The ACTUAL process AFTER the body is no longer alive

What happens to your body after death?

A lot of videos I educate about are about how we live,

how the body goes through the dying process,

but I don't really talk about what happens to the body

after it dies.

This video is going to do just that.

So, what happens immediately to your body

after it dies?

It relaxes,

like I've been saying,

hence why people urinate,

have bowel movements,

sometimes have fluid come up their nose or out of their eyes or nose,

ear,

I mean,

all of the things in your body that are holding fluids in.

Relax.

That's why death can be messy sometimes. After someone dies,

not always,

but sometimes the body relaxes so much,

it releases

all of its fluid.

So, I like to talk about it,

so people aren't surprised if that happens,

very normal

and to be expected sometimes.

The second thing that happens,

and you probably have noticed this,

the body temperature drops.

Now,

I have noticed personally,

just through seeing a lot of dead bodies,

that people's bodies are different.

Some people will start getting cooler

immediately.

Some people take a while,

maybe an hour,

maybe an hour and a half,

it just depends.

But their body temperature will drop.

Technically speaking,

the body temperature should drop about 1.5

degrees Fahrenheit per hour to eventually match whatever the

temperature is in the room that they're in.

One thing that I think people don't know that happens is

all of the blood will pool downward towards the ground.

So,

if you let someone

lie there for long enough,

which we do sometimes,

you don't have to hurry up and make sure your loved one leaves the house.

So, they're at the house,

the body will be laying there and if you turn them,

you will notice usually the back of their legs,

the whole backside of them will look purple or darker.

That's because all their blood is pulling

down,

gravity is pulling it down,

so they will eventually get, have like a darker color tone of skin

on their backside.

Now,

the one thing that everyone knows that What happens is the stiffening of the body,

the rigor mortis.

People always have questions about this.

When does it happen?

Why does it happen?

So, here it is.

Rigor mortis or the stiffening of the body

usually takes place within like 1 to 2 hours after death and then

worsens and then loosens over the next like 24 to 30 hours.

I have seen people become very stiff almost immediately after death,

like a few minutes after death,

and other people,

their body takes longer,

so it just depends,

but there is a stiffening of the muscles.

First,

it'll be in the smaller muscles like your eyes,

your face,

then your neck,

then gradually you'll stiffen throughout your trunk

and your body going to your extremities,

hands,

fingertips,

toes.

So, why does rigor mortis happen?

It happens because your body's metabolism stops and it could no longer produce ATP,

which is adenosine triphosphate,

which is a mouthful for me to say,

but it's the body's cellular energy.

I want to be very accurate about this.

I'm just gonna read it for you.

So, it says here,

ATP is necessary to break the cross bridges between actin and myosin,

two muscle proteins that contract and relax to allow muscles to move.

When ATP levels drop,

actin and myosin filaments bind together and contract permanently,

causing muscles to stiffen and lose elasticity.

This is hard for me to read.

There you have it.

That's what rigor mortis says.

So,

rigor mortis

starts from time of death and then

goes

over the next 24 to 36 hours,

and then eventually the body loosens again,

so the body does not stay stiff the whole time.

One thing I'd like to mention that most

people don't realize that after someone dies,

they become very,

very heavy.

So, cleaning them on your own after they die would be almost impossible,

I guess,

unless you're much bigger than the person who died,

then you probably could.

But they are very heavy,

so you will likely need help to move them,

change them,

wash them if that's what you plan on doing.

So, like I said,

after a day or so after death,

the body does loosen again.

The body's tissues relax and it causes the stiffness to break down.

Usually by this time,

the person's body is in the mortuary,

and then depending on what you as a family wanted to

do with the body is how the mortuary will move forward,

whether that's embalming,

cremation,

there are green burials,

it just depends.

In a world where people didn't have access to a

mortuary or a healthcare system and they just died naturally,

our bodies are built

to after death,

decompose,

and this is how the body would do that.

So, there are four key stages to decomposition of a body.

So, the first stage is called hypostasis.

This I actually already spoke about.

This is when the person dies

shortly after 1 to 2 hours,

their blood vessels will collapse and start to pool downwards towards gravity,

towards the earth.

This causes them to have their blood pool at the bottom or the

back of them and causes like a purplish brownish color to happen

at the back of their body.

It can almost look like one big bruise.

Now,

it's not a bruise,

but it could look like one.

The second stage is called algor mortis.

This is when the body follows the Newton laws of cooling,

which I talked about before,

where it drops in like about 1 to 1.5 degrees

every hour until it matches the temperature of the room.

It takes about 12 hours for the body to feel cool to the touch and 24

to actually be cool to its core.

So, the core temperature of the body

will actually match

whatever room they're in.

The third stage is called autolysis,

also called self-digestion.

Basically,

enzymes begin to break down oxygen-deprived tissue.

This process actually begins and starts only several minutes after death.

The last process is called putrefaction,

and it usually starts between 4 to 10 days after death.

This is when gasses start being released,

so there's an odor,

there would be discoloration of the skin and the body.

black putrefaction occurs between 10 to 20 days after death.

When the exposed skin turns black,

there could be some bloating and fluids are released from the body.

So, this is the part where the body is literally decompensating

and

how we would die and how the body would die before we had things like mortuaries.

So, it's a very normal thing.

However,

since we really aren't exposed to it,

and when we are,

it's usually from some kind of dramatic ending where someone finds

a body,

things like that.

But this is a natural part of the body decomposing.

So that is the natural process of what happens to a body if we

didn't take it to a mortuary to be embalmed or to be cremated.

That's why I think it's so important to know

what you'd want

with your loved one.

What do you want after you die?

There are different options besides cremation

or embalming,

burials.

There's green burials.

There's all different options out there for us.

It's just important to be informed and to know what you want.