Who Owns the Dead?
newrepublic.com
newrepublic.com
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.
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...
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Here's a good explanation from a mortician: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw7bsNKsABQ
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.
"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.
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).
>Knox slept curled up in the small space beside it at night
Sounds like a recipe for more dead people than strictly necessary.
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...
Discomfort. But I can't seem to find a source on what percentage is necessary. It might be higher than the suffocation percentage.
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.
I'm sure they used at least as much for the body, which is a lot once it sublimates into gas.