You may think you know what happens after you expire, but there are a lot of shocking
post-mortem possibilities you might not expect.
From perfectly normal to downright bizarre, these things really can happen to your body
after you expire.
Movies often make passing look quick.
Passing characters might rasp words emphatically or wordlessly gasp dramatically in their final
moments…
"Oh my."
...but once they expire, they basically become paperweights.
Real one, on the other hand, sometimes cling to life long after they're officially lifeless.
Their brains are passed, yet their hearts and other organs seem to function unencumbered.
Without a working brain stem, breathing and other bodily processes should stop.
However, in the 1950s, physicians began noticing that some of the patients they'd deemed alive
were actually brain passed, and such cases became known as beating heart ones.
And this phenomenon has nothing to do with the advent of ventilators or other medical
devices.
Long before such life support devices existed, flummoxed physicians learned that certain
patients' hearts pumped for hours after passing.
While these occurrences are rare, UCLA neurologist Alan Shewmon dug up 175 separate examples
of bodies whose functions kept going for more than a week after expiring.
One reportedly functioned for two decades.
So rather than resting in peace once you pass, pieces of you may stubbornly insist on living.
Mortality can hinge on seconds.
If your heart stops long enough, so does the rest of you.
So once your ticker quits, the end generally comes quickly, but not always.
"He says he's not passed!"
"Yes, he is."
"I'm not!"
"He isn't!"
"Well, he will be soon.
He's very ill."
"I'm getting better!"
"No, you're not.
You'll be stone passed in a moment."
For example there was 78-year-old Walter Williams who had seemingly breathed his last breath
on a Wednesday night in March 2014.
"The coroner says he checked the pulse around nine o'clock Wednesday night, and pronounced
Williams passed at his home in Lexington, with no heartbeat."
But Williams had a surprise up his sleeve.
Evidently unimpressed with passing, he started writhing in his body bag.
The best guess is that Williams' heart somehow restarted because of a defibrillator he had
implanted in his chest.
"And at 2:30 my cousin called me, and said, 'Not yet.'
I said, 'What do you mean "not yet"?'
He said, 'Dad is still here.'"
Williams might have had help from hidden jumper cables, but some resurrections can't be explained
as easily.
In 2013, ABC recounted the unlikely revival of 37-year-old Anthony Yahle.
"There was no spontaneous blood pressure or pulse.
And with very heavy hearts, we had to stop, and we pronounced him, actually, passed."
Yahle's heart stopped for a total of 45 minutes.
But just when it seemed that the Reaper completed another harvest, Yahle returned to the land
of the living without explanation.
Even if your heart doesn't go on like the theme from Titanic, your body might still
show signs of after-life.
For instance, your brain may remain functional long enough to realize that you expired.
A survey of over 2,000 cardiac arrest survivors conducted by the Stony Brook University School
of Medicine suggested that people who come back from the great beyond can sometimes recall
resuscitation.
In other words, multiple patients who technically passed away stayed awake after their fate
was apparently sealed.
To clarify, these weren't people whose hearts simply took an extended break from beating.
All signs of life as we recognize them had ceased.
Regardless, temporary bodies could vividly remember the measures taken to rescue them.
This raises unsettling questions about what it means to expire.
What if some supposed stiffs are only mostly passed?
While all these rare occurrences may make passing seem like an illusion, decomposition
shows otherwise.
Not all bodies become compost, though.
Through the magic of morbid chemistry, some of them turn into soap.
Cadaver fat sometimes interacts with bacteria during a process called saponification.
The result is a soap-like or waxy substance called adipocere that envelops the body and
allows human remains to remain relatively intact as a kind of soap mummy.
Rather than merely rotting, your body could become a cleaning product or candle wax.
Which, according to Scientific American, actually happened in 18th century France.
When bodies rot, they also cool down.
Except for when they don't.
In numerous harrowing instances throughout history, rather than losing heat, the departed
actually get warmer.
The phenomenon is called postmortem hyperthermia, and no one's been able to explain it.
Old-timey physicians used to fear that sudden temperature spikes in bodies would lead to
spontaneous combustion.
It didn't happen, but science still hasn't figured out the cause of the rare bodies warmth.
Neither the room temperature nor the cadaver's state of dress seem be factors.
Certain internal stressors like substance use and trauma might play a role, but if so
then no one knows exactly how.
Some theorize it could have something to do with the bacteria left in the body after passing,
but so far no one's been able to prove anything.
All we know for sure is that when it comes to passing, some like it hot.
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