planet goth... haunted house
the outside yard
life after death?
When you die you won't be needing your body anymore, unless you plan on becoming a member of the Undead. So what's the best way of disposing of it? Although you will be beyond such earthly concerns, your choice may matter to the world you leave behind as it could have a lasting effect on the environment.
chemicals
Your body, like all living things, is a collection of chemicals held together in a very complex arrangement. The chemicals originally come from the earth, are collected by plants and animals, and are then passed on to you when you eat. When you die, the chemicals make their way back to the earth where they started. Dust to dust, as the funeral service says. How quickly they get there, and in what form, depends on whether you are buried or cremated.
burial
If you decide on a traditional burial, which about a 25% of people in the UK do, your body will be placed in a coffin and put in the ground. Enclosed in its wooden box and placed in the cool earth, your body will decay at a slower rate than if it was simply left on the surface. Organisms such as bacteria and fungi will feast on your body, taking what they need for energy and nutrients.
decay
Your soft tissues will decay away first, leaving just the hard mineral structure of your skeleton. But eventually even this will turn to dust and vanish, though it may take hundreds of years to do so.
Larger creatures may find it tricky to penetrate your coffin. But after some years, a hardwood container will soften up enough to let those beetles and worms in…
cremation
If you choose cremation, you will turn to dust rather quicker than if you’re buried! Raised to a temperature of around 1000°C, the chemicals that make up your body quickly break down to simpler structures. Some of you will go up the chimney in the form of gases, while the rest will be reduced to ash. The mineral remains of bones are a bit tougher and have to be ground up into powder. Of course, if you've had a hip replacement or other metal artificial body part then it will have to be fished out before you can fit in an urn.
Although cremation is the more popular option today, it has recently come under fire (pardon the pun) for environmental reasons. Crematoriums produce a number of toxic gasses: it has been estimated that they produce 10% of all the dioxins produced in the UK and a similar amount of mercury from dental fillings…
going green
A growing trend is to opt for a 'green funeral'. In such a ceremony you are buried in specially designated woodland in a cheap, easily bio-degraded coffin made of cardboard or chipboard. Your body is less well protected so it decays quicker and you help nourish the trees growing above you. You can then enjoy your long sleep with a clean green conscious (if you still have one anywhere).
the science of the near death experience
What happens after death? This is one of those questions that most people have thought about but no one knows the answer to, mainly because for most of us death only happens once... However, with modern medical techniques, people can recover from being medically close to death and can give us an insight into what might happen when we die.
A large proportion of people who have recovered from being ‘near death’ describe roughly the same experience. There seem to be five stages: a feeling of inner peace, body separation, entering a dark tunnel, seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, and entering the light…
Can this experience be explained by science, or it is really the start of a journey into another world?
The actual moment of death is very difficult to define. In the UK a person is declared dead when they have lost function in their brainstem. Once there is no activity from the brain and the brainstem the person can never regain consciousness and all other bodily functions will quickly shut down.
Near-death experiences often occur when the heart and/or lungs have stopped working. Modern techniques now allow doctors to restart the heart and respiration in certain circumstances but this has to be done quite quickly because without blood your brain becomes starved of oxygen. It is thought that it is this reduction of oxygen to the brain that may cause the ‘near death’ experience.
The brain is continuously receiving mega-loads of information from the senses – far more than it can process. Signals from your eyes travel to the part of the brain called the thalamus before being passed to the visual cortex where they are processed. To avoid overload, inhibitory cells in the thalamus filters out a lot of the unwanted information allowing only a controlled amount to reach the visual cortex.
When the brain is starved of oxygen the inhibitory cells in the thalamus stop working, so the brain gets gradually becomes overloaded with information. It’s thought that this may be what causes the hallucination of entering a dark tunnel, seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, and entering the light. This sensation is not only characteristic of near-death experiences but also occurs when certain drugs that reduce the effectiveness of the inhibitory cells, such as LSD, are taken.
The out of body experiences are a little bit more difficult to explain, but again they don’t only happen in near death experiences. Certain drugs such as marijuana can also induce the out of body feeling. The most common explanation of an out of body experience is that your brain is trying to remember what has just happened to you and so you see yourself lying in a hospital bed.
The general scientific consensus is that near-death hallucinations are the brain’s reaction to a situation of extreme stress and a lack of oxygen. And as we cannot restart the brain after it has died the living will probably never really know what really happens after death.
Doctor, apply defibrillator! Standby… CLEAR!
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