10 Things You Didn't Know About Death

1. SORRY, YOU CAN’T GO BACK. Medically, death is usually defined as the event when an organism’s life functions stop: an irreversible cessation of brain and body activities.
In practical terms, death comes when our heart stops beating; we stop breathing, and all higher brain functions turn off. All systems are no-go. There are legal issues regard-ing more precise definitions, such as exactly when death is death and not a persistent vegetative state, in which the body is kept artificially “alive” in the sense of cellular exchange and the continuance of lower life functions.

2. MANY WAYS TO SAY GOODBYE. How we handle our departed varies greatly from culture to culture, as do attitudes and cus-toms surrounding our farewells. Every culture has rituals for the respectful disposition and memorialization of its deceased. No true civilization casually throws its dead away.
Funerals are for the living. They provide a way to say goodbye. All cultures share principles for this goodbye. All follow group ritual; all have sacred burial or disposal places; all memorialize the departed. Even the Neanderthals (50,000—60,000 B.C.) had burial grounds with bodies deco-rated with animal horns or antlers and the remains of flowers.
A funeral confirms the reality and finality of an individ-ual’s existence. It gives us a chance to express grief, to create a temporary community of sorrow, uniting those left behind into one family—perhaps for the only time in their lives.
Funerals provide an opportunity for family and friends to share emotional support, and they teach mourners to face their loss by expressing their feelings.

3. TRADITION, TRADITION. In ancient Greek, Jewish, and Ro-man funerals, the deceased was not embalmed but washed in warm water, sometimes with olive oil. Often the cleansing was done by women of the family. Romans and Greeks might mod-estly adorn the deceased. But in Jewish tradition, the deceased was (and usually still is) wrapped unadorned in a simple white shroud and buried in a plain pine coffin. All three cultures prac-ticed burial in ground that was considered holy. Romans pre-pared their dead for burial by first closing their eyes and placing coins on them, and placing a coin in the mouth to guarantee fare across the River Styx. Then—depending on social class and level of wealth—family members or slaves washed the body for several days with warm water and anointed it with olive oil and perfumes. In the fourth century B.C., cremation became more common than burial. Funerals were often held at night to re-duce the likelihood of unwanted crowds or rowdiness.

4. DEATH AMERICAN STYLE. Sometimes called the father of modern embalming, Dr. Thomas Holmes of New York was an Army Medical Corps captain during the Civil War. He and his staff embalmed some 4,000 KIAs. President Lincoln appreciated the role embalming played in returning the Union dead home in a dignified and sanitary manner. Em-balming was rare for Confederate dead.
Dr. Holmes quickly saw potential in the funeral business, and he left the military to provide civilian embalming ser-vices at $100 a pop—far better than Army pay. Historical aside: Once the war was over, since there were far fewer dead people—and also fewer trained embalmers—many under-takers reverted to preserving corpses with ice.

5. BURN MY WIFE—PLEASE. In some cultures, suicide was re-spectful funeral etiquette. In ancient Japan, slaves committed seppuku (ritual suicide) to honor their dead master. (Clearly, employee retention was not a high priority.) In Fiji, besides wives and slaves, friends of the deceased were strangled to join him in death. To Western eyes, the Hindu custom of suttee (wife burning) seems really sick—even for those of us who have had difficult marriages. The widow had to don her finest outfit, then recline alongside her late husband on the funeral pyre while their eldest son torched them to paradise.
Fire has a close connection with death. Primitive tribes often burned bodies to destroy evil spirits lurking therein. Zulus even burn possessions of the deceased to keep evil spirits away. Other tribes set a ring of fire around the de-ceased to scorch death spirits and prevent them from attack-ing mourners. Zoroastrians—fire lovers—preferred to let their dead rot or even be eaten by vultures. Fire was too sacred to use for a lowly purpose; burying a decaying corpse was considered insulting to Mother Earth.

6. GENDER DISCRIMINATION AFTER DEATH. For better or worse, dead males in some cultures have been treated differ-ently from dead females. Primitive examples: the Cochieans buried women but hung men from trees. The Ghonds buried women and cremated men. The Bongas buried men facing north, women facing south. OK, have you ever heard of Co-chieans, Ghonds, or Bongas? Clue.
We have inherited many funeral customs from distant ancestors, including wardrobe hints. Some ancient societies, when saying farewell to their fellows, thought they could keep death spirits away from themselves with clever disguises. If they really believed they could fool the spirits with a quick change of clothes, pagans must have considered them either stupid or myopic.
The face is where eating and breathing happen, so most ancient cultures assumed that our life force leaves through the mouth. When someone became gravely ill, they sometimes tried to trap the life spirit inside the patient by clamping his mouth and nose shut—which surely killed far more people than it helped. Bad bedside manner.

7. RELIVING THE PAST. Overeating at funerals began in an-cient times, when food offerings were made as an affirma-tion of life. Wakes echo the custom of watching over the deceased, hoping they will “wake” and come back to life. Candles are a variation of the use of fire to protect the living from the spirits. Bell-ringing stems from a medieval belief that spirits are frightened away by the ringing of a conse-crated bell.
Military funerals include a rif le volley fired over the de-ceased hero. What are they shooting at? Probably the same evil spirits that our ancestors tried to chase away by heaving spears or shooting arrows. And why do we offer wreaths at funerals? To wrap around the spirit of the dead and keep it from entering us. Why a determined Death would be so eas-ily fooled by flowers has never been explained.

8. MUMMY DEAREST. The historian Cassius wrote that the Egyptians developed embalming as a solution to the problem of the regular Nile River f loods, which would exhume the dead. They apparently understood—although they had no specific knowledge of pathogens—that f loating cadavers caused illness and death.
Egyptian embalmers were priests, whose embalming success was due largely to Egypt’s hot dry climate. Flesh decomposes via bacterial action, and heat and aridity thwart bacterial survival and growth.
The Egyptians practiced three methods of embalming (too gruesome to outline here) based on the wealth of the individual—not unlike funeral directors today. All after-life functions took place within the necropolis (“city of the dead”), a walled enclosure that was off limits to the average Hosep. Within those walls were the embalmers, coffin mak-ers, cosmetic artists, and burial crypts.

9. WHY EMBALM? The main reason is to avoid infection and disease spread through decomposition. Although some patho-gens die soon after their host, others survive for long periods in dead tissue. Anyone touching an unembalmed body can become infected. Also, flies and worms can be vectors to spread disease among humans with whom they come in contact.
Embalming also protects the deceased from putrefaction while arrangements are completed for burial, cremation, or entombment. Unembalmed corpses are not good company. There is also the issue of restoration, which offers the psy-chological value of emotional closure for friends and relatives who want one last look at the departed in a state of natural-looking peacefulness.

10.MORE THAN YOU WANT TO KNOW. Once embalmers became competent, there was much less rush to burial. Mourners had more time for funeral arrangements. Early embalming prepara-tions were arsenic solutions, later replaced by formaldehyde.
Just as they do today, nineteenth and early twentieth-cen-tury drug reps ran wild across the country. Embalming fluid companies sent salesmen to give one- or two-day seminars on their product. Anyone who took the training sessions and agreed to buy a certain amount of the embalming fluid was automatically certified as a qualified embalmer. This snake-oil approach to mortuary science lasted well into the twentieth century, when states took over the licensing process.