Nobody has died of old age in the USA for the past half century. That category of cause of death was eliminated in 1951.
Now everyone must die "from" something.
There is only one real cause of death, oxygen starvation. The cause of death on death certificates is really the cause of the cause, the cause of cell death due to oxygen starvation.
The practice of burying the dead goes back at least 350,000 years. A site in Atapuerca, Spain, 45 feet below the surface, held 27 hominids. These are likely of the species Homo heidelbergensis, a possible common ancestor of both Neanderthals and modern humans.
One study turned up at least 200 English euphemisms for death, including "to be in Abraham's bosom" and "just add maggots." I have no idea if the latter is shortened to JAM, but I would be surprised if I was the first to notice.
A favourite of Star Trek fans is to "sleep with the Tribbles."
We all know that bacteria and other microorganisms eat dead flesh, and TV murder fans know that one kind of fly begins to lay its eggs in or on the body of a dead person within minutes of death. It seems to be less well known that the intestinal enzymes that help us to digest our food when we are alive begin to digest the rest of our body within three days of death.
Cells that rupture after death become attractive food for bacteria that live in our gut. (It is estimated that our bodies are really symbionts, as more microorganisms live within us in symbiotic relationships with our body cells—we can't exist without them—than we have of our own body cells.)
Bodies of people that drown or are thrown into water after being killed, then remain in that water, become bloated with noxious gas and float to the surface. This explains why most drowning deaths eventually produce dead bodies at the surface of the water.
The eyes tend to bulge out with the rest of the bloating, giving rise to the bulging eyes we see in Halloween masks or scary movies.
While we may think that only pharaohs and rich nobles were mummified in ancient Egypt, mummification was more popular than that. During the building of a railway in Egypt during the late 19<sup>th</sup> century, unearthed mummies were so common that they were used as fuel for locomotives.
Every museum around the world who wanted a mummy could buy one cheap.
During the First World War, Egyptian mummies were shipped to European countries where they were unwrapped and the cloth used like paper during the paper shortage. The rest of the bodies were burned as fuel.
All of our body cells are programmed to commit suicide at the right time so that they can be flushed and replaced with new cells. As we age, not enough new cells form and the DNA strands in the cells that do become shorter. Which DNA information gets lost from the ends of DNA strands varies, according to recent studies, but you may be able to make some astute guesses.
Some body cells commit suicide before we are born. If they didn't, we would all be born with webbed feet, like ducks (with webbing between the toes, as a surprisingly large number of people have—about one in ten). That prehensile tail you have heard about that forms on embryos during the second trimester is consumed well before the time of birth—that is, before the embryo is "viable."
That Massachusetts doctor who weighed a body immediately before death, in 1907, then weighed it immediately after death, to find that the difference was 21 grams (which many have since claimed to be proof of a human soul, or at least the weigh thereof) has been proven to have been mistaken.
Some people still maintain that the ultimate breath of a dying person is the one where the soul leaves the body through exhalation.
In 19<sup>th</sup> century Europe, there were so many claims that living people were buried alive because attendants thought they were dead that "hospitals for the dead" were set up to await proof of death (in the form of putrefaction).
Most of the stories you have heard about scratch marks on the insides of caskets of people who were dug up days or weeks after death in North America in past centuries are not true. Most originated in the days when unmarried women were accused of being witches, burned at the stake, then buried. Curious folks dug up some and devised the stories to show that witches really could return from the dead.
More people commit suicide in New York City each year than are murdered. (When have you read an editorial insisting that something be done about that, the way they proliferate about involvement in Iraq?)
One estimate puts the number of humans who have died since our species distinguished itself from our primate cousins at one billion. To put that into perspective, more people than that live in India (about 1.1 billion) and China (about 1.3 billion) today.
(Source: most of this came from Discover, September 2006 issue)
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to teach the living and stop the killing.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
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Comments: 34
Apparently we have trouble with the words "die" and "death" and even "dead" when it comes to people. People believe these words have a finality about them that they don't want to accept. In other words, some people believe (whether they admit it or not) that if they say someone has "died" they may thereby destroy the possibility that the deceased may have a life after death.
That's superstition. Like all superstitions, it doesn't make sense. If the superstition were true, that would give people the power of God.
Don't think so.
Wow, you must have awakened in rare spirits this morning. I enjoyed this, in a macabre kind of way. However, I must point out that the common saying"Saved by the bell" originated in England, from the practice of placing a string in a coffin, before burying, attached to a bell, so if the "deceased" were not truly dead, he could pull the string, ringing the bell, and thusly, dug up. It was apparantly a fairly common occurrance.
Most physicians list "cardio-respiratory failure" as the cause of death for "natural" deaths on death certificates
A person in a coffin would have died of asphyxiation before they woke up to ring the bell.
The wake, however, was originally a "wait" while family and friends waited a respectable period in case the "dead" person awoke. That kidn of wake would not last long because putrefaction would begin and the body would smell.
North American parlours came to be called "living rooms" when the morticians opened funeral parlours, thus relieving family members of keeping the body in the parlour duriong the wake. Parlours were rarely used, but they became commonly used areas of a house when they would never hold dead bodies and were then called living rooms.
Thanks for the clarification. I have pictures of my Grandpa, in his coffin in my Granny's parlour. He passed in '63.
Marsha, I will have to see if Six Feet Under is also being shown on one of the Canadian channels. Unless it's purposefully black humour. I don't get Bravo.
More superstitions surrounded death, over our history, than for any other reason, I believe. Death or the risk of death.
Exactly! I've seen a lot of them, working in a nursing home, one deals death certificates fairly often. (getting them signed by the doc).
My favourite is "passed" or "passed on." People who have no certain belief about what happens to us after death use these terms.
And, while I am in near-rant mode, why don't people who believe that their loved ones have "gone to a better place" celebrate their good fortune, rather than grieving for them? When you think about it, it's either selfish or they don't believe in that better place.
Perhaps death is a greater lingering mystery than life.
And as to Parlours and such: The transfer of the dead from homes to funeral homes had a huge impact on home design. Homes used to have much larger front doors -- so that a casket could be brought in to the house. Funny how now a dead body IN a home might actually decrease the marketability of the home - and not too long ago nearly every home in America had come in contact with a dead person.....
Donna, what do you do in NH's?
Now, I'm still waiting to hear from someone who is really pissed off by something I have written. I'll go have a nap while I ma waiting.
You had better have suicidal cells, Anna. You would be one stinking mess if your cells didn't have a self-cleaning mechanism.
What makes the risk of change worse where death is concerned, is that they don't know where their loved one has gone (they can't "touch" the next life) and they feel that they may suffer from the loss of the loved one from their own life. Witness how often people comfort each other at their "time of loss." In a sense, it's like losing part of their personal wealth.
Of course, part of the real wealth of a person is their loved ones. And making more of them is often impossible.
To make others feel better? I think people would feel better if they knew as much as science knows today than they get from religious "helpers."
So many people are interested in how science differs from religion (both sides help this schism by attributing the most outrageous things to the other side). They seem to know very little about how very much science has accomplished to support some religious beliefs.
We do this in our personal lives, some of us. When we meet a new person, we wonder how that person is different from us, instead of how that person is much the same as we are.
I greet a stranger as a potential new friend. Some people greet strangers as the spawn of the devil, bound to poison their lives and their community. (uh oh! rant--I was the one dissenting comment in a thread on Gather today about how immigrants, especially illegal ones, were bringing down the US)
The funny thing is, of course, that this trend toward euphemisms is so strong that historically speaking, the English verb "to die" is a euphemism itself. The old English verb for kicking the bucket was "steorfan", related to German "sterben" (to die), which went on to give us "starve". "Die" seems to have been borrowed from Danish as a euphemism...
Thanks Jenna. Comments enhance Gather articles so much, especially with the astute people who read mine.
Death is a mystery so difficult for the living to accept. Religion and literature are so absorbed in explaining the here and the hereafter.
The last paragraph of this article seems a bit astounding. Perhaps it may need some corroboration.
Dolphi, I read recently (and can't locate the source now) that we grow a complete new skin every 28 days (or so) and shed well over 1000 pounds of skin over a lifetime of 70 years. Most house dust is composed of human skin.
Thanks for the explanation, Beany. We try to keep the articles and comments informative.