NewPhilosopherdoing, gave you that moment of draw-
ing of breath thinking, “Gosh, this is
something I’m never going to experi-
ence again”, because your first inter-
action with somebody who gives you
that explicit permission is really quite
daunting, and you feel the weight on
your shoulders.
It is a real growing up moment, a
real moment of maturity, an under-
standing and relationship between
you and that dead person. And then
when you first start to cut into the
skin of that dead person, again the re-
lationship changes. By the time you’re
a week into the dissection, you’re in
a different relationship with them
again, because you’re coming back
and you’re revisiting the details and
intimacy of their anatomy that no-
body else will understand. And when
you get to the end of the relationship
with them and you know that you
have dissected them to the full, that
knowledge that they have enabled to
transfer into your head is something
that you will carry with you for the
rest of your life.
Due to your work, you’ve seen death
very differently to the rest of us. We see
people as being alive, and then they are
dead; whereas you’ve seen the stages of
post-mortem alteration that bodies go
through from pallor mortis to skeletoni-
sation. Can you give a brief outline of
this process and how long it takes to pass
through the stages?
There is unfortunately no simple
answer to that, but I’m going to try
and keep it as simple as I can because
all of the different stages of decompo-
sition go all the way from the moment
you die, right through to the point at
which there are no remains left. And
effectively the elements that were
used to build us return to the earth, or
whatever environment – if we’re cre-
mated, they’re returned to the atmos-
phere. So, there is a very long cycle in
there, but within that long cycle there
are patches where things work a lit-
tle bit quicker. So, for example, once
you start dying, the body is going to
already start to change, and the actual
death itself is an event which can be
pretty well captured in a moment,but of course the dying process can
be quite protracted, where the body
is shutting down and effectively the
organs have started to die before the
individual is dead. When you look at
the concept of ‘a person is now dead’,
one of the first things that will happen
is of course the heart will stop beat-
ing and the lungs stop operating, so no
longer are the tissues getting the oxy-
gen that they require and the bacteria
will initiate decomposition. What will
happen first of all is that our bodies
will start to cool, or if the ambient
temperature is warmer than where we
are it will actually start to warm up. So,
the temperature will start to change.
What will also happen is, because the
heart is no longer beating, the blood
will start to pool and will start to set-
tle – it changes in colour. And then the
biochemistry kicks in and our muscles
now start to go into a period of con-
traction. All of these levels of change
of temperature, change of colour,
change of body structure, will happen
in a period that may be very swift in
some circumstances but may actuallyThe other side of life