Discussion What happens when someone dies?

[fkyou]

What happens when people die? I want to hear it to calm down..I'm afraid I somehow will still be here as a vegetable which can happen but that's not my point...

 

[Untoten_]

What happens when people dies? I want to hear it to calm down..I'm afraid I somehow will still be here as a vegetable which can happen but that's not my point...

It really depends on the method man. That's all I can tell you. There's some that are more foolproof than others. But there's something out of your control, that's others finding you and "saving" you.

 

[Arvayn]

Like, what happens to your body, or what happens to you? Because no one really knows the answer to the latter, though I personally believe that your consciousness just stops existing.

Here's a lengthy explanation for both what physically happens to a dead person, and what other people do about them. FYI, I study thanatology obsessively and plan to make a career out of it, so I can answer any additional questions about death that you might have.
I realized halfway through writing this that it's going to take me ages to explain everything, but god damn it, I'M TOO DEEP IN TO BACK OUT NOW AND LET IT ALL GO TO WASTE!

Spoiler: The Biology (TW: Graphic Details)

The appearance and condition of your cadaver depends heavily on the exact cause of death, but there are a few general symptoms that happen to all cadavers:

Initial Death
As soon as your brain stops working (generally considered to be one of the two signs that death has occurred, along with an absent pulse and heartbeat), all of the muscles in your body will immediately relax, and you will empty your bowels (read: shit and piss yourself). Your internals will also be flooded with whatever chemical and fluid reserves were kept contained by pressure or muscle tension. Your eyes and mouth will remain open, and your eyes in particular will slowly be drained of color, fog up and recede deeper into their eye sockets.
If you killed yourself via hanging or SN (two of the most popular methods here), you'll also experience cyanosis, where your extremities (face, hands, feet etc.) turn purple or blue due to the lack of oxygen.

Decomposition Factors
The microorganisms in your body (read: bacteria, your various types of cells) will run absolutely wild, and start doing all sorts of things. The bacteria will eat your flesh (muscles, cartilage, organs etc.) and turn your body into an all-you-can-eat buffet. Your immune cells will start decimating everything in their path within a last-ditch effort to stay alive (your body during this brief time is subject to a process called phagocytosis), before they all quickly die off entirely. Your other cells will die from the lack of food and oxygen, or cannibalize themselves to death as a reaction to running out of food (this is called autolysis). Over time, the bacteria will cause putrefaction, and the eventual reduction of your cadaver to a skeleton. The speed at which putrefaction happens heavily depends on the temperature and humidity of the area that you died in; the hotter and wetter it is, the faster it happens. On average, it starts after about 24 to 48 hours.

If you're unlucky and you died somewhere with the presence of insects (say that it's a summer day and you left your window open or something), they will heavily accelerate your putrefaction, since they will feed on your body and also lay eggs inside of it. These eggs will hatch into larvae (most commonly, housefly maggots) that will eat your body from the inside out and turn it into their childhood home. Scavenger animals can also have you reduced to bones in only a matter of hours, such as large birds (especially vultures) or hungry, unsocialized dogs.

Stages of Decomposition

Pallor Mortis
Within a few dozen minutes or even less, your skin will flush extremely pale; if you're a light-skinned person, it will become a snowy white, and if you're dark-skinned, it will become a sort of ashen gray. This is because the circulation of your bodily fluids simply just stops, and your internal body temperature begins to cool to ambient levels. This is called pallor mortis, or just pallor for short.

Rigor Mortis
After about one hour, your muscles, which would be completely relaxed up to this point, will run out of a chemical called ATP (adenosine triphosphate), which is administered to tell your muscle filaments when to unbind from each other. Without ATP, your body will become incredibly tensed up and stiff, and feel rock hard to the touch; it will become as tensed up as it physically can be, as a matter of fact. This is called rigor mortis. It will keep your body stuck in whatever position it's in for about a day or so, and then it'll relax again once your muscle fibers are too damaged and digested.

Livor Mortis
Once your blood stops circulating, gravity will cause it to coalesce in the lower regions of your body. Depending on the exact position of your cadaver, this lower region could be your front, your back, your lower half... probably not your upper half, unless you're somehow suspended upside down. After a few hours, the lower region will take on a red or a pink color, appear bloated, and feel soft and squishy to the touch. This is called livor mortis, and it is the final stage before you start to properly decay.

Putrefaction
Assuming relatively temperate conditions and no submersion in water (that causes an entirely different timeline of events), putrefaction will be in full swing after a few days. Your body will start to experience deformations and discolorations, and it will release a foul, powerful smell of death and rot. Later on, your organs will have become wet, mushy and crumbly, and a lot of them will have been liquefied into a sort of dark, blackish liquid. You'll have saggy patches that have internally collapsed into themselves, and bloated patches filled with gasses and liquids, all over your skin. Your skin in itself will have taken on a different color. It may be yellow, purple, blue or even green, depending on the exact bioclimate that's present; overtime, it will tend towards black. Putrefaction is a constant and gradually intensifying process (most thanatologists even make an active distinction between onset putrefaction and advanced putrefaction), but on average, it finishes up and leaves dry remains after about a week.

Skeletonization
Once everything has been eaten, all that's really going to be left are your bones, which will be a sort of pink or red in color due to trace amounts of blood and marrow that stuck to them. They'll be cleaned up by microorganisms and take on a white or yellowish white color. And... That's pretty much it. You're a skeleton now. Depending on how you're preserved, you may remain a skeleton forever. Or, you'll continue to be eaten across months to years and eventually reduced to nothing.

Spoiler: The Bureaucracy

Generally, what's done with your body by other people depends on where you live and how quickly you are found. We'll assume the most common case scenario, and say that you're found in less than 24 hours and you haven't written a formal will that details any specific funerary arrangements.

Rural Areas
If you live in a secluded commune or a sort of village, you're very likely to simply be given a quick washing and then buried whole into the ground, where your body will be used as nutrients by the vegetation and fauna, and won't cause any of the typical problems to others such as foul scent or emotional shock. Most communities will customarily mark your burial spot somehow, be it through a grave, altar or memorial. Depending on the size of the community, there may not even be a dedicated mortuary workforce, and local mayoral workers will handle your paperwork and produce a death certificate for you, before handing any legal rights over to your closest living relatives (for minors and unmarried bachelors, the rights holder is usually a parent/guardian, and for married adults, it's their spouse or one of their adult children). The person who holds these rights is called a personal representative, but informally, terms like "next of kin", "executor" and "administrator" are also used.

Urban Areas
If you live in a city or town, bureaucracy and authorities get involved, and the process becomes more elaborate and complicated.

Initial Discovery
Whoever finds you will be expected to call emergency services or their local police station, and report their discovery. Police officers will arrive to secure and evacuate the general area; depending on how the state of your body is described, there might also be a team of paramedics sent over to attempt resuscitation and, if nothing else, at least confirm your death.

Preliminary Assessment
Following that, a coroner will be notified of the case and will also arrive, sometimes accompanied by a team of forensic investigators (it heavily depends on the resources and funding that's available to their department). A preliminary examination will be made on your body, which assesses the general damages and helps forms theories about the likely cause of death, and then you'll be stuffed into a biohazard body bag and driven to a morgue, where you'll be placed inside a freezer to prevent your decomposition.
Meanwhile, the forensics team will harvest samples from your body for analysis, while the police will temporarily seize some of your items (ESPECIALLY any electronics you have, e.g. a computer or phone) and do a background check on you to form a profile of your identity. They'll gather as much information as possible on you and open an investigation into your death, to assess the exact circumstances behind it and, most importantly, make sure that it really was a suicide, and not a murder or assisted suicide. Your seized belongings will be returned to your relatives only after their investigation is closed. This investigation is an entire process of its own, but that's not what we're here to talk about...

Morgue Admission
At the morgue, the coroner will make various phone calls to people that you know (or, if this is unknown, people that you might know) in order to inform them of your passing if they are not already aware, and establish contact with your closest living relative, whom will be periodically updated on the status of your body with any new information that comes to light.
Then, your body will be put on a waiting list for autopsy (a surgical process that aims to scientifically determine a body's exact cause and time of death). Depending on the volume of bodies and the number of staff that the morgue possesses, it might take them anywhere from months, weeks or days to get around to your body, but the freezer will keep it in good condition.
Not all bodies need to be autopsied, especially elderly bodies and those who die in hospice care, but suicides typically present fairly mysterious and potentially even high-stakes circumstances that necessitate it.

Autopsy Time!
Once it's time for your autopsy, the coroner may deem it necessary to perform various medical processes that I will not outline here, both for brevity's sake and for the fact that there are so many possibilities to go over. Still, you will likely be cut into in order to have your internal structure more closely examined, and then sewn back up with sutures. A report will be made on your death that describes the physiological reason you died with maximal precision, as well as any additional notes that the coroner deems necessary to include (this includes the fact that it was a suicide.).
Meanwhile, a mortician will handle any paperwork and documents that need to be created in your name, including your death certificate. Some of these will be kept by the state, while others will be released to your next of kin. Your body is then discharged from the morgue.

Funeral Arrangements
Your body is then relocated to a funeral home (funeral homes are distinct from morgues and serve different functions, though it's not particularly uncommon for the two to exist very closely together and even share much of the same staff.), and your next of kin will be summoned to discuss funeral arrangements. Do they want a funeral? Do they want you cremated (reduced to ashes and preserved inside a container)? Embalmed (preserved with formaldehyde in preparation for a funeral)? Closed casket? Open casket (where the body is restored to a peaceful appearance by a mortuary artist and visually displayed)? Picture viewing? No viewing? This is for them to decide.
If you are a legal adult, it's possible to make your own funeral arrangements before you die, and generally, I'd say that it is a good idea. It removes a lot of financial strain from your loved ones and simplifies the process for them, allowing them to better grieve. On top of this, it gives you more agency over what exactly is done to your body, just as you would want it. Plus, you get to write something really stupid and funny on your gravestone.

In Memoriam
Finally, we reach the part that most laypeople are familiar with. If you were cremated, your next of kin will simply get to keep the container (usually a vase or an urn) containing your ashes and do as they like with it. There may not even be a funeral if they do not opt for one. If you were embalmed, the funeral ceremony will be held, weeping will be had, and after it's done, you'll be relocated to a graveyard, where your body will spend out the rest of its days six feet under, typically within a casket or a tomb.
You may be visited by relatives, or you may not. Someone may pass your gravestone and briefly ponder and speculate about your life, considering if they may have gotten to know you in another time... and then move on and forget about you. Eventually, your name will be muttered for the last time, the last memory of you will be had, and then you will have truly experienced your final death.

 

[CatLvr]

@fkyou you know, maybe you should make this a megathread??

And @Arvayn -- you and @COP2CON have hella extensive knowledge to share regarding this topic, as do plenty of others whose screen names aren't coming to me right now.

I'm not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I would be happy to share what general knowledge I have about how to deal with your belongings, if anyone wants to make sure their assets go to particular persons instead of into an estate to be probated and/or want to not leave a mess for their loved ones to deal with.

I know some people don't care, but I have seen plenty of threads here asking about what happens to a body after someone dies, what cops do when they are called to a scene, what to do about "stuff" when you are gone so you don't leave a mess for your family to deal with, etc. so maybe having it all in one big thread would be helpful??

I dunno, what do you think?? (Also, I started to DM you -- and apologies to @fkyou but your question made me think maybe it would be helpful for all of us to have a central thread for everyone to refer to.

Finally, I realize this is an international forum so, obviously there would be differences is laws, customs, etc. but it would be a starting place for people to start their research. What do you (and you guys I tagged) think??

 

[Arvayn]

@fkyou you know, maybe you should make this a megathread??

And @Arvayn -- you and @COP2CON have hella extensive knowledge to share regarding this topic, as do plenty of others whose screen names aren't coming to me right now.

I'm not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I would be happy to share what general knowledge I have about how to deal with your belongings, if anyone wants to make sure their assets go to particular persons instead of into an estate to be probated and/or want to not leave a mess for their loved ones to deal with.

I know some people don't care, but I have seen plenty of threads here asking about what happens to a body after someone dies, what cops do when they are called to a scene, what to do about "stuff" when you are gone so you don't leave a mess for your family to deal with, etc. so maybe having it all in one big thread would be helpful??

I dunno, what do you think?? (Also, I started to DM you -- and apologies to @fkyou but your question made me think maybe it would be helpful for all of us to have a central thread for everyone to refer to.

Finally, I realize this is an international forum so, obviously there would be differences is laws, customs, etc. but it would be a starting place for people to start their research. What do you (and you guys I tagged) think??

Yeah, I think it's a good idea... There should definitely be a guide made that just explains all the relevant aspects of post-mortem care and events. Honestly, I'm surprised no one has done it yet. Though, I won't be the one to do it, since I don't have the knowledge to answer most of the legal questions, and it tends to vary quite a bit between countries and continents anyway. I just know the biology and industry protocol stuff.