What happens when you die is perhaps one of the greatest mysteries on Earth, simply because none of us know the answer and yet all of us will experience death eventually.
Humankind’s great thinkers have been pondering this question for millennia. And in 1994, an orthopedic surgeon named Tony Cicoria may have come close to solving this great mystery when he was struck by a nearly-fatal bolt of lightning in upstate New York. Cicoria felt himself fly backward and the next thing he remembered was turning around to see his body lying on the ground behind him.
For a moment, Cicoria reported, he stood there and watched a woman perform CPR on his body before he floated up a flight of stairs to watch his children play in their rooms.
“Then I was surrounded by a bluish-white light,” Cicoria recalled, “an enormous feeling of well-being and peace… The highest and lowest points of my life raced by me. I had the perception of accelerating, being drawn up… Then, as I was saying to myself, ‘This is the most glorious feeling I have ever had’ — slam! I was back.”
What Science Says About What Happens When You Die
While we may not fully understand the feeling of dying until we experience it for ourselves, we do know what happens to our bodies right before and after death.
At first, according to Dr. Nina O’Connor, a person’s breathing will become irregular and unusually shallow or deep. Their breath can then begin to sound like a rattle or a gurgle, which happens because the person isn’t able to cough up or swallow secretions in their chest and throat.
“All of it comes from the process of the body slowing and shutting down,” she says. This sound has been fittingly called “the death rattle.”
Then, at the moment of death, every muscle in the body relaxes. This may cause the person to moan or sigh as any excess air is released from their lungs and into their throat and vocal cords.
Meanwhile, as the body relaxes, the pupils dilate, the jaw may fall open, and the skin sags. If the person has any urine or feces in their body, these will then be released too.
But as Parnia suggested, death doesn’t happen in an instant and some researchers assert that our brains can operate up to ten minutes after our hearts stop beating.
Within the first hour after death, the body begins to experience the “death chill” or algor mortis. This is when the corpse cools from its normal temperature to the temperature of the room around it.
After a couple of hours, blood will begin to pool in the areas of the body that are closest to the ground due to gravity. This is known as livor mortis. If the body stays in the same position for several hours, these body parts will start to look bruised while the rest of the body grows pale.
Limbs and joints will then begin to stiffen within a few hours after death during a process called rigor mortis. When the body is at its maximum stiffness, the knees and elbows will be flexed and the fingers and toes may appear crooked.
But after around 12 hours, the process of rigor mortis will start to reverse. This is due to the decay of internal tissue and it lasts between one and three days.
During this reversal, the skin begins to tighten and shrink, which can create the illusion that the person’s hair, nails, and teeth have grown. This skin tightening is also responsible for the illusion that blood has been sucked from the corpses, which in turn inspired some of the vampire legends of medieval Europe that we still know today.
What Physicians Say It Feels Like When We Die
Aside from the science of death and decomposition, humans have always also sought to know what the sensation of dying feels like. Because most of us, unlike Cicoria, won’t ever have a near-death experience, we are simply left wondering: What does it feel like to die?
And according to general practitioner Dr. Clare Gerada, death can sometimes feel like having to use the bathroom.
“Most people will die in bed, but of the group that don’t, the majority will die sitting on the lavatory. This is because there are some terminal events, such as an enormous heart attack or clot on the lung, where the bodily sensation is as if you want to defecate.”
If a person doesn’t die from a terminal event, however, and instead passes on more slowly from a long-term illness or old age, dying may feel a bit like depression. Toward the end of their lives, people tend to eat and drink less, which results in fatigue and a lack of energy. This causes them to move, talk, and think slower.
Dr. O’Connor adds that “the physical fatigue and weakness [of people near the end] is profound. Simple things, like getting up out of bed and into a chair could be exhausting — that could be all of someone’s energy for a day.”
But because it’s so often difficult or impossible for dying people to express how they’re feeling during the event, the question of how it feels when we die remains largely shrouded in mystery.
What Happens To Your Body After You Die?
While the more ineffable matters of what it feels like to die may always be fuzzy, what’s very clear is what happens to the body in a practical sense after death. But how we handle our dead bodies and what ceremonies and rites we perform still varies greatly around the world.
Typically in the West, bodies are embalmed after death. The process of embalming dates back to the ancient Egyptians — and even earlier — when some cultures mummified their dead in the hopes that their soul could one day return to the corpse. Aztecs and Mayans likewise had a history of mummifying their dead, as did many of the world’s most studied civilizations in the pre-modern era.
But as for modern, Western practices, embalming in the United States only became popular during the Civil War as a means of transporting fallen soldiers back to their families to be buried.
Modern embalming is a meticulous process. As soon as a doctor has certified that a person is dead, the body is transported to a coroner who may request a postmortem examination. This process requires a pathologist to complete an external and internal examination. For the internal examination, the pathologist removes every organ of the body, from the tongue to the brain, and then inspects them and places them back in the body.
Next, the body is drained of all its fluids, which are replaced with a preservative like formaldehyde. Meanwhile, the throat and nose are packed with cotton wool.
The mouth is stitched or glued closed from the inside. The hair is washed, the nails are cleaned and cut, and cosmetics are applied to the face and skin. Plastic caps are applied under the eyelids to help them hold their shape.
Finally, the body is dressed and placed in a coffin. From here, it can be buried or cremated, depending on the person’s preference, culture, or religion.
In many non-Western cultures, in fact, death rituals are very different from what most of us might be familiar with.