Book summary “Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?”: summary

Introduction

You are likely to notice that children possess a morbid curiosity about death that adults spend a lifetime trying to ignore. While you might try to shield young minds from the grim realities of mortality, children ask blunt questions about what actually happens to a body after life stops. You may find yourself entirely unequipped to answer when a child asks if their cat will eat their eyeballs if you die alone in your apartment.

Caitlin Doughty steps into this gap as a licensed mortician and cremationist who refuses to sugarcoat the physical reality of dying. She argues that society suffers from a deep disconnection from death, driven by an unhealthy fear and a lack of basic biological knowledge. Instead of avoiding the grotesque, you can confront it directly through scientific inquiry and dark humor.

This book strips away the mystery and squeamishness surrounding human decomposition, funeral practices, and bodily functions after the heart stops. You will journey through the mechanics of mortuary science, ancient burial rites, and the strange legal realities of managing corpses in the modern world. The text systematically dismantles popular myths about death and replaces them with hard biological facts.

As you read, you will find answers to the most unsettling questions you never knew how to ask:

• Will your household pets consume your remains if you pass away undiscovered?
• What happens to your stomach contents and organs while you decompose?
• Can you legally launch your cremated remains into outer space or turn them into glass?
• How do different cultures manage the overwhelming logistical challenge of rotting flesh?
• What actually occurs inside a coffin buried deep beneath the earth?

1. Body Changes After Death

Death initiates an immediate cascade of biological changes as muscles relax and rigor mortis takes over.

When you die, primary relaxation loosens all your body muscles and can release any waste left inside.

When you are alive, your external anal sphincter is a voluntary muscle controlled by your brain. It locks down fecal matter until you decide otherwise. Upon death, your muscles lose tone and release any remaining feces or urine.

Morticians encounter this reality during a first call. They use specific methods to manage waste before family viewings:

• diapers;
• mid-level A/V plugs;
• invasive anal packing.

Forensic pathologists earn $50,000 more per year on average than morticians. They must pick through stomach and poop contents during autopsies.

Rigidity and Faces

You do not need to worry about permanent silly expressions. Primary relaxation leaves your muscles floppy for 2 to 3 hours, which drops your jaw and opens your eyelids.

Afterward, the lack of oxygen stops ATP production. Your muscles seize up in rigor mortis.

Rigor mortis is temporary. It fades after about 72 hours, and your muscles go floppy again.

A 25-year-old woman in India was found dead with her legs and an arm in the air. Investigators theorized that her killer posed her limbs during primary relaxation before rigor mortis locked them in place.

2. Funeral Customs and Misconceptions

Popular culture and history are full of myths regarding how we handle the dead, from Viking ships to popcorn.

The Hollywood depiction of a flaming arrow igniting a corpse on a floating boat is a historical myth not practiced by actual Vikings.

Vikings performed cremations on land. They sometimes shaped stone outlines like boats or hauled whole ships onto land for ship burials, but never set burning boats adrift.

A floating boat cannot carry the massive amount of wood and sustained heat required to fully cremate an adult human body.

Arab writer Ahmad ibn Fadlan documented a Rus' chieftain cremation where a longship was hauled onto land on a wooden platform and burned completely on solid ground.

A full human cremation requires specific resources:

• 1,200 degrees: the temperature a cremation fire must reach for two to three hours;
• over 40 cubic feet: the amount of wood required for a full human cremation.

Popcorn Cremation

Internet memes suggest swallowing microwave popcorn unpopped to shock the crematory operator with loud popping sounds during cremation.

Popcorn requires specific conditions, including an ideal temperature around 356 degrees Fahrenheit and moisture balance, to pop.

Cremation machines, also known as a retort, reach average temperatures of 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit with flames directly hitting the torso. A 14-ton machine would blacken and vaporize popcorn kernels instantly without producing a sound.

Leaving an implanted medical device like a pacemaker inside a body during cremation creates a dangerous explosive hazard. Over 700,000 people a year receive pacemakers.

Pacemakers consist of a battery, generator, and wires. If not surgically excised prior to cremation, the intense heat triggers a flammable chemical reaction that instantly discharges the battery's stored energy.

This explosion can injure the operator or damage the machine's doors and bricks. Morticians must check paperwork and feel the chest area above the heart to cut out pacemakers before placing a body into the retort.

3. Burial Science and Scavengers

Decomposing bodies produce pungent compounds named cadaverine and putrescine that attract scavengers. However, proper soil layers block the odor and utilize topsoil microorganisms, fungi, and insects to decompose the body into a scentless skeleton. Scavengers also avoid digging because it requires too much energy compared to easier food sources.

Animals rarely dig up human graves because proper soil depth acts as an effective scent barrier and promotes rapid decomposition.

Black and brown bears in remote Siberia broke into cemeteries and dug up bodies because frozen ground kept graves shallow and starvation forced them past ordinary foraging.

Natural burial requires careful planning to balance scent management with decomposition speed. You must consider specific measurements:

• 3 and a half feet: the recommended compromise depth for a natural burial to provide a smell barrier while maintaining active topsoil decomposition.

Cemetery Water

Friendly bacteria decompose buried bodies safely without tainting groundwater, as the upper soil layer acts as a purifying filter. Conversely, toxic chemicals used in historic preservation, such as the arsenic used by Civil War embalmers, can seep into local water supplies generations later.

Natural decomposition processes do not contaminate water supplies, but chemical preservation methods like historic embalming can cause long-term environmental toxicity.

A study conducted at a Civil War cemetery in Iowa City discovered that nearby water sources contained arsenic levels three times higher than the safe limit.

This historic conflict left lasting environmental impacts that you can measure across decades. Consider these figures regarding the legacy of toxic preservation:

• 600,000: the number of soldiers who died during the Civil War.
• 150 years: the time passed since the Civil War while arsenic continues to seep from cemeteries.

4. Medical Anomalies and Comas

Conjoined twins share physical and circulatory systems so deeply that the illness or death of one frequently causes the death of the other. You find that this condition is extremely rare. It occurs in 1 in every 200,000 births.

Conjoined twins share a grim prognosis, with nearly 60 percent dying in the womb and 35 percent not surviving their first day.

When they survive, their organs often function in tandem. A weak organ in one twin is compensated by the other, placing immense strain on the survivor. In 1993, the hospital care and surgery cost for American conjoined twins Amy and Angela Lakeberg reached $1 million.

Chang and Eng Bunker, the original Siamese twins from Siam, died two hours apart. Chang suffered a stroke and died, causing Eng's blood to fill their connected section and not return.

Conjoined Twins

Comas and Burial

Historical fears of being buried alive led doctors to use extreme and dangerous methods to confirm death before modern science. You might worry about entering this state, but taphophobia drove extreme historic anxieties.

Before the twentieth century, doctors used horrific methods to test if a patient was truly dead:

• pushing needles under toenails;
• slicing feet;
• applying red-hot pokers;
• administering smoke enemas;
• writing messages in invisible lead acetate ink to detect putrefaction sulfur dioxide.

In sixteenth-century England, Matthew Wall was nearly buried alive. His pallbearers dropped his coffin on wet leaves, causing him to wake up and knock on the lid. He lived for twenty-four more years after being revived.

In 1937, Angelo Hays was in a motorcycle accident, mistakenly pronounced dead, and later found alive when exhumed. You can survive for a maximum of five hours on the air inside a buried coffin.

Brain death and a coma are distinct medical states, with brain death being irreversible and accompanied by total loss of lower brain stem functions. While a coma patient retains brain function and can potentially recover, a brain-dead patient has lost all upper and lower brain functions. Machines are required to maintain respiration and heartbeats. Modern doctors use rigorous tests to confirm this state.

5. Unusual Places of Death

House sellers are rarely legally required to disclose peaceful deaths that occurred on the property. Laws regarding death disclosure vary by location.

You generally do not need to disclose peaceful, accidental, or suicidal deaths to buyers unless they ask.

Some states like Oregon require no disclosure at all. However, violent deaths or murders may fall under material facts that require disclosure to avoid lawsuits. Such properties become known as stigmatized property.

Rules depend heavily on jurisdiction:

• peaceful deaths rarely require legal disclosure;
• suicides and accidents follow local regulations;
• murders often fall under material facts;
• California requires landlords to disclose a death in an apartment for three years.

A woman named Jessica in Los Angeles discovered a neighbor had died alone in an apartment below hers and remained undiscovered for over two weeks, yet the apartment was later cleaned and rented to new tenants without legally mandated disclosures.

Dying on a Plane

Logistical challenges multiply when a passenger dies mid-flight. Airlines lack a dedicated morgue cabin.

Flight crews must move the deceased body to an empty row or first-class seat when space permits. Cabin staff secure the remains with a blanket and a seatbelt.

6. Animal Interactions and Cannibalism

Domestic pets will scavenge human remains postmortem out of hunger or anxious attempts to rouse their deceased owners.

While pets may scavenge out of necessity, human flesh offers poor nutrition and severe health risks.

Pet Scavenging

Cats share 95.6 percent of their DNA with lions. In the United States every year, cats slaughter 3.7 billion birds. The total estimated death toll of birds, mice, rabbits, and voles killed by cats reaches 20 billion.

Cats wait longer than dogs before they begin scavenging an unattended corpse. A feline targets soft exposed areas like lips, eyelids, and tongues. Dogs will attack a corpse without remorse. Dogs often begin by nibbling or licking to wake an unresponsive owner rather than starting from starvation.

A forensic veterinarian documented a red setter that licked and bit the legs of an unconscious alcoholic owner. After she died, the dog continued trying to rouse her, resulting in missing tissue from her nose and mouth.

Taboos of Cannibalism

Human meat offers poor nutritional value and carries high disease transmission risks. Human flesh is legally unobtainable due to corpse desecration laws. While cannibalism itself is not specifically criminalized, acquiring human flesh violates abuse of corpse laws.

Nutritionally, humans provide fewer calories than other red meats and consist largely of fat. Anthropologists analyzed male donor bodies for caloric content between 1945 and 1956. An adult male human yields an estimated average of 125,822 calories in protein and fat. A mammoth once provided a calorie yield of 3.6 million.

Mortuary cannibalism presents severe biological dangers. Eating human flesh risks transmitting blood-borne viruses and fatal prions that survive cooking and cause neurodegenerative diseases.

Anthropologists traced an epidemic of kuru, a fatal prion disease causing muscle spasms and dementia among the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, to their ritualistic consumption of human brains after death.

In 1972, Pedro Algorta survived an Andes plane crash by consuming deceased passengers during a seventy-one-day ordeal.

7. Preservation and Display

Modern technology allows for radical preservation methods like plastination, replacing natural decomposition entirely.

Gunther von Hagens pioneered plastination and founded the Institute for Plastination in Germany. You can view these anatomical specimens in the Body Worlds exhibition, which opened in Tokyo in 1995 and began touring the United States in 2004. Eighteen thousand people are currently registered as body donors to Body Worlds. The potential cost of full-body plastination reaches fifty thousand dollars.

Plastination

The plastination process replaces body fluids with polymers to create durable, odorless specimens for public exhibition.

The procedure requires several distinct stages:

• fixing a body with formaldehyde;
• dissecting the tissue;
• dehydrating it by immersion in a cold acetone bath;
• boiling it in molten plastics like silicone and polyester inside a vacuum chamber.

The vacuum forces out the acetone and replaces it with plastic. The plastinator then poses the body before curing it with heat, light, or gas.

Tall Caskets

Urban legends claim funeral homes saw off the legs of tall corpses to make them fit into standard containers. You do not need to worry about limb amputation because standard caskets accommodate heights up to seven feet. Custom manufacturers can build caskets of any required dimension. Crematories can process bodies up to approximately nine feet in length.

In 2009 at Cave Funeral Home in South Carolina, an employee illegally severed a six-foot-seven-inch man's legs to fit him into a standard casket. Authorities uncovered this crime four years later after an exhumation. Oversize caskets are readily available up to eight feet in length to prevent such abuses. For comparison, Robert Wadlow reached a height of eight feet eleven inches as the tallest recorded person, while former NBA player Manute Bol stood seven feet seven inches tall with an eight-foot-six-inch wingspan.

8. Medical Uses of Corpses

Forensic science utilizes stomach contents to establish timelines, though cadaver blood transfusions remain socially taboo.

Digestion slows down significantly at death as secretion and muscular action cease, leaving only residual enzymes and bacteria to break down food. You might wonder if your body keeps digesting a meal after you die. Pathologists examine stomach and bowel contents to determine how long a person survived after their last meal.

The state of digestion of stomach contents helps forensic pathologists estimate the postmortem interval during an autopsy.

Scientists analyzed the stomach contents of Ötzi, a 5,300-year-old mummy found between Austria and Italy, discovering his last meal consisted of meat, einkorn wheat, and toxic bracken fern before he was killed by an arrow.

Cadaver Blood

Medical experiments in the twentieth century proved that blood can be successfully drained from a recently deceased donor and transfused into a living recipient within a six-hour window. However, the practice is rare due to the availability of living donors, ethical disclosure issues, and societal taboos against corpse fluids.

Soviet surgeon V. N. Shamov successfully experimented with transfusing dead dogs' blood into exsanguinated living dogs in 1928, later expanding trials to humans. In 1961, Jack Kevorkian became the first American doctor to attempt cadaver blood transfusions. Animal tests achieved a 90 percent lethal level of exsanguination, while initial experiments removed 70 percent of blood from test dogs. Cadaver blood remains usable for transfusions for several hours after death, though social stigma and logistical challenges prevent widespread use.

9. Cemetery Space Solutions

Traditional burials spread corpses across hundreds of acres of valuable land. Modern innovators design multi-story structures to house the dead.

To combat a lack of land in dense urban areas, cemeteries are increasingly expanding upward into multistory buildings.

Some towers fill burial columns with dirt to respect religious customs. Others use automated conveyors to transport urns to personal visiting rooms.

Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica III in Brazil features 32 stories of graves alongside a restaurant, concert hall, and gardens. Yarkon Cemetery in Israel plans burial towers with an ultimate capacity of 250,000 graves.

Grave Rentals

Perpetual care assumes that a grave remains undisturbed forever. European nations often reject this model due to spatial limits.

Some European nations utilize a rental model where graves are leased for a set time limit rather than owned in perpetuity.

Public graves in Germany and Belgium are rented for a defined period between 15 and 30 years. When families choose not to continue paying, bodies face relocation:

• remains move deeper into the ground;
• bones transfer to a communal grave.

Singapore features a population density of 18,000 people per square mile. A 1998 law restricts burials to 15 years in the country. Workers dig up the bodies after this limit, cremate them, and place them in a columbarium.

10. Decomposition Processes and Smells

Death triggers a predictable sequence of color changes as gravity and bacteria alter your body. Initial pallor is followed by livor mortis, the purple pooling of blood in lower areas due to gravity. Forensic examiners use livor mortis patches to determine the position of death.

A dead body undergoes a predictable sequence of color changes driven by gravity settling blood, bacterial putrefaction, and cellular enzyme destruction.

Half an hour after death, your iris and pupil cloud over and turn milky. About a day and a half after death, putrefaction sets in as gut bacteria liquefy organs. This stage produces:

• green abdomens;
• marbling from decaying blood vessels;
• yellow or green pigments from bilirubin and biliverdin breakdown.

Decomposition Scents

The classic foul odor of a decomposing body is generated by volatile organic compounds produced as intestinal bacteria break down tissue. Microbes consume the body and release sulfur-containing gases that create distinct aromatic chemicals. These compounds act as chemical signals that attract scavengers, cadaver dogs, and blowflies.

The classic foul odor of a decomposing body is generated by volatile organic compounds produced as intestinal bacteria break down tissue.

Medical examiners and funeral directors describe the scent of decomposition with various comparisons:

• rotting vegetables;
• roadkill;
• soggy Brussels sprouts.

Eight specific chemical substances give human putrefaction gas its unique stink profile. These include putrescine and cadaverine, alongside odor mortis and necromones.

Insect Bone Avoidance

Flesh-eating insects usually avoid consuming bones because bones require difficult labor and offer little nutritional value. Necrophagous insects like dermestid beetles are primarily interested in soft tissues, skin, hair, and feathers. Because insects do not require large amounts of calcium, they have not evolved a drive to consume bone unless extreme starvation conditions occur.

Agriculture educator Peter Coffey discovered that Dermestes maculatus beetles chewed small round holes into the delicate bones of a stillborn lamb when food availability was poor. In the oceans, deep-sea bone-eating worms called Osedax were first discovered by scientists in 2002.

11. Modern and Historic Challenges

Winter frost makes standard digging impossible. Cemeteries historically relied on storage structures or modern mechanical tools to handle burials. In the nineteenth century, communities used outdoor structures like receiving vaults or dead houses to store coffins until the spring thaw.

When winter frost stops standard digging, cemeteries break through the ground using specialized mechanical tools.

Archaeologist Robyn Lacy studies historical dead houses, noting that some of these simple wooden or brick structures still exist and remain in use. Today, cemeteries break through frozen topsoil using heavy construction jackhammers, backhoes with specialized frost teeth, or external heating domes. It takes 6 hours to blast four feet down into frost using a construction jackhammer, while heating equipment requires 12 to 18 hours to thaw the ground.

A fatality in space presents complex logistical and physical challenges regarding whether to preserve, process, or release the remains. Rapid decompression in the vacuum of space causes body gases to expand and body liquids to turn into gas, leading to massive bloating and extreme tissue distension. An astronaut loses consciousness following a sudden suit breach in 9 to 11 seconds. Space programs have historically explored options ranging from deep-space burials to mechanical freeze-drying prototypes.

In 2005, NASA collaborated with a Swedish company named Promessa on a design prototype called the Body Back to freeze-dry and pulverize space corpses. The ambient temperature of space used to freeze corpses in proposed retrieval systems drops to –270°C.

The systematic recovery, identification, and repatriation of fallen soldiers evolved significantly during the twentieth century. Before the nineteenth century, ordinary foot soldiers were typically left on the battlefield while leaders received formal transportation home. Modern military mortuaries utilize advanced forensics, X-rays, fingerprinting, and DNA matching to identify remains and prepare them for viewings.

During the Napoleonic Wars, British Admiral Horatio Nelson's crew preserved his body by storing his corpse in a barrel filled with brandy and aqua vitae. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency continues searching for missing personnel, leaving 73,000 World War II American service member bodies still unaccounted for. When casualties return home today, the Dover Port Mortuary maintains a potential handling capacity of 100 bodies a day.

12. Alternative Preservation and Remains

From mummification to plastic wrapping at wakes, human remains require careful management to prevent leakage.

Funeral Plastic

Bodies can leak fluids from preexisting holes or from decomposition liquids called purge. Furthermore, chronic wounds, surgeries, poor circulation, or edema can cause weeping skin that needs to be sealed with gels, powders, and plastic.

Funeral directors use plastic materials like Saran Wrap, shrink wrap, or full-body vinyl garments called unionalls to prevent bodily fluids from leaking and staining expensive caskets or clothing during wakes.

A grandmother wrapped in plastic under her blouse at her wake prevented leakage during a large family viewing.

Keeping Skulls

Keeping a relative's skull on a mantel is legally and practically impossible in the United States due to strict paperwork requirements, abuse of corpse laws, and the absence of legal skeletonization services. Funeral homes cannot legally decapitate and de-flesh a corpse, and burial and transit permits only allow burial, cremation, or scientific donation.

While gray areas in state laws have allowed online bone sales, reducing a human head to a skull for private ownership violates laws against disposing of remains outside a cemetery.

In a seven-month period in 2012-2013, 454 human skulls were listed on eBay with an average opening bid of $648.63 before the practice was banned. At least 38 states have laws attempting to prevent the sale of human remains.

Amber Preservation

While encasing a dead body in tree resin that eventually fossilizes into amber could preserve it for millions of years, extracting usable DNA to clone the organism is scientifically impossible. Trees produce sticky resin to protect against pests, which can occasionally fossilize into amber when protected from weathering. However, environmental factors cause DNA to disintegrate far too quickly for cloning.

Notable amber discoveries include:

• a 20-million-year-old scorpion in Mexico;
• 75-million-year-old dinosaur feathers in Canada;
• a 100-million-year-old spider attacking a wasp.

10 Key Ideas

1. Primary relaxation immediately loosens all your body muscles and can release any waste left inside when you die.
2. The Hollywood depiction of a flaming arrow igniting a corpse on a floating boat is a historical myth not practiced by actual Vikings.
3. Animals rarely dig up human graves because proper soil depth acts as an effective scent barrier and promotes rapid decomposition.
4. Conjoined twins share a grim prognosis, with nearly 60 percent dying in the womb and 35 percent not surviving their first day.
5. You generally do not need to disclose peaceful, accidental, or suicidal deaths to buyers unless they ask.
6. While pets may scavenge out of necessity, human flesh offers poor nutrition and severe health risks.
7. Modern technology allows for radical preservation methods like plastination, replacing natural decomposition entirely.
8. Forensic science utilizes stomach contents to establish timelines, though cadaver blood transfusions remain socially taboo.
9. To combat a lack of land in dense urban areas, cemeteries are increasingly expanding upward into multistory buildings.
10. A dead body undergoes a predictable sequence of color changes driven by gravity settling blood, bacterial putrefaction, and cellular enzyme destruction.