A lot of us agree that death is an extremely sad, yet very natural thing that happens, while a few of us are extreme optimists who view death as our next great adventure, but nearly all of us can probably agree that death is fascinating. While we understand what constitutes a person “dead”, and we’re pretty sure our life does in fact flash before our eyes in our final moments, we certainly don’t know things like what death feels like or what happens after we die. While we aren’t here to answer those hard-hitting questions today, we have come to you with some morbid facts about death and dying and frankly, we have more questions than ever now.
Well, let’s get things going with decapitation! After you or someone else has been decapitated, you or the other person, actually remain conscious for a solid 20 seconds. And while 20 seconds may not seem like a very long time in most situations, we have a feeling that 20 seconds without a head probably feels like a lifetime.
Death has a distinct aroma and there are two gases that are responsible for that: putrescine and cadaverine. These gases are produced when bacteria break down the amino acids known as ornithine and lysine.
We’ve never even stopped to consider and ask ourselves about our five senses when we pass on. We suppose that’s because we just thought we lost them all at the same time, but as it turns out, your sense of hearing is the last to go. And we don’t know how to feel about that.
Trigger warning: major ick. People used to believe that the blood of well, recently expired people if you will, was some sort of health tonic and would pay executioners a few coins to drink it. Warm. Fresh from the gallows.
Let’s just say someone was murdered and the corpse has been laying wherever for X amount of time, but nobody has an exact timeline or even an idea of when the person passed. That’s where forensic scientists come in, they study the species of insects on the body, then they can actually tell us how long it’s been since death. So yeah, forensic science is pretty awesome.
We’ve probably all heard the term “six feet under” and we just know that the conversation has turned, well, toward death and possibly quite morbid, but where did the term come from? Well, the idea that graves needed to be 6 feet deep actually comes from a plague outbreak that occurred in the mid-1660s. The mayor of London at the time declared that this was the exact depth a grave needed to be to prevent, or rather limit, the spread of disease.