Process

Adieu, the final farewell, an exploration of death!

Process: Forward to Human Death – Forward to Religious Beliefs – Back to Statistics

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The process of death is very clear and is best characterisedd by these bullet points:

The deceased body loses temperature steadily;
Some fifteen minutes to two hours after death, the body takes on a paleness, which is called pallor mortis;
From one-to-five hours, livor mortis, or lividity, begins and gets fixed in six-to-ten hours. This involves blood accumulating in the lower parts of the body (as a result of gravity), it causes a discoloration of the skin at these lower parts that varies from pink to dark purplish as the blood settles;
From five-to-seven hours, rigor mortis begins, first in the face. From eight-to-twelve hours, the rigor, stiffness, spreads through the body and to the limbs;
At twelve hours the body reaches just 77°F /25°C internally;
At twenty-to-twenty-four hours body temperature has the ambient/room temperature, this is algor mortis or cold death. Once the ambient has been reached there can be no estimate of time of death, but during the temperature reduction period, in a closed environment, the current temperature can help with an estimate of time of death.
This is done by consulting a Standard Cooling Curve, this suggests approximately a loss of 1.5°F per hour, from 98.4°F. In Celsius it is expressed as a loss of 2°C in the first hour and 1°C per hour thereafter, from the norm of 37°C;
From twenty-four hours rigor mortis then reduces;
From thirty-six hours, rigor has completely disappeared;
From forty-eight hours, decomposition sets in and an unpleasant odour is given off;
From three weeks to several years the process of skeletonisation proceeds;
Then fossilisation sets in – though this is over a much long period.