to be considerably more mundane.

  I heard a Fly buzz when I died;

  The stillness round my form

  Was like the stillness in the air

  Between the Heaves of storm.

  The eyes beside had wrung them dry,

  And breaths were gathering sure

  For that last onset when the king

  Be witnessed in his power.

  I willed my keepsakes, signed away

  What portion of me I

  Could make assignable—and then

  There interposed a fly,

  With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,

  Between the light and me;

  And then the windows failed, and then

  I could not see to see.

  Agony to Extinction:

  The Death Process

  In Emily Dickinson’s famous poem, “I heard a Fly buzz when I died,” death happens in an instant. One moment, the speaker is lying on her deathbed, listening to the titular insect circling her head. A second later, all her senses are extinguished, as though someone has switched off the lights: “And then the windows failed and then / I could not see to see.”

  That’s the way most of us think of death—as a specific moment when a person draws his last breath. In reality, things are more complicated than that. Death isn’t a single event—it’s a process with definable stages.

  The first is what biologists call the agonal phase, a term etymologically associated with the word agony (both derive from the Greek agon, meaning “struggle”). During this period—which generally lasts only a few moments and is often referred to as the “death throes”—the dying person really does seem to be in agony. In truth, however, he or she is too far gone to be aware of any pain and is simply undergoing the violent muscular spasms that accompany the shutdown of the bodily systems. The chest and shoulders may heave convulsively and various ghastly noises—gurgles, rasps, rattles, or even a terrifying bark—might issue from the throat.

  The agonal phase is followed by clinical death. At this point, the heart stops beating and respiration ceases. There is a brief window of opportunity here for the person to be revived. This highly critical moment has been portrayed in countless movies and TV medical dramas in which frantic emergency room doctors try to jolt a flatlined patient back into life by applying electric defibrillator paddles to the person’s chest. (In real life, this technique is only used in cases of heart attacks; to retrieve a person from clinical death requires cardiopulmonary resuscitation or CPR.)

  If the attempt to resuscitate a clinically dead patient fails, brain death will soon follow. The standard definition of brain death is “the bodily condition of showing no response to external stimuli, no spontaneous movements, no breath, no reflexes, and a flat reading (usually for at least 24 hours) on a machine that measures the brain’s electrical activity.” The “total and irreversible cessation of brain function” is now the standard criterion for death determination in the United States and most other Western nations.

  Even after brain death occurs, there are still two more stages in the utter extinction of a human being: biological death, which refers to the permanent, irreversible end of all the body’s life processes; and postmortem cellular death, during which the individual cells die and begin to decompose, a process that can last for several hours after biological death.

  RECOMMENDED READING

  The single best book ever written on the subject of how we die is How We Die (Knopf, 1994) by Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland. Much-deserved winner of the National Book Award, this enormously wise, humane, elegantly written work describes, without sentimentality, sensationalism, or sugarcoating, exactly what happens
when death occurs by the most common means: heart attack, stroke, cancer, and plain old age. Because the book is so unflinching and honest in its insistence on the messiness, ugliness, and indignities of dying, it has the (somewhat paradoxical) effect of making the whole business seem less terrifying: not an unimaginable horror but a universal and unavoidable event that is the means by which “each of us is returned to the same state of physical, and perhaps spiritual, nonexistence from which we emerged at conception.”

  THE DEATH CLOCK

  Want to know when you’ll die? The Death Clock—"the Internet’s friendly reminder that life is slipping away” will tell you. Just go to www.deathclock.com, enter your vital statistics (birthday, sex, height, weight, smoking status, etc.), and the Death Clock will tell you how much time you have left, down to the last second!

  How Do You Know

  When You’re Dead?

  Back in the old days, it was easy to tell if someone was alive or not. If a person had stopped breathing and his heart no longer beat, you could safely assume he was a goner. “I know when one is dead, and when one lives,” King Lear cries over the body of his daughter Cordelia. “Lend me a looking glass. If that her breath will mist or stain the stone, why then she lives.”

  Nowadays, things are much trickier. Holding a mirror up to someone’s nose won’t cut it anymore. In an age when life support technology has made it possible to keep a human body going more or less indefinitely by artificial means, it’s become necessary to draw a more exact distinction between life and death.

  In the late 1950s, two French neurologists named P. Mollaret and M. Goulon observed that some patients being kept alive on respirators showed absolutely no electrical activity in their brains. They were in a state of nonbeing that the two physicians called “coma dépassé”—beyond coma. These findings ultimately led to the adoption of a new set of standards for determining death: what is technically known as “death by brain criteria,” or more commonly “brain death.” Essentially, the phrase refers to the complete and irreversible loss of all brain functioning. Based on a landmark report published by the Harvard Medical School in 1968, doctors determine brain death by testing for these vital signs:

  Capacity to breathe independently. Physicians give the comatose patient oxygen, then shut off the ventilator to see if he can breathe on his own

  Gag reflex. The patient’s airway is suctioned. If he fails to cough or gag, his reflexes are no longer functioning.

  Pupil reaction. Doctors shine a light directly at the eye to see if the pupils contract.

  Blinking. Doctors poke the patient’s cornea. A live person will blink. A dead one won’t.

  Eye rolling. Doctors rotate the patient’s head to see if the eyes move around (a phenomenon known as “doll’s eyes”).

  Making a face when ice water is poured into your ear. Doctors pour ice water into the patient’s ear and watch what happens.

  Our Bodies, Our Deaths

  After all those crunches, push-ups, and bicep curls, you might not want to hear this, but that muscular physique you’ve worked so hard to achieve isn’t going to last forever. Death is not kind to the human body. It is generally agreed that the strongest man in recorded history was Canadian-born weight-lifter Louis Cyr, who could press four thousand pounds, push a freight car up a hill, and lift a wooden platform holding eighteen men. He died of nephritis in 1912. Dig him up today and that once formidable upper torso would not be an impressive sight.

  Left to its own natural devices, the human corpse passes through several increasingly revolting stages on its way to becoming what pathologists call “dry remains.” The first stage is known as “fresh” (“as in fresh fish, not fresh air,” Mary Roach helpfully points out in her best seller, Stiff). With your heart no longer pumping, your blood begins to sink to the lowest parts of your body—meaning your back and buttocks, assuming that you are supine. Within minutes, the underside of your body will show signs of livor mortis—a purple-red discoloration known as “postmortem staining”—while your face, chest, and so on turn a ghastly white.

  In the meantime—after growing slack at the instant of death—your muscles start to stiffen. Rigor mortis sets in. It begins two to six hours after death with your eyelids, neck, and jaw, then gradually spreads until your whole body is affected, a process that takes another four to six hours. Your temperature is also dropping during this period, a change known as algor mortis. By now, you are a very literal stiff.

  Typically, a corpse remains in this rigid condition for approximately one to three days. Then the muscles grow flaccid again. That’s when stage two begins and things start to get really ugly.

  Stage two is known as “bloat.” All living humans harbor bacteria in their intestinal tracts. These bacteria produce foul-smelling gas, which we expel in the usual impolite ways. Our deaths do not stop these bacteria from generating gas inside our guts. Now, however—since our colon, sphincter, and so on have ceased functioning—we can’t discharge it anymore. As a result, the gas builds up inside us and (in the words of Richard Selzer, author of Mortal Lessons) it “puffs the eyelids, cheeks, and abdomen into bladders of murderous vapor. The slimmest man takes on the bloat of corpulence.” The pressure of the gas causes the eyes to bulge, pushes the intestines out through the rectum, and forces foul bloody fluid from the mouth, nose, and other orifices. Beginning in the lower abdomen, the skin turns color—from green to purple and finally, in later stages, to black.

  Bloat lasts about a week and is followed by the penultimate stage, “putrefaction and decay.” It is during this phase that the body essentially liquefies. Mary Roach compares it to a “slowed-down version” of Margaret Hamilton’s death scene in The Wizard of Oz, when the Wicked Witch melts into the ground—though the reality is a good deal more repulsive. Giant putrid blisters appear on the discolored skin; the hair, nails, and teeth loosen; the brain oozes through the ears or bubbles from the mouth; the swollen belly bursts; and the internal organs dissolve into an unspeakable soup.

  All this, of course, is accompanied by a stench so overpowering that, according to one expert, people who experience it for the first time need weeks to get it out of their nostrils. No deodorizer can mask it. As the pathologist/essayist F. Gonzalez-Crussi’s observes in his book The Day of the Dead and Other Mortal Reflections: “Bathe a decomposing cadaver in sweet perfumes, and it will smell of rotting carrion on a bed of roses.”

  Gradually (depending on various factors, including the climate), the corpse turns into more or less odorless “dry remains”—“cartilage and bone connected by sinewy ligaments,” as one writer describes it.

  RECOMMENDED READING

  In addition to the three books mentioned previously—Mary Roach’s wonderfully witty Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (Norton, 2003); Richard Selzer’s lyrical Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery (Harcourt, 1976); and F. Gonzalez-Crussi’s equally elegant Day of the Dead and Other Mortal Reflections (Harcourt, 1993)—you’ll want to check out Dr. Kenneth Iserson’s encyclopedic Death to Dust: What Happens to Dead Bodies? (Galen Press, 1994) and Christine Quigley’s comprehensive survey, The Corpse: A History (McFarland, 1996). Also highly recommended: Jim Crace’s bold, beautifully written novel, Being Dead (Picador, 2001), which charts both the relationship of two long-married, middle-aged zoologists and the slow decomposition of their bodies after they are murdered on a beach by a passing psycho.

  ASK DR. DEATH

  Dear Dr. Death:

  Let’s say I die and no one bothers to bury me. How long will it take for my body to decompose?

  Morbid

  Dear Morbid:

  Like anything else subject to spoilage—uncooked hamburger, iceberg lettuce, sushi—dead bodies decay at different rates depending on environmental conditions.

  A body left out in the open in a warm, moderately humid climate will be reduced to skeletal remains in relatively short order—anywhere from one to six months. This is owing in large part to the actions of carrion in
sects (such as sarcophagous flies) and animal scavengers.

  Conditions that keep such creatures from feasting on your flesh will, of course, retard the decomposition process. Since flies can’t exist in subfreezing temperatures, bodies left outside in frigid weather will last much longer than those in temperate climates. (The cold also slows the bacterial activity that causes putrefaction.) The effect of a glacial environment on a human corpse was dramatically demonstrated in 1991, when two Alpine hikers came upon the remarkably well-preserved body of what turned out to be a 5,300-year-old man, who quickly became known as “Otzi the Iceman,” aka “Frozen Fritz.”

  If your body is abandoned in a desertlike environment, chances are that it will turn into a natural mummy through the process of dehydration. In her fascinating 2001 book, The Mummy Congress, science writer Heather Pringle talks about the Chilean city of Arica, where scores of mummified corpses dating from the Inca period have been uncovered. Bordering on the Atcama Desert—a virtually rainless plateau running from the Andes to the Pacific Ocean—Arica “is blessed with almost perfect conditions for the long-term preservation of the human body,” a “relentless and inescapable aridity” that can “dry a human corpse to the texture of shoe leather and keep it that way.”

  According to an old rule of thumb known as Casper’s law, one week of decomposition in the open air is equivalent to two weeks in water. In other words, if your body is dumped in a stagnant lake as opposed to, say, your backyard, you will take twice as long to decompose. You will, however, putrefy in a particularly repulsive way. Here’s how journalist Brian Hickey describes it: