Firefighter here. I was reflecting on a fatality I attended recently. My thoughts wandered to how a body looks like it is ‘just matter’ in a way that a living thing does not, even when sleeping. Previously I assumed this observation was just something to do with traumatic death, but this person seemed to have died peacefully and the same, ‘absence’ of something was obvious.
I’m not a religious person, but it made me wonder if there actually is something that ‘leaves’ when someone dies (beyond the obvious breathing, pulse etc).
I’m not looking for a ‘my holy book says’, kind of discussion here, but rather a reflection on the direct, lived experiences of people who see death regularly.
I’ve hospiced plenty of folks right until they’ve passed and that feeling of missing comes sooner than clinical death, I’ll tell you. Once someone’s respiration rate drops low enough and their pulse and BP are undetectable, and the blood starts pooling, you’ll have a very hard time differentiating them from a body without a stethoscope and time. Clinically dead folks do tend to become a job to deal with and aren’t something that register as people, though you still feel the need to be respectful.