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I dissected the dead in med school, and I've worked as a TA in anatomy class afterwards. Several close family members have died recently. I cared for my mother when she became terminally ill, and ultimately had to watch her die. I had my share of contact with death, and I'm only prefacing this to show where I'm coming from.

When a person dies, what made them a person is suddenly gone. What remains is a lifeless shell. I never saw a dead body that looked like it was "just sleeping". It may sound callous to some, but dead people are not people. It's a little bit different in the US though, compared to the EU, where I come from. Over here, funeral homes do not go to heroic lengths in order to cosmetically make a dead body appear lifelike again. But overall I stand by my opinion that it takes an extraordinary effort to look at the dead and not see that the person who lived there is not inside anymore.

Contrast this to the article, where dead people are being talked about as if they were still alive. I suspect these wishes of taking care of dead bodies of loved ones comes from an inability to recognize what death actually is. To me, passages of this article read as if the dead somehow required nursing and comfort.

There are many good reasons why it's a good idea to use the services funeral homes provide. First off, I am very suspicious that following such a huge loss, handling the dead body of a relative is a good idea psychologically. I am very grateful I did not have to do this when family members died. Even in cultures where families are expected to take care of their own dead, usually outside people from the village come in to help with the actual process.

Most importantly though, a lot of dead bodies pose a public health risk, especially those of older people with a history of hospitalization. I would be very concerned about multiresistant infections such as MRSA. It's not safe for family members to handle these bodies.

>When a person dies, what made them a person is suddenly gone. What remains is a lifeless shell

This is a quite convenient thought conforming to our current pro-death culture.

Information that is stored in the cell connection structure of the mammal brain isn't irreversibly destroyed at the moment of death, as one of the many similar studies shows [1] . There are existing methods to preserve some (possibly large) part of this information lots of HN readers have probably heard about. Knowing these facts and being really honest with ourselves we will have to conclude that the final death of the individual occurs when this information-storing fine tissue structure of him disintegrates into unstructured matter. The question becomes then - who, by his indifference or by his profession lets this disintegration process run to its end.

Perhaps future generations will look down on us for perpetuating such barbaric customs that lead to rotting of uncountable millions of people into nothingness.

1. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v521/n7552/full/nature1...

Boy am I the wrong person to attack on this. I'm absolutely with you on the idea that we should be working harder on preserving, restoring, and - where possible - functionally reconstituting viable brains (of people who wish it).

As a tangent, because the context applies: I would be totally fine, in fact I would prefer it, to wake up one day having changed substrate from biological matter to living in silico. However, most people would absolutely not be. I know for a fact that my mother and grandmother would have been horrified by the mere suggestion. It's not for everybody, but at the same time I believe it's exceptionally important to have that option as an individual.

> Information that is stored in the cell connection structure of the mammal brain isn't irreversibly destroyed at the moment of death, as one of the many similar studies shows

That's irrelevant. We cannot access that information, so it's presence makes no difference. Once I die, all that's left to humanity at that point is a bunch of meat which I used to control. I can no longer do it, and while most of who I was is probably still stored there, nobody can access it, so either burning the body, or eating it, or whatever makes no difference.

IMHO, bodies of the dead should be treated as resources. People need to learn to cope with death, since we're not cavemen any more, and we can't still believe treating the body differently will change that (at least not until we have a lot more tech).

On the other hand, we know that just a few minutes of hypoxia produces irreversible brain damage. The brain is a delicate organ and begins decaying immediately at the point of death, with massive loss of information.
Yes and no. Most hypoxic brain damage occurs in the form of re-perfusion injuries. If that cascade could somehow be halted, prolonged anoxic episodes would not necessarily lead to the cell death landslides we see today after strokes and cardiac arrests. While anoxia most certainly depolarizes the whole structure, leading to the loss of whatever is currently in short term memory, the more permanent structures of the brain should survive episodes of maybe an hour or more, if we could only stop the apoptosis triggers from happening as soon as blood flow is restored.
This is super interesting. Links or other sources?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ischemic_cascade

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excitotoxicity

http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1161422-overview

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2841970/

The status quo of efforts basically discards the totally anoxic tissue after a stroke, focussing on protecting the (often large) partially perfused border region. This is what's practical now, but the fight about the totally ischemic core regions is far from over.

It's a race between anoxic necrosis (which is the point of no return, where passive cell dissolution happens) and active cell death cascades that are triggered in the fully or partially reperfused cell. The latter one can potentially be halted, the first one leads to irreversible information loss. What the actual timing windows are on both of these in the human brain is subject to active research and the view on them is likely to change over the coming years.

I posted links mainly to stroke and TBI-relevant articles, because that's where the research happens. However it's important to keep in mind that the fully dead brain is relatively static, whereas damaged areas in the living brain are subject to internal "cleanup" mechanisms pretty much right away. In this context, prolonged cardiac arrest might turn out to be preferrable to a stroke.

Thanks you for the link!
On the other hand, butterflies remember things from their caterpillar lives, after their brains turned to mush.
Requiring professional handling of dead people has certain benefits. It reduces the chance of infection (a lot of people in West Africa caught Ebola at funerals last year), and it probably also makes it more difficult for suspicious deaths to go unnoticed. Poisoned your uncle to get his money? The funeral director might call the police.

So it makes sense for professionals to get involved at least in the early hours after death, even if only to ensure that the body will not trigger an epidemic. But most of the rest of what we think of as a funeral is just a bundle of arbitrary practices -- some traditional, others invented and popularized by hospitals and funeral homes who profit from them. There is no reason to enshrine them in law. Families should be free to do as they please with their deceased, as long as they don't pose a threat to public health or interfere with a criminal investigation.

The public health aspect is definitely important. The country where I live has very strict limits about handling dead bodies - they can only be buried in official cemeteries. If you opt for cremation, the ashes must also be buried or spread in selected official locations where they don't pose a hazard. Keeping grandpa in a can on top of the fireplace is out of the question.

While I don't value physical remains, I understand some people really do and their opinions must be respected. But it's similar to religious circumcision - when your customs start interfering with people's health, you lose absolute rights to always do what you want.

Are the hashes of dead people really any more dangerous than the ashes of coal or wood that every fireplace or BBQ produces? Sounds too heavy-handed an approach to me.
Hashes of dead people sound like you took a SHA hash of each of them to remember the unique mark that they left on Earth forever.

"Here lies John Doe, commit ID: 1b372d0e."

On a more serious note, if the funeral director and crematory did their jobs properly, anything dangerous (such as dental fillings containing mercury) should have been removed, either before cremation or before grinding.

My country is slightly more lenient. My grandparents' ashes are buried in my parents' back yard, and we had to do quite a bit of paperwork to make it legal. It's still illegal to scatter the ashes in any public land or body of water, and I can understand that because certain scenic locations would quickly become a big pile of ashes if it were allowed.

What people do with ashes is completely unenforceable. How can anyone stop somebody from putting remains wherever they like? How would anyone know?

Technically, they're not "ashes" but "cremains" and are composed almost entirely calcium and salts which is very different from ash (the residue of a fire burning).

Correct, a huge amount is ground-up bone matter. For some reason though, society is more comfortable with the thought of grandma being incinerated than pulverised in a crusher, even though a cremation involves both, so it's not well known. ;)
Only an infinitesimal number of stiffs are actually infectious. Most of them are in West Africa and died of Ebola. So it's not really a concern in most circumstances.
Considering how anti-vaxxers managed to bring back diseases that we once thought virtually extinct, I wouldn't be so sure about letting people keep corpses in their living room without some sort of professional supervision.

Public health in developed countries doesn't simply maintain itself. It's easy to take it for granted and not realize how much work CDC is doing to keep us all blissfully complacent.

Sure, but unwarranted fear of dead bodies isn't good either. Not even many infectious diseases remain infectious, since dead people can't cough or sneeze. And there's no such thing as miasma either.

Here's a good explanation from a mortician: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw7bsNKsABQ

>The funeral home staff arranged the girl over dry ice to slow her decay

>Knox slept curled up in the small space beside it at night

Sounds like a recipe for more dead people than strictly necessary.

It's not dangerous unless you're an infant. Even when asleep, children and adults will quickly be roused by rising CO2 concentrations. Infants are the only humans who sometimes lack the necessary mechanism. The threshold for rapid loss of consciousness or fatality is very high -- 10-20% -- and is highly unlikely to be reachable by dry ice subliming in a bedroom.
Is that likely to cause problems? CO2 burns and it requires a lot of it to displace oxygen.
What do you mean, it burns?

Well, it will stick to the ground since it is heavier than air, and it is toxic long before oxygen is displaced [1]. And dry ice contains a very large amount of gas!

[1] http://www.principia-scientific.org/at-what-concentration-do...

>What do you mean, it burns?

Discomfort. But I can't seem to find a source on what percentage is necessary. It might be higher than the suffocation percentage.

You mean, the gas? Dry ice, yes, because it is cold, but the gas? (This is the first time I heard that and I find it hard to imagine.)
I think Dylan's referring to the way elevated CO2 stings your eyes, nose, throat. Lungs too if it gets that far. It's weird sensation, and it definitely feels "hot" in a way. Asphyxiation by CO2 is quite unpleasant.
Ah, I see. That makes sense. Thanks for the clarification.
When you come into direct contact with something that cold, it causes a sensation that feels very nearly identical to being burned.
10 % concentration lets you asphyxiate, and it is heaver than air. If I remember correctly, 1 L dry ice turn to 750 L in gaseous form.

In a large, cool room and under a cover it probably is not an issue, but something to be aware of. In a small room or a car it could get critical quickly.

This is what I'm talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIgV2Q8Leh0

I'm sure they used at least as much for the body, which is a lot once it sublimates into gas.