What part of your body takes the longest to die after you do? And what color does that
body part turn after death?! Keep watching to see what happens to your eyes after you die.
Novelist Rick Yancey wrote in his book "The Infinite Sea,"
"When you look death in the eye and death blinks first, nothing seems impossible."
But what if you blink first? In the existential staring contest between life and death,
one can only ward off the harrowing glare of the reaper for so long.
One day, you will blink before he does. We all die, after all. But before your eyes close for
the last time, they will have accomplished some extraordinary feats of information delivery.
According to an article from MIT, the human brain is capable of processing
an image that the eye sees in as little as 13 milliseconds.
Mary Potter, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences, writes,
"What vision does is find concepts. That's what the
brain is doing all day long — trying to understand what we're looking at."
Those are things we know for certain about the functioning eye,
but what about the non-functioning eye? What happens when this supremely complex organic
mechanism starts to shut down after death? The corneas, the transparent outer layer of the eye,
are viable for transplant for up to 14 days after someone dies,
though most transplants take place within a week, according to the Eye Bank Association of America.
By comparison, Donor Alliance reports that hearts and lungs have a window of four to six hours;
livers, between eight and 12 hours, and kidneys, 24 to 36 hours.
It's common to describe a living person as having "dead eyes" or a "lifeless gaze," but
what does that even mean? Ask yourself how many pairs of dead human eyes you've actually seen.
Unless you're a coroner or a crime scene investigator, odds are it's not that many.
But it's common knowledge that there's a difference in the eyes after someone passes on.
Forensic pathologist Dr. Judy Melinek explained to The Healthy,
"Many people die with their eyes open, and when the whites of the eyes start to dry out they turn
blue or gray. This is called 'tache noir' and is frequently part of forensic board examinations."
The clouding effect on the cornea starts to set in just a couple hours after someone dies.
The cornea becomes increasingly opaque over the course of the days immediately after death,
the Review of Optometry reports. Over time, the eyeballs will eventually start to recess back
into the skull once all reflexes and blood flow to them have been cut off, so that "sunken" look
is quite literally a result of the eyes sinking back into their sockets, according to My Health.
It's kind of like when you haven't slept much and your eyes look puffy, shrouded, and dark.
The Review of Optometry also notes that potassium levels in the eyes of the deceased
differ from those in the rest of the body. The breakdown and release of
potassium happens in the blood, but occurs more predictably and slowly in the eyes.
Analyzing that information from the eyes can help officials approximate someone's time of death.
"Funduscopic examination!" "Funduscopic examination!"
There are actually a series of things experts can determine about how somebody died and the
circumstances leading up to their death by examining their eyes. For instance,
by studying the level of opaqueness that has consumed a dead person's cornea, scientists
can approximate how long it has been since that person died. Review of Optometry explains that
if the eyes are only slightly tinted, odds are it's only been a few hours since their passing.
However, if there's hardly any translucency left, it could have been days since the person's death.
The eyes can provide information about someone's cause of death that other parts of the deceased
anatomy do not. Petechial hemorrhages are tiny capillary ruptures that appear in both the
conjunctiva and eyelids when a person has been strangled. For example, if a coroner
observes several of these, they could conclude that a person was killed by strangulation,
though it could indicate other causes, too. Dr. Randy Hanzlick told Review of Optometry,
"They're caused by an increase in the hydrostatic pressure in the capillaries.
You can see them in many forms of asphyxia, like strangulation or chest compression, but you can
also see them if there's a [build-up of] pressure from heart failure or a sudden cardiac death."