Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Read online

  Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?

  Big Questions from Tiny Mortals about Death

  Caitlin Doughty

  Illustrations by Dianné Ruz

  W.W. NORTON & COMPANY

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  To future corpses of all ages

  Contents

  Before We Begin

  When I die, will my cat eat my eyeballs?

  What would happen to an astronaut body in space?

  Can I keep my parents’ skulls after they die?

  Will my body sit up or speak on its own after I die?

  We buried my dog in the backyard, what would happen if we dug him up now?

  Can I preserve my dead body in amber like a prehistoric insect?

  Why do we turn colors when we die?

  How does a whole adult fit in a tiny box after cremation?

  Will I poop when I die?

  Do conjoined twins always die at the same time?

  If I died making a stupid face, would it be stuck like that forever?

  Can we give Grandma a Viking funeral?

  Why don’t animals dig up all the graves?

  What would happen if you swallowed a bag of popcorn before you died and were cremated?

  If someone is trying to sell a house, do they have to tell the buyer someone died there?

  What if they make a mistake and bury me when I’m just in a coma?

  What would happen if you died on a plane?

  Do bodies in the cemetery make the water we drink taste bad?

  I went to the show where dead bodies with no skin play soccer. Can we do that with my body?

  If someone is eating something when they die, does their body digest that food?

  Can everybody fit in a casket? What if they’re really tall?

  Can someone donate blood after they die?

  We eat dead chickens, why not dead people?

  What happens when a cemetery is full of bodies and you can’t add any more?

  Is it true people see a white light as they’re dying?

  Why don’t bugs eat people’s bones?

  What happens when you want to bury someone but the ground is too frozen?

  Can you describe the smell of a dead body?

  What happens to soldiers who die far away in battle, or whose bodies are never found?

  Can I be buried in the same grave as my hamster?

  Will my hair keep growing in my coffin after I’m buried?

  Can I use human bones from a cremation as jewelry?

  Did mummies stink when they were wrapped?

  At my grandma’s wake, she was wrapped in plastic under her blouse. Why would they do that?

  Acknowledgments

  Sources

  Before We Begin

  Oh, hey. It’s me, Caitlin. You know, the mortician from the internet. Or that death expert from NPR. Or the weird aunt who gave you a box of Froot Loops and a framed photo of Prince for your birthday. I’m many things to many people.

  What is this book?

  It’s pretty simple. I collected some of the most distinctive, delightful questions I’ve been asked about death, and then I answered them. It’s not rocket science, my friends!

  (Note: some of it is, in fact, rocket science. See “What would happen to an astronaut body in space?”)

  Why are people asking you all these death questions?

  Well, again, I’m a mortician, and I’m willing to answer strange questions. I’ve worked at a crematory, gone to school for embalming, traveled the world to research death customs, and opened a funeral home. Plus, I’m obsessed with corpses. Not in a weird way or anything (nervous laughter).

  I’ve also given talks all over the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand on the wonders of death. My favorite part of these events is the Q & A. That’s when I get to hear people’s deep fascination with decaying bodies, head wounds, bones, embalming, funeral pyres—the works.

  All death questions are good death questions, but the most direct and most provocative questions come from kids. (Parents: take note.) Before I started holding death Q & As, I imagined kids would have innocent questions, saintly and pure.

  Ha! Nope.

  Young people were braver and often more perceptive than the adults. And they weren’t shy about guts and gore. They wondered about their dead parakeet’s everlasting soul, but really they wanted to know how fast the parakeet was putrefying in the shoebox under the maple tree.

  That’s why all the questions in this book come from 100 percent ethically sourced, free-range, organic children.

  Isn’t all this a little morbid?

  Here’s the deal: It’s normal to be curious about death. But as people grow up, they internalize this idea that wondering about death is “morbid” or “weird.” They grow scared, and criticize other people’s interest in the topic to keep from having to confront death themselves.

  This is a problem. Most people in our culture are death illiterate, which makes them even more afraid. If you know what’s in a bottle of embalming fluid, or what a coroner does, or the definition of a catacomb, you’re already more knowledgeable than the majority of your fellow mortals.

  To be fair, death is hard! We love someone and then they die. It feels unfair. Sometimes death can be violent, sudden, and unbearably sad. But it’s also reality, and reality doesn’t change just because you don’t like it.

  We can’t make death fun, but we can make learning about death fun. Death is science and history, art and literature. It bridges every culture and unites the whole of humanity!

  Many people, including me, believe that we can control some of our fears by embracing death, learning about it, and asking as many questions as possible.

  In that case, when I die, will my cat eat my eyeballs?

  Great question. Let’s get started.

  Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?

  When I die, will my cat eat my eyeballs?

  No, your cat won’t eat your eyeballs. Not right away, at least.

  Don’t worry, Snickers McMuffin hasn’t been biding his time, glaring at you from behind the couch, waiting for you to take your last breath to be all, “Spartans! Tonight, we dine in hell!”

  For hours, even days, after your death, Snickers will expect you to rise from the dead and fill his normal food bowl with his normal food. He won’t be diving straight for the human flesh. But a cat has got to eat, and you are the person who feeds him. This is the cat-human compact. Death doesn’t free you from performing your contractual obligations. If you have a heart attack in your living room and no one finds you before you miss your coffee date with Sheila next Thursday, a hungry and impatient Snickers McMuffin may abandon his empty food bowl and come check out what your corpse has to offer.

  Cats tend to consume human parts that are soft and exposed, like the face and neck, with special focus on the mouth and nose. Don’t rule out some chomps on the eyeballs—but Snickers is more likely to go for the softer, easier-access choices. Think: eyelids, lips, or tongue.

  “Why would my beloved do that?” you ask. Let’s keep in mind that, as much you adore your domesticated meowkins, that sucker is an opportunistic killer that shares 95.6 percent of its DNA with lions. Cats (in the United States alone) slaughter up to 3.7 billion birds every year. If you count other cute little mammals like mice, rabbits, and voles, the death toll might rise to 20 billion. This is an abject massacre—a bloodbath of adorable forest creatures perpetrated by our feline overlords. Mr. Cuddlesworth is a sweetheart, you say? “He watches TV with me!” No, ma’am. Mr. Cuddlesworth is a predator.

  The good news (for your dead body) i
s that some pets with slithery, sinister reputations might not have the capacity (or interest) to eat their owners. Snakes and lizards, for example, won’t eat you postmortem—unless you happen to own a full-grown Komodo dragon.

  But that’s the end of the good news. Your dog will totally eat you. “Oh no!” you say. “Not man’s best friend!” Oh yes. Fifi Fluff will attack your corpse without remorse. There are cases where forensics experts first suspect a violent murder has occurred, only to discover that the damage was Ms. Fluff attacking the dead body postmortem.

  Your dog might not nip and tear at you because she’s starving, however. More likely Fifi Fluff will be attempting to wake you up. Something has happened to her human. She’s probably anxious and tense. In this situation, a dog might nibble the lips off her owner, just like you bite your nails or refresh your social media feed. We all have our anxiety busters!

  One very sad case involved a woman in her forties who was known to be an alcoholic. Often, when she was intoxicated and unconscious, her red setter would lick her face and bite her legs to try to rouse her. After she died, flesh was found missing from her nose and mouth. The setter had tried to rouse her human again and again, with increasing force, but couldn’t wake her.

  Forensic case studies­—did you know that “forensic veterinarian” is a job?—tend to focus on the destruction patterns of larger dogs: for example, the German shepherd that took out both his owner’s eyes, or the husky that ate her owner’s toes. 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.” Rumpelstiltskin sounds like a bold little survivalist to me.

  Somehow, a dog being anxious and overwhelmed makes us feel better about the whole corpse-eating thing. We develop bonds with our pets. We want them to be upset when we die, not licking their chops. But why do we have that expectation? Our pets eat dead animals, just like humans eat dead animals (okay fine, not you vegetarians). Many wild animals will also scavenge a corpse. Even some of the creatures we think of as the most skilled predators—lions, wolves, bears—will happily chow down if they encounter a dead animal in their territory. Especially if they’re starving. Food is food and you’re dead. Let them enjoy their meal and go about their lives, now with a slightly macabre pedigree. Viva Rumpelstiltskin!

  What would happen to an astronaut body in space?

  Two words, many problems: Space. Corpse.

  Like the vast reaches of space, the fate of an astronaut corpse is uncharted territory. So far, no individual has died of natural causes in space. There have been eighteen astronaut deaths, but all were caused by a bona fide space disaster. Space shuttle Columbia (seven deaths, broken apart due to structural failure), space shuttle Challenger (seven deaths, disintegrated during launch), Soyuz 11 (three deaths, air vent ripped open during descent, and the only deaths to have technically happened in space), Soyuz 1 (one death, capsule parachute failure during reentry). These were all large-scale calamities, with bodies recovered on Earth in various states of intactness. But we don’t know what would happen if an astronaut had a sudden heart attack, or an accident during a space walk, or choked on some of that freeze-dried ice cream on the way to Mars. “Umm, Houston, should we float him over to the maintenance closet or . . . ?”

  Before we talk about what would be done with a space corpse, let’s lay out what we suspect might happen if death occurred in a place with no gravity and no atmospheric pressure.

  Here’s a hypothetical situation. An astronaut, let’s call her Dr. Lisa, is outside the space station, puttering away on some routine repair. (Do astronauts ever putter? I assume everything they do has a specific, highly technical purpose. But do they ever spacewalk just to make sure everything looks tidy around the ol’ station?) All of a sudden, Lisa’s puffy white space suit is struck by a tiny meteorite, ripping a sizable hole.

  Unlike what you may have seen or read in science fiction, Lisa’s eyes won’t bulge out of her skull until she finally shatters in a blast of blood and icicles. Nothing so dramatic will occur. But Lisa will have to act quickly after her suit is breached, as she will lose consciousness in nine to eleven seconds. This is a weirdly specific, kind of creepy time frame. Let’s call it ten seconds. She has ten seconds to get herself back into a pressurized environment. But such a rapid decompression will likely send her into shock. Death will come to our poor putterer before she even knows what is happening.

  Most of the conditions that will kill Lisa come from the lack of air pressure in space. The human body is used to operating under the weight of the Earth’s atmosphere, which cradles us at all times like a planet-sized anti-anxiety blanket. From the moment that pressure disappears, the gases in Lisa’s body will begin to expand and the liquids will turn into gas. Water in her muscles will convert into vapor, which will collect under Lisa’s skin, distending areas of her body to twice their normal size. This will lead to a freaky Violet Beauregarde situation, but will not actually be her main issue in terms of survival. The lack of pressure will also cause nitrogen in her blood to form gas bubbles, causing her enormous pain, similar to what deep-water divers experience when they get the bends. When Dr. Lisa passes out in nine to eleven seconds, it will bring her merciful relief. She will continue floating and bloating, unaware of what is happening.

  As we pass the minute and a half mark, Lisa’s heart rate and blood pressure will plummet (to the point where her blood may begin to boil). The pressure inside and outside her lungs will be so different that her lungs will be torn, ruptured, and bleeding. Without immediate help, Dr. Lisa will asphyxiate, and we’ll have a space corpse on our hands. Remember, this what we think will happen. What little information we have comes from studies done in altitude chambers on unfortunate humans and even more unfortunate animals.

  The crew pulls Lisa back inside, but it’s too late to save her. RIP Dr. Lisa. Now, what should be done with her body?

  Space programs like NASA have been pondering this inevitability, although they won’t talk about it publicly. (Why are you hiding your space corpse protocol, NASA?) So, let me pose the question to you: should Lisa’s body come back to Earth or not? Here’s what would happen, based on what you decide.

  Yes, bring Lisa’s body back to Earth

  Decomposition can be slowed down in cold temperatures, so if Lisa is coming back to Earth (and the crew doesn’t want the effluents of a decomposing body escaping into the living area of the ship), they need to keep her as cool as possible. On the International Space Station, astronauts keep trash and food waste in the coldest part of the station. This puts the brakes on the bacteria that cause decay, which decreases food rot and helps the astronauts avoid unpleasant smells. So maybe this is where Lisa would hang out until a shuttle returned her to Earth. Keeping fallen space hero Dr. Lisa with the trash is not the best public relations move, but the station has limited room, and the trash area already has a cooling system in place, so it makes logistical sense to put her there.

  Yes, Lisa’s body should come back, but not right away

  What if Dr. Lisa dies of a heart attack on a long journey to Mars? In 2005, NASA collaborated with a small Swedish company called Promessa on a design prototype for a system that would process and contain space corpses. The prototype was called the Body Back. (“I’m bringing body back, returning corpses but they’re not intact.”)*

  If Lisa’s crew had a Body Back system on board, here’s how it would work. Her body would be placed in an airtight bag made of GoreTex and thrust into the shuttle’s airlock. In the airlock, the temperature of space (–270°C) would freeze Lisa’s body. After about an hour, a robotic arm would bring the bag back inside the shuttle and vibrate for fifteen minutes, shattering frozen Lisa into chunks. The chunks would be dehydrated, leaving about fifty pounds of dried Lisa-
powder in the Body Back. In theory, you could store Lisa in her powdered form for years before returning her to Earth and presenting her to her family just like you would a very heavy urn of cremated remains.

  Nope, Lisa should stay in space

  Who says Lisa’s body needs to come back to Earth at all? People are already paying $12,000 or more to have tiny, symbolic portions of their cremated remains or DNA launched into Earth’s orbit, to the surface of the moon, or out into deep space. How psyched do you think space nerds would be if they had the chance to float their whole dead body through space?

  After all, burial at sea has always been a respectful way to put sailors and explorers to rest, plopped over the side of the ship into the waves below. We continue the practice these days despite advances in onboard refrigeration and preservation technology. So, while we do have the technology to build robot arms to shatter and freeze-dry space corpses, perhaps we could employ the simpler option of wrapping Dr. Lisa in a body bag, space-walking her past the solar array, and letting her float away?

  Space seems vast and uncontrolled. We like to imagine that Dr. Lisa will drift forever into the void (like George Clooney in that space movie I watched on the plane that one time), but more likely she would just follow the same orbit as the shuttle. This would, perversely, turn her into a form of space trash. The United Nations has regulations against littering in space. But I doubt anyone would apply those regulations to Dr. Lisa. Again, no one wants to call our noble Lisa trash!

  Humans have struggled with this challenge before, with grim results. There are only a few climbable routes to climb to the top of Mount Everest’s 29,029-foot peak. If you die at that altitude (which almost three hundred people have done), it is dangerous for the living to attempt to bring your body down for burial or cremation. Today, dead bodies litter the climbing paths, and each year new climbers have to step over the puffy orange snowsuits and skeletonized faces of fellow climbers. This same thing could happen in space, where shuttles to Mars have to pass the orbiting corpse every trip. “Oh geez, there goes Lisa again.”