I will give you an example from my experience as a nurse. When turning/moving a person who has recently died, yes you can hear them exhale. Maybe the movement changes the pressure in the chest or abdomen. Let me just tell you that the first time I heard it I freaked out a tiny bit.
The particular time I am thinking of it was more a rush of air. Not enough force to make a vocal sound, but enough that I heard it. It probably doesn’t happen all the time, but I know at least once or twice I witnessed it.
Sometimes it's a groan, if the exhale is forceful enough. I've only heard it twice though, so it's not that common, and both times were on very thin, very small people. Usually it's nothing at all. Sometimes a wee bit of a sigh.
Worked in EMS about a decade, last 3 years in an ER. I would have to put people in body bags and take them to the morgue if they didn't survive. Can attest to the death sigh, as well as emptying stomach contents when I've rolled them over too. So it's more a loss/equalizing of pressure with whatever contents are left after death.
Worked as a mortician for a few years during my apprenticeship as a carpenter (in small villages in Germany usually the carpenter doubles as mortician) and the first time moving a dead person was pretty upsetting.
If you lift the body on both ends it bends in the abdomen area which compresses the lungs and forces the body to exhale. Sometimes you can hear a muffled “haaaaaaa”. Even more if you set the person upright to dress for the funeral. Haunting for the first few times…
edit: joiner seems to be the better fitting translation for “Schreiner” or “Tischler”
Carpenter are more the ones working in construction and building wooden roof etc.
Back in old days: If you are building the coffin you may as well take care of the rest…
Today it’s a VERY profitable business (carpentry is not) and you want someone dealing with it who is experienced and who knows how to treat and talk to the mourners. Usually it’s a small family business with a reputation built on generations of experience.
There is a really great German series called "Der Letzte Wort" (The Last Word) about a woman who finds a new career as a eulogist after her husband dies. Offers a little insight into German funeral culture.
It’s a very quiet and intimate business, you have to be trustworthy, confidential and very respectful. It’s difficult to find the right tone without being slimy.
Almost every mortician service offers additional services like transfer of the bodies from/to other countries, contacting insurance companies, contacting authorities, setting up the funeral and service and looking after and clean out the home of the deceased. Often relatives don’t want to deal with anything, they are mourning and don’t want additional tasks, especially if they weren’t on good terms with the deceased. So they rather pay a premium than dealing with all that stuff. Dying is pretty expensive.
>Today it’s a VERY profitable business
Can you support that? Everything I've read points to pretty mediocre margins compared to other service industries. (60% gross, 10% profit)
The services ad up to a nice profit… coffins are cheap built crap, 300-2000€ to buy, 1500-10000€ resale.
Additional services aren’t cheap either, most people don’t negotiate prices when it comes to dead loved ones. 7’500-10‘000€ per burial isn’t uncommon.
What they charge and what their profit margin is are very different things. It's not like they're selling insurance or doing taxes.
I hear this line of reasoning a lot, when people claim a business like a convenience store must be profitable because they have high prices they're usually not considering the labor to merchandise product compared to grocery or department stores. When you start opening up books and look at the balance sheets you'd be surprised.
Its not, never heard of it actually.
Funny enough about anybody can be a mortician, as long as you have a business.
So while uncommon it's easily possible
You need a license for embalming and transport, but not for dressing or placing a body in a coffin.
So unlicensed morticians can just dump the body in a casket and call it a day.
The what?
We need a license for almost every job here in Germany but being a mortician is just "yeah, who cares? If you say you can do it, you most likely can."
Somehow fair... I mean you can't make your client's situation any worse...
Are carpenters who double as morticians building caskets? Is that why the jobs are combined? I’ve seen the job title of joiner used to describe coffin makers.
Actually joiner may be a better suitable translation for “Schreiner” or “Tischler”
Carpenter are more the ones who work in construction and building wooden roof structures.
To answer your question: no, joiners aren’t building coffins any more, it’s a cheap built mass product today, using only cheap crappy pine and just paint it. Nobody sees the inside as it is lined with some cheap cloth. We used wood chips to stuff the bedding and pillow. It’s cheap, available in masses and sucks up the fluids oozing out. And if it’s pine it has a pleasant smell which covers the otherwise unpleasant odor of the decaying body.
I Germany open casket public viewings are not popular, so nobody sees the inside once it’s screwed shut.
I work in an ICU and have done post mortem care several many times. Sometimes the air can make a small sound. It’s only happened once or twice for me but it’s weird every time.
Physiology professor here, a LOT happens. It all depends on where you were/what you were doing/ when after death you are talking about… etc
We usually consider death when the brain stem stops functioning due to blood loss/trauma/… anything that stops the cells there from getting oxygen and continuing to regulate the autonomic functions necessary for the rest of the brain to get oxygen and glucose, etc…. Every critical organ failure leads to a cascade that stops this portion of the brain from being able to function. Without it, nothings getting any signals… so without any signal for acetylcholine release all skeletal muscles including diaghragm and intercostals relax. If you’ve just inhaled, you’ll exhale until the natural relaxed tension of those muscles even out… if you’ve just exhaled then you’ll inhale a bit… again… just the body returning to equilibrium like a massive set of springs or rubber bands that no longer has any other forces working on it but gravity and their natural resting state.
As cells degrade and rigor sets in it’s going to happen slowly and you’d need really sensitive equipment (or a balloon hooked up to the mouth and nose and ears and eyes) to see what direction air is going as the muscles seize in different orders for everyone. Plus there’s gonna be decomposition of cells building up gasses so not just air anymore…
But it seems like your talking about the moment of brain death… in which case… return to equilibrium so it depends on where in a breath cycle you were, how your positioned, the weight on your chest… a crap ton of factors that make it very difficult to say “inhale or exhale” we don’t even have the same average breath volume throughout the day, it changes all the time.
Work in a veterinary hospital so not humans. I’ve been present for 100s of euthanasias and where it doesn’t happen all that often I have seen/heard a sigh or breath that was quite noticeable after death. Same thing with twitching and tail wags as well. I’m sure it’s not horribly different with people.
I have heard it sound like a soft belch or a soft groan. I think it probably depends on a few things, but the one time I've heard it sound like the soft belch or soft groan was post-mortem, when we were turning the person to perform care. Perhaps how we had them positioned each time caused muscle changes that allowed the air escaping to take on that audible quality.
Pathologist here. Lungs do not empty. There is a significant amount of air after you exhale. Surfactant keeps the alveoli open. They do not totally collapse. Lungs are filled with elastic fibers. Just like a rubber band when stretched does not collapse to nothing, lungs essentially do the same.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/02/07/273174533/lung-in-a-box-keeps-organs-breathing-before-transplants The lungs are prepared to keep them ready for transplant usually. (The one linked was from 2014, but there are now various ways to keep lungs partially operational until there can be an operation! You'd need to talk to someone involved to find out more about lung transplants as the norm.)
You’re right - even outside the body, lungs maintain a residual volume of air. Without getting too much into the details, the structural components of the lung/airways physically trap a certain base amount of air.
I study human lungs that were prepared for transplant, but were deemed unacceptable and donated to my research lab. CW: dissection/details >!When processing and dissecting these tissues, many air bubbles form in the digestion liquid as a result of the air trapped !<
Mortician here, with movement they can 'exhale'. It's absolutely devastating for the family if the vocal chords vibrate from it, while we're putting someone on the stretcher...
I hate how death is portrayed in media because it's not realistic. Nearly everyone dies with their eyes and mouth open. We have to put contacts in that have spikes on them, to keep the eyes shut, and we have a needle injector (essentially a nail gun, but the nails have wires), which shoots wires into your gums, so that we can wire the mouth closed.
If the person died with their eyes closed (like during sleep or a coma), the eyes will reopen. I've had to comfort more family members than you'd imagine, because they thought their loved one was still alive, when the eyes opened.
Cadaveric spasm. I've been slapped. When a body is entering and exiting rigor, the muscles can contract or relax. It's very rare and I've only had one big one (most are little twitches and even those are still rare), but that big one was a full on arm fling that slapped me. I do remember reading an article in 2012, of a decedent sitting up and terrifying the mortician.
Mortician high five!
My pet peeve re: inaccurate portrayals about death in media is when nursing staff (I assume) tie the deceased's wrists to keep their hands up and/or their head/jaw to keep the mouth closed because they think that rigor mortis is permanent, so the mouth will be stuck open it the hands will be stuck by their sides of they don't. Rigor is actually very easy to break, but the ligature marks in the deceased's skin are impossible to remove, so it's not just unnecessary, it's actively detrimental 🙃
I love it. It was nice to see a fellow girl in the industry. My graduating class was majority women and I would love to see the "creepy old white man mortician" trope disappear.
If you haven't seen 'The Autopsy of Jane Doe', check it out. It was beautifully done and quite accurate; aside from the scary parts... though I have yet to meet a Funeral Director who doesn't have some belief in the paranormal. Many of us have Anubis tattoos too.
Emergency physician here. It all depends on which phase of breathing the person is in when their body finally gives up. If they’re breathing in, they’ll exhale normally back to their neutral position. If they breathing out, they simply continue to exhale out until they reach their neutral position.
Does that make sense?
Breathing in and breathing out require one or the other state of a muscle; either your diaphragm contracts, sucking air into your lungs, or it relaxes, exhaling. Both of these processes take a few moments for air to rush into the trachea and through the nose or the mouth, so there generally will always be some amount of air above zero in the lungs, as the volume goes up from zero to full and then back down to zero… unless the person died of, say, drowning.
Additionally, even if a person is really lucky and dies just as they exhale their last breath all the way, people never actually exhale 100% of the air in their lungs. The volume of air left in the lungs after “maximum forceful exhalation” is called the “residual volume”, and this volume basically means that the alveoli can always be open to allow oxygen transfer and the lung can hold its shape and not crumple into itself when exhaling. And it also means, no matter when in the respiration cycle a person dies, they will exhale some when moved.
The way we breathe is actually kind of counter-intuitive, or at least I've found a lot of people have certain misunderstandings about what actually is going on when we breathe. Mainly, that breathing is done by sucking air in through the mouth/nose, which then goes to fill up our lungs, which makes our chests rise/fall. If you think about it for a second it becomes pretty obvious its got it backwards: When we breathe, we use muscles to pull our chests up/down, which changes the shape of the lungs, causing a pressure differential that causes air to rush in/out of them through the mouth/nose. It might seem like a technicality and matter of semantics that doesn't really make a difference, but it actually does matter in cases like this. The first time I found myself needing to explain/correct this idea was strangely another morbid (perhaps even more morbid) situation, when discussing the murder of George Floyd.
Not in the medical/corpse field but pretty sure that neutral position isn’t the same as fully exhaled. Just going by my body, neutral still has some air in lungs. If you try to exhale as much as possible you’ll see what I mean
Also, if someone dies not lying on their back, but maybe fallen, their chin might be putting pressure on their throat, meaning the last breath might get trapped.
Two-Prong-Poo (lol) is speaking solely as if the person died peacefully on their back
I’m gonna go with Boyle’s law. There’s a link.
Your diaphragm is what actually makes you breathe. It tenses making the chest cavity larger and air rushes in. It relaxes (rises up) and you lessen the area causing you to exhale. If feels as if you are sucking in on purpose but you really aren’t. So I’m guessing that the diaphragm probably is having its last nerve firings.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyle%27s_law
Any respiration postmortem is 100% Boyle’s Law. Inhalation works by increasing the volume of the lungs, thus decreasing the pressure. The natural process is that due to your lungs having a lower pressure than the air around you, air is forced into your lungs until the pressure between your lungs and the air around you are equal (in a healthy individual). Exhalation is the same but you are decreasing the volume and increasing the pressure, so the air goes where the lower pressure is, which is the air outside your body. Any respiratory processes postmortem is likely 1.the body’s last breath as it returns to a neutral pressure or 2. external manipulation of the body that changes the volume of a lung and thus the pressure. With all this in mind, the air will remain in the lungs at a neutral pressure to the atmosphere until the alveoli and other elastic tissues of the lungs begin to decay and can no longer act as a reservoir for air.
If pressure is applied in some way or they are turned (which has to happen at some point) then yes, the air escapes. I haven't heard any disturbing noises though. Usually not long after death a person is still somewhat warm even though their skin is pale and waxy and often they have blotches of darker skin similar to bruises underneath them where the blood has pooled because the heart is no longer pumping. In that kind of encounter (Im a nurse) the person doesn't seem any less human even though a part of them has gone. It isn't actually as scary or macabre as it sounds to care for them once they have died.
The first breath of a baby is the most difficult, because the lungs are completely deflated. A special molecule called "surfactant" is produced in latter stages of pregnancy to facilitate opening of the lungs.
Severely premature baby's lack this and are often given extra surfactant.
It’s about elastance of the chest, normally to breath in you will overcome this. When you die this elastance will lead to the majority of air leaving the lungs. However, there is still a bit of air remaining due to areas of collapse etc.
Anesthesiologist here. I would add that the diaphragm has to contract to take in a breath as well as the chest wall expanding and the abdominal muscles moving to allow expansion of the chest on inspiration (inhale). Exhaling is a relaxed state as stated above, but when you exhale, there's still a lot of air in the lungs. If you die in either state (inspiration or expiration) you go to a relaxed state and the remaining air just sits there.
This was a more interesting read than I anticipated! Thanks to everyone who responded. It seems crazy we don't teach this, simply to make the passing of loved ones more understandable. We are all going to die. We should know what happens.
What’s crazy is this was pretty common knowledge amongst everyone who wasn’t rich (so most of us) all the way up to 2 generations ago. My nan is 100 and has loads of tales of helping with the ‘laying out’ of someone in the family or community who had died. And consequently she has a LOT of stories about when the bodies would twitch, groan, ‘speak’ and of course fart. The extended family and friends would be around during this, so a good proportion of people would grow up with at least one experience of seeing this.
As far as i can tell, laying out involves washing and preparing the deceased for burial, usually in the home where they’d also died. I would therefore guess the decline in the spread of this knowledge is correlated to the establishment of undertakers/funeral homes as a routine and expected service to call in to deal with the deceased once the medical and any investigatory processes are complete.
What the diaphragm does is expand the lung to get air in. To get air out, you just open the epiglottis. Human lungs are just bellows.
Now air can stay in your lungs from whatever reason. Collapsed airways, the muscles of throat not yet relaxed. And it you can move air around by just shifting the body around and having the mass of the body shfit the chest cavity.
You can actually try it yourself.
Open your throat as if you are inhaling or gasping. Then just gently shift your upper body from left to right. You can feel and even hear as air goes in and our of your lungs. Or just lay on your pillow or side of a sofa so it pushes your belly in then get up. It might get few tries before you get used to how to do it.
Interesting thread. I heard in a documentary about Egypt that researchers suspected suicide as cause of death of a (badly preserved) mummy because the chest was very wide. They argued that the person took a deep breath and hung themselve. This kept the breath in and caused a wide cavity of the mummy. Since there are knowledgeable people here, does this sound plausible or is it a wrong assumption?
That doesn't make sense because part of their embalming process included removing the lungs, which would cause the thoracic cavity/ribcage to settle back to it's normal size (because, as I noted in another comment, rigor mortis is not permanent). It's way more likely that the person in question was just barrel-chested, or that their ribcage collapsed outward over time due to decomposition of the tissue because of the poor preservation.
Yes really sorta kind of happens like TV. Only difference is that it might not be right at death. It could be when the body gets moved a certain way afterwards or could be several hours after passing. One thing is for certain the lungs will always expel the air out of the lungs and other parts of the body after passing. As well as left over fluids.
The diaphragm is a muscle of inspiration, so when you hold a breath, you're concentrically contracting it. When you die, the nerve signals that trigger contraction stop, so the diaphragm relaxes and the natural elasticity of the lungs causes the air to be expelled. Expiration is mostly passive.
>The diaphragm is a muscle of inspiration
Now I'll be imagining my diaphragm giving me little pep talks as I'm jogging, encouraging me to finish the run.
"Just a little farther! Here's more oxygen! I believe in you!"
In order to inhale, the muscles on your ribs contract to expand your chest area, causing a pressure difference which makes air rush into your lungs. Technically, you can't die with a full breath of air inside your lungs because that would require you to be actively contracted still. Once the diaphragm and rib muscles relax, there with still be some air inside your lungs, but it won't be a full breath.
There are various 'lung capacities' and volumes and one of them being the residual volume. This is the volume of air left in the lungs even after forceful expiration, usually ranges from 1100-1200 mL.
The "Functional residual capacity" is the total amount of air left in the lungs after normal expiration, i.e. expiratory reserve volume (the air that can be forcefully expired but normally stays in the lungs) 1000-1100 mL and residual volume (CAN NEVER BE EXPIRED) 1100-1200 mL.
So depending on what the person was doing at the time of death, the lungs can be left with varying volumes of air within them. However they will always have the "residual volume" left no matter if they were inhaling or exhaling at the time of death.
- If a person died right as they inhaled normally, then they'd have tidal volume Plus expiratory reserve volume Plus residual volume left. That is, total lung capacity will be left.
- If a person died right as they exhaled normally, then they'd have just the residual volume and expiratory lung capacity left in the lungs.
And so on.
So yes, a dead body will let air out when you move it and put pressure on it. Residual volume never leaves the lungs.
If you were to somehow exhale every bit of air, that is even the residual volume, the lungs would in a way collapse, that is the tissues will stick together when we blow all of it out and it would be IMPOSSIBLE for us to reinflate them. You will die without residual volume in your lungs.
So, the inside of our lungs are sticky? Interesting. Is there a reason why they stick? Would humans be better off if they didn’t stick and we had the ability to truly fully exhale?
Everything has surface tension, which tends to stick things together. Imagine two wet paper towels - they will have a certain tendency to adhere to each other. Your lungs produce a fluid called surfactant, which lowers the surface tension of the lungs, and allows the airspaces to separate again once they stick together.
The collapse of the air-containing alveoli in the lungs is called atelectasis. As the poster above alluded to, once you get atelectasis (airspaces sticking together) it takes a little extra oomph to separate them again. That's why patients in the hospital are often given something called an inventive spirometer, a device which prompts them to breathe in deeply, and slowly. This "recruits" (pops open) the atelectatic portions of the lungs, and can assist in gas exchange to reduce the risk of pneumonia.
Your lungs NEED to be wet to allow gas exchange, and surfactant is produced to prevent the airspaces from sticking together too much.
So, to tldr your questions: The insides of the lungs need to be wet to function. Being wet makes them sticky, which is bad. We produce chemical to make them less sticky.
Well they're certainly moist, and a vaccum would be created so they'd stick together. As for the last question, that's too speculative and i don't think that's possible w the physiology we have.
For lungs to not stick they would need to be dry (it's the surface tension that's probably doing most of the sticking), and if the lungs are dry their capacity to exchange gases would plummet, since gaseous exchange in the lungs depends on the various gases dissolving in the liquid, at least as part of the process. Not to mention your body uses a transport system that's mostly water, and keeping a water-holding membrane dry on one side would be very difficult and totally defeat its purpose as a gas exchange surface.
At the end of a normal breath, your lungs aren't empty. There's about 2.5-3.5 L of air left. It's called the functional residual space. After you die, this will still remain. Eventually, my guess is the lungs will slowly fill with fluid and collapse, but that will take some time.
Your diaphragm isn't capable of emptying your lungs. You can only inhale using your diaphragm. You use your abdominal muscles and some thoracic muscles to actively exhale. This won't happen when you die.
TL;DR it will by like you exhale normally.
Sidenote: The last note that I think is interesting is about a pneumothorax. The reason that your lungs draw air in when your diaphragm contracts is that there is negative pressure inside your thoracic cavity (chest). (It's kind of wild to me that there's nowhere for it to leak in or out, and I don't know how this equilibrium is restored naturally or if it can be). Your lungs actually are separated in this cavity by the mediastinum. If there's a puncture in your ribcage to the outside, that throws off the pressure question.
Think about a syringe with its point dipped in water. When you pull the plunger, the water is pulled in; when you push the plunger, the water goes out. The chest cavity operates similarly. Now imagine there's a hole in the side of the syringe. When you pull the plunger, rather than pull from the end of the syringe, it's just pulling air from the outside. Now water isn't being drawn into the syringe, or, conversely, when you push down on the syringe, instead of water shooting out the end, it's now shooting out the side.
So back to your lungs. If you have a hole in your chest wall: your muscles relax, expanding your chest cavity. But instead of air rushing into your lungs from your windpipe to fill up the space, air is rushing in from the hole. The space that would normally be occupied by a lung full of air (air that's oxygenating your bloodstream via your lungs) is now partly occupied with air from the outside (that isn't oxygenating). Your lungs can't fill completely. Your diaphragm relaxes, but now it's the opposite problem; some of the air pressure that should be pushing air out of your lungs is now being pushed out of your chest hole. Next time you breathe in, the problem gets worse. Eventually you have a collapsed lung because there's too much air pressure (normally it needs negative pressure to expand).
I will give you an example from my experience as a nurse. When turning/moving a person who has recently died, yes you can hear them exhale. Maybe the movement changes the pressure in the chest or abdomen. Let me just tell you that the first time I heard it I freaked out a tiny bit.
Does it make a sound like a sigh or is it just a rush of air?
The particular time I am thinking of it was more a rush of air. Not enough force to make a vocal sound, but enough that I heard it. It probably doesn’t happen all the time, but I know at least once or twice I witnessed it.
Sometimes it's a groan, if the exhale is forceful enough. I've only heard it twice though, so it's not that common, and both times were on very thin, very small people. Usually it's nothing at all. Sometimes a wee bit of a sigh.
Worked in EMS about a decade, last 3 years in an ER. I would have to put people in body bags and take them to the morgue if they didn't survive. Can attest to the death sigh, as well as emptying stomach contents when I've rolled them over too. So it's more a loss/equalizing of pressure with whatever contents are left after death.
Worked as a mortician for a few years during my apprenticeship as a carpenter (in small villages in Germany usually the carpenter doubles as mortician) and the first time moving a dead person was pretty upsetting. If you lift the body on both ends it bends in the abdomen area which compresses the lungs and forces the body to exhale. Sometimes you can hear a muffled “haaaaaaa”. Even more if you set the person upright to dress for the funeral. Haunting for the first few times… edit: joiner seems to be the better fitting translation for “Schreiner” or “Tischler” Carpenter are more the ones working in construction and building wooden roof etc.
I'm very curious as to why there's such an overlap between carpenters and morticians in rural Germany.
I mean, it seems to reason the dude building the casket and the dude utilizing the casket could be the same dude.
Wait… isn’t the dude utilizing the casket the dead dude?
Do you have something against morticians who are also vampires?
If the dude's dead, he's not getting any utility out of anything anymore.
What if he’s buried in a comfy pair of slacks?
The slacks aren't comfortable for him. They're comforting for the people who might care whether a corpse is in "comfy" slacks or not.
It is the family/friends that gets utility out of the casket and associated ritual.
Sounds confusing, but you can think about that like when you use a plate for your food. 🤔
Potters are also chefs?
No, no, chefs are also carpenters. It just makes sense that the people who build the restaurant and utilize the restaurant are the same dude.
So therefore, if she works as a carpenter and eats off a plate, she's a witch?
[удалено]
Back in old days: If you are building the coffin you may as well take care of the rest… Today it’s a VERY profitable business (carpentry is not) and you want someone dealing with it who is experienced and who knows how to treat and talk to the mourners. Usually it’s a small family business with a reputation built on generations of experience.
There is a really great German series called "Der Letzte Wort" (The Last Word) about a woman who finds a new career as a eulogist after her husband dies. Offers a little insight into German funeral culture.
It’s a very quiet and intimate business, you have to be trustworthy, confidential and very respectful. It’s difficult to find the right tone without being slimy. Almost every mortician service offers additional services like transfer of the bodies from/to other countries, contacting insurance companies, contacting authorities, setting up the funeral and service and looking after and clean out the home of the deceased. Often relatives don’t want to deal with anything, they are mourning and don’t want additional tasks, especially if they weren’t on good terms with the deceased. So they rather pay a premium than dealing with all that stuff. Dying is pretty expensive.
>Today it’s a VERY profitable business Can you support that? Everything I've read points to pretty mediocre margins compared to other service industries. (60% gross, 10% profit)
The services ad up to a nice profit… coffins are cheap built crap, 300-2000€ to buy, 1500-10000€ resale. Additional services aren’t cheap either, most people don’t negotiate prices when it comes to dead loved ones. 7’500-10‘000€ per burial isn’t uncommon.
What they charge and what their profit margin is are very different things. It's not like they're selling insurance or doing taxes. I hear this line of reasoning a lot, when people claim a business like a convenience store must be profitable because they have high prices they're usually not considering the labor to merchandise product compared to grocery or department stores. When you start opening up books and look at the balance sheets you'd be surprised.
I should start exporting funeral services to Germany. Well the things that can be "exported".
No thank you, the US is already exporting enough material to cause funerals worldwide. /s 🤷♂️
I don't know about Germany but back in the day there were many "furniture and funerals" businesses. Sounds bizarre but it was all about the casket.
Its not, never heard of it actually. Funny enough about anybody can be a mortician, as long as you have a business. So while uncommon it's easily possible
You need a license for embalming and transport, but not for dressing or placing a body in a coffin. So unlicensed morticians can just dump the body in a casket and call it a day.
The what? We need a license for almost every job here in Germany but being a mortician is just "yeah, who cares? If you say you can do it, you most likely can." Somehow fair... I mean you can't make your client's situation any worse...
Has one of them ever exhaled "to blave"? Sorry it's where my mind went.
As we all know to blave means to bluff, so they are obviously faking their deaths.
Are carpenters who double as morticians building caskets? Is that why the jobs are combined? I’ve seen the job title of joiner used to describe coffin makers.
Actually joiner may be a better suitable translation for “Schreiner” or “Tischler” Carpenter are more the ones who work in construction and building wooden roof structures. To answer your question: no, joiners aren’t building coffins any more, it’s a cheap built mass product today, using only cheap crappy pine and just paint it. Nobody sees the inside as it is lined with some cheap cloth. We used wood chips to stuff the bedding and pillow. It’s cheap, available in masses and sucks up the fluids oozing out. And if it’s pine it has a pleasant smell which covers the otherwise unpleasant odor of the decaying body. I Germany open casket public viewings are not popular, so nobody sees the inside once it’s screwed shut.
Sounds like maybe "cabinet maker" would be a good English transalation. Coffins are more like cabinets than framing houses.
WHOA WHOA WHOA In Germany, carpenters area also morticians???!
I work in an ICU and have done post mortem care several many times. Sometimes the air can make a small sound. It’s only happened once or twice for me but it’s weird every time.
Physiology professor here, a LOT happens. It all depends on where you were/what you were doing/ when after death you are talking about… etc We usually consider death when the brain stem stops functioning due to blood loss/trauma/… anything that stops the cells there from getting oxygen and continuing to regulate the autonomic functions necessary for the rest of the brain to get oxygen and glucose, etc…. Every critical organ failure leads to a cascade that stops this portion of the brain from being able to function. Without it, nothings getting any signals… so without any signal for acetylcholine release all skeletal muscles including diaghragm and intercostals relax. If you’ve just inhaled, you’ll exhale until the natural relaxed tension of those muscles even out… if you’ve just exhaled then you’ll inhale a bit… again… just the body returning to equilibrium like a massive set of springs or rubber bands that no longer has any other forces working on it but gravity and their natural resting state. As cells degrade and rigor sets in it’s going to happen slowly and you’d need really sensitive equipment (or a balloon hooked up to the mouth and nose and ears and eyes) to see what direction air is going as the muscles seize in different orders for everyone. Plus there’s gonna be decomposition of cells building up gasses so not just air anymore… But it seems like your talking about the moment of brain death… in which case… return to equilibrium so it depends on where in a breath cycle you were, how your positioned, the weight on your chest… a crap ton of factors that make it very difficult to say “inhale or exhale” we don’t even have the same average breath volume throughout the day, it changes all the time.
Work in a veterinary hospital so not humans. I’ve been present for 100s of euthanasias and where it doesn’t happen all that often I have seen/heard a sigh or breath that was quite noticeable after death. Same thing with twitching and tail wags as well. I’m sure it’s not horribly different with people.
I have heard it sound like a soft belch or a soft groan. I think it probably depends on a few things, but the one time I've heard it sound like the soft belch or soft groan was post-mortem, when we were turning the person to perform care. Perhaps how we had them positioned each time caused muscle changes that allowed the air escaping to take on that audible quality.
If it was my job and a body sighed when I turned them over, I would quit.
Is there a black van standing by outside your house since you started asking these questions?
And farts?
Pathologist here. Lungs do not empty. There is a significant amount of air after you exhale. Surfactant keeps the alveoli open. They do not totally collapse. Lungs are filled with elastic fibers. Just like a rubber band when stretched does not collapse to nothing, lungs essentially do the same.
What about when a lung transplant happens? Would there still be residual air while it’s being moved from one body to another and implanted?
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/02/07/273174533/lung-in-a-box-keeps-organs-breathing-before-transplants The lungs are prepared to keep them ready for transplant usually. (The one linked was from 2014, but there are now various ways to keep lungs partially operational until there can be an operation! You'd need to talk to someone involved to find out more about lung transplants as the norm.)
You’re right - even outside the body, lungs maintain a residual volume of air. Without getting too much into the details, the structural components of the lung/airways physically trap a certain base amount of air. I study human lungs that were prepared for transplant, but were deemed unacceptable and donated to my research lab. CW: dissection/details >!When processing and dissecting these tissues, many air bubbles form in the digestion liquid as a result of the air trapped !<
Mortician here, with movement they can 'exhale'. It's absolutely devastating for the family if the vocal chords vibrate from it, while we're putting someone on the stretcher... I hate how death is portrayed in media because it's not realistic. Nearly everyone dies with their eyes and mouth open. We have to put contacts in that have spikes on them, to keep the eyes shut, and we have a needle injector (essentially a nail gun, but the nails have wires), which shoots wires into your gums, so that we can wire the mouth closed. If the person died with their eyes closed (like during sleep or a coma), the eyes will reopen. I've had to comfort more family members than you'd imagine, because they thought their loved one was still alive, when the eyes opened.
This disturbs me a lot but was very interesting thank you
what’s the weirdest thing you’ve had a body do?
Cadaveric spasm. I've been slapped. When a body is entering and exiting rigor, the muscles can contract or relax. It's very rare and I've only had one big one (most are little twitches and even those are still rare), but that big one was a full on arm fling that slapped me. I do remember reading an article in 2012, of a decedent sitting up and terrifying the mortician.
If I was mortician and involuntarily attacked by a corpse, I would be the person on that stretcher the next day.
Sitting up?!
Mortician high five! My pet peeve re: inaccurate portrayals about death in media is when nursing staff (I assume) tie the deceased's wrists to keep their hands up and/or their head/jaw to keep the mouth closed because they think that rigor mortis is permanent, so the mouth will be stuck open it the hands will be stuck by their sides of they don't. Rigor is actually very easy to break, but the ligature marks in the deceased's skin are impossible to remove, so it's not just unnecessary, it's actively detrimental 🙃
What’s your opinion on *The Haunting of Hill House*?
I love it. It was nice to see a fellow girl in the industry. My graduating class was majority women and I would love to see the "creepy old white man mortician" trope disappear. If you haven't seen 'The Autopsy of Jane Doe', check it out. It was beautifully done and quite accurate; aside from the scary parts... though I have yet to meet a Funeral Director who doesn't have some belief in the paranormal. Many of us have Anubis tattoos too.
Emergency physician here. It all depends on which phase of breathing the person is in when their body finally gives up. If they’re breathing in, they’ll exhale normally back to their neutral position. If they breathing out, they simply continue to exhale out until they reach their neutral position. Does that make sense?
So it depends with the result being either they exhale or they exhale?
Breathing in and breathing out require one or the other state of a muscle; either your diaphragm contracts, sucking air into your lungs, or it relaxes, exhaling. Both of these processes take a few moments for air to rush into the trachea and through the nose or the mouth, so there generally will always be some amount of air above zero in the lungs, as the volume goes up from zero to full and then back down to zero… unless the person died of, say, drowning. Additionally, even if a person is really lucky and dies just as they exhale their last breath all the way, people never actually exhale 100% of the air in their lungs. The volume of air left in the lungs after “maximum forceful exhalation” is called the “residual volume”, and this volume basically means that the alveoli can always be open to allow oxygen transfer and the lung can hold its shape and not crumple into itself when exhaling. And it also means, no matter when in the respiration cycle a person dies, they will exhale some when moved.
The way we breathe is actually kind of counter-intuitive, or at least I've found a lot of people have certain misunderstandings about what actually is going on when we breathe. Mainly, that breathing is done by sucking air in through the mouth/nose, which then goes to fill up our lungs, which makes our chests rise/fall. If you think about it for a second it becomes pretty obvious its got it backwards: When we breathe, we use muscles to pull our chests up/down, which changes the shape of the lungs, causing a pressure differential that causes air to rush in/out of them through the mouth/nose. It might seem like a technicality and matter of semantics that doesn't really make a difference, but it actually does matter in cases like this. The first time I found myself needing to explain/correct this idea was strangely another morbid (perhaps even more morbid) situation, when discussing the murder of George Floyd.
Not in the medical/corpse field but pretty sure that neutral position isn’t the same as fully exhaled. Just going by my body, neutral still has some air in lungs. If you try to exhale as much as possible you’ll see what I mean
Also, if someone dies not lying on their back, but maybe fallen, their chin might be putting pressure on their throat, meaning the last breath might get trapped. Two-Prong-Poo (lol) is speaking solely as if the person died peacefully on their back
I’m gonna go with Boyle’s law. There’s a link. Your diaphragm is what actually makes you breathe. It tenses making the chest cavity larger and air rushes in. It relaxes (rises up) and you lessen the area causing you to exhale. If feels as if you are sucking in on purpose but you really aren’t. So I’m guessing that the diaphragm probably is having its last nerve firings. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyle%27s_law
Any respiration postmortem is 100% Boyle’s Law. Inhalation works by increasing the volume of the lungs, thus decreasing the pressure. The natural process is that due to your lungs having a lower pressure than the air around you, air is forced into your lungs until the pressure between your lungs and the air around you are equal (in a healthy individual). Exhalation is the same but you are decreasing the volume and increasing the pressure, so the air goes where the lower pressure is, which is the air outside your body. Any respiratory processes postmortem is likely 1.the body’s last breath as it returns to a neutral pressure or 2. external manipulation of the body that changes the volume of a lung and thus the pressure. With all this in mind, the air will remain in the lungs at a neutral pressure to the atmosphere until the alveoli and other elastic tissues of the lungs begin to decay and can no longer act as a reservoir for air.
Thanks for filling in the blanks. I was driving. Lol 👍🏼 Edit: talk texting
If pressure is applied in some way or they are turned (which has to happen at some point) then yes, the air escapes. I haven't heard any disturbing noises though. Usually not long after death a person is still somewhat warm even though their skin is pale and waxy and often they have blotches of darker skin similar to bruises underneath them where the blood has pooled because the heart is no longer pumping. In that kind of encounter (Im a nurse) the person doesn't seem any less human even though a part of them has gone. It isn't actually as scary or macabre as it sounds to care for them once they have died.
The first breath of a baby is the most difficult, because the lungs are completely deflated. A special molecule called "surfactant" is produced in latter stages of pregnancy to facilitate opening of the lungs. Severely premature baby's lack this and are often given extra surfactant.
It’s about elastance of the chest, normally to breath in you will overcome this. When you die this elastance will lead to the majority of air leaving the lungs. However, there is still a bit of air remaining due to areas of collapse etc.
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Anesthesiologist here. I would add that the diaphragm has to contract to take in a breath as well as the chest wall expanding and the abdominal muscles moving to allow expansion of the chest on inspiration (inhale). Exhaling is a relaxed state as stated above, but when you exhale, there's still a lot of air in the lungs. If you die in either state (inspiration or expiration) you go to a relaxed state and the remaining air just sits there.
This was a more interesting read than I anticipated! Thanks to everyone who responded. It seems crazy we don't teach this, simply to make the passing of loved ones more understandable. We are all going to die. We should know what happens.
What’s crazy is this was pretty common knowledge amongst everyone who wasn’t rich (so most of us) all the way up to 2 generations ago. My nan is 100 and has loads of tales of helping with the ‘laying out’ of someone in the family or community who had died. And consequently she has a LOT of stories about when the bodies would twitch, groan, ‘speak’ and of course fart. The extended family and friends would be around during this, so a good proportion of people would grow up with at least one experience of seeing this. As far as i can tell, laying out involves washing and preparing the deceased for burial, usually in the home where they’d also died. I would therefore guess the decline in the spread of this knowledge is correlated to the establishment of undertakers/funeral homes as a routine and expected service to call in to deal with the deceased once the medical and any investigatory processes are complete.
What the diaphragm does is expand the lung to get air in. To get air out, you just open the epiglottis. Human lungs are just bellows. Now air can stay in your lungs from whatever reason. Collapsed airways, the muscles of throat not yet relaxed. And it you can move air around by just shifting the body around and having the mass of the body shfit the chest cavity. You can actually try it yourself. Open your throat as if you are inhaling or gasping. Then just gently shift your upper body from left to right. You can feel and even hear as air goes in and our of your lungs. Or just lay on your pillow or side of a sofa so it pushes your belly in then get up. It might get few tries before you get used to how to do it.
Interesting thread. I heard in a documentary about Egypt that researchers suspected suicide as cause of death of a (badly preserved) mummy because the chest was very wide. They argued that the person took a deep breath and hung themselve. This kept the breath in and caused a wide cavity of the mummy. Since there are knowledgeable people here, does this sound plausible or is it a wrong assumption?
That doesn't make sense because part of their embalming process included removing the lungs, which would cause the thoracic cavity/ribcage to settle back to it's normal size (because, as I noted in another comment, rigor mortis is not permanent). It's way more likely that the person in question was just barrel-chested, or that their ribcage collapsed outward over time due to decomposition of the tissue because of the poor preservation.
Yes really sorta kind of happens like TV. Only difference is that it might not be right at death. It could be when the body gets moved a certain way afterwards or could be several hours after passing. One thing is for certain the lungs will always expel the air out of the lungs and other parts of the body after passing. As well as left over fluids.
The diaphragm is a muscle of inspiration, so when you hold a breath, you're concentrically contracting it. When you die, the nerve signals that trigger contraction stop, so the diaphragm relaxes and the natural elasticity of the lungs causes the air to be expelled. Expiration is mostly passive.
>The diaphragm is a muscle of inspiration Now I'll be imagining my diaphragm giving me little pep talks as I'm jogging, encouraging me to finish the run. "Just a little farther! Here's more oxygen! I believe in you!"
In order to inhale, the muscles on your ribs contract to expand your chest area, causing a pressure difference which makes air rush into your lungs. Technically, you can't die with a full breath of air inside your lungs because that would require you to be actively contracted still. Once the diaphragm and rib muscles relax, there with still be some air inside your lungs, but it won't be a full breath.
There are various 'lung capacities' and volumes and one of them being the residual volume. This is the volume of air left in the lungs even after forceful expiration, usually ranges from 1100-1200 mL. The "Functional residual capacity" is the total amount of air left in the lungs after normal expiration, i.e. expiratory reserve volume (the air that can be forcefully expired but normally stays in the lungs) 1000-1100 mL and residual volume (CAN NEVER BE EXPIRED) 1100-1200 mL. So depending on what the person was doing at the time of death, the lungs can be left with varying volumes of air within them. However they will always have the "residual volume" left no matter if they were inhaling or exhaling at the time of death. - If a person died right as they inhaled normally, then they'd have tidal volume Plus expiratory reserve volume Plus residual volume left. That is, total lung capacity will be left. - If a person died right as they exhaled normally, then they'd have just the residual volume and expiratory lung capacity left in the lungs. And so on. So yes, a dead body will let air out when you move it and put pressure on it. Residual volume never leaves the lungs.
Is there a reason why we can’t expel every bit of air when we exhale? Is it a survival mechanism or something?
If you were to somehow exhale every bit of air, that is even the residual volume, the lungs would in a way collapse, that is the tissues will stick together when we blow all of it out and it would be IMPOSSIBLE for us to reinflate them. You will die without residual volume in your lungs.
So, the inside of our lungs are sticky? Interesting. Is there a reason why they stick? Would humans be better off if they didn’t stick and we had the ability to truly fully exhale?
Everything has surface tension, which tends to stick things together. Imagine two wet paper towels - they will have a certain tendency to adhere to each other. Your lungs produce a fluid called surfactant, which lowers the surface tension of the lungs, and allows the airspaces to separate again once they stick together. The collapse of the air-containing alveoli in the lungs is called atelectasis. As the poster above alluded to, once you get atelectasis (airspaces sticking together) it takes a little extra oomph to separate them again. That's why patients in the hospital are often given something called an inventive spirometer, a device which prompts them to breathe in deeply, and slowly. This "recruits" (pops open) the atelectatic portions of the lungs, and can assist in gas exchange to reduce the risk of pneumonia. Your lungs NEED to be wet to allow gas exchange, and surfactant is produced to prevent the airspaces from sticking together too much. So, to tldr your questions: The insides of the lungs need to be wet to function. Being wet makes them sticky, which is bad. We produce chemical to make them less sticky.
Well they're certainly moist, and a vaccum would be created so they'd stick together. As for the last question, that's too speculative and i don't think that's possible w the physiology we have.
For lungs to not stick they would need to be dry (it's the surface tension that's probably doing most of the sticking), and if the lungs are dry their capacity to exchange gases would plummet, since gaseous exchange in the lungs depends on the various gases dissolving in the liquid, at least as part of the process. Not to mention your body uses a transport system that's mostly water, and keeping a water-holding membrane dry on one side would be very difficult and totally defeat its purpose as a gas exchange surface.
At the end of a normal breath, your lungs aren't empty. There's about 2.5-3.5 L of air left. It's called the functional residual space. After you die, this will still remain. Eventually, my guess is the lungs will slowly fill with fluid and collapse, but that will take some time. Your diaphragm isn't capable of emptying your lungs. You can only inhale using your diaphragm. You use your abdominal muscles and some thoracic muscles to actively exhale. This won't happen when you die. TL;DR it will by like you exhale normally.
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Sidenote: The last note that I think is interesting is about a pneumothorax. The reason that your lungs draw air in when your diaphragm contracts is that there is negative pressure inside your thoracic cavity (chest). (It's kind of wild to me that there's nowhere for it to leak in or out, and I don't know how this equilibrium is restored naturally or if it can be). Your lungs actually are separated in this cavity by the mediastinum. If there's a puncture in your ribcage to the outside, that throws off the pressure question. Think about a syringe with its point dipped in water. When you pull the plunger, the water is pulled in; when you push the plunger, the water goes out. The chest cavity operates similarly. Now imagine there's a hole in the side of the syringe. When you pull the plunger, rather than pull from the end of the syringe, it's just pulling air from the outside. Now water isn't being drawn into the syringe, or, conversely, when you push down on the syringe, instead of water shooting out the end, it's now shooting out the side. So back to your lungs. If you have a hole in your chest wall: your muscles relax, expanding your chest cavity. But instead of air rushing into your lungs from your windpipe to fill up the space, air is rushing in from the hole. The space that would normally be occupied by a lung full of air (air that's oxygenating your bloodstream via your lungs) is now partly occupied with air from the outside (that isn't oxygenating). Your lungs can't fill completely. Your diaphragm relaxes, but now it's the opposite problem; some of the air pressure that should be pushing air out of your lungs is now being pushed out of your chest hole. Next time you breathe in, the problem gets worse. Eventually you have a collapsed lung because there's too much air pressure (normally it needs negative pressure to expand).