This podcast contains graphic descriptions of death and decay.

Please listen with care. Rain. Campside Media.

It can take hundreds of years for a human body to return to dust.

Immediately after you die, the body begins digesting itself breathing halts your blood stops circulating

your body cools losing one and a half degrees every hour until it reaches room

temperature after about two hours every hour until it reaches room temperature.

After about two hours, rigor mortar sets in,

stiffening your muscles.

Small fluid-filled blisters form on your organs and skin, giving the body a plastic-like sheen.

The bacteria in your body, no longer kept in check by the immune system, begin to feast. They consume tissue, releasing methane and other gases in the

process. Your body blokes, nearly doubles in size. That unmistakable horrid odor of death grows for several days and soon you can be smelled a quarter mile away.

Under certain conditions a process called suponification takes place.

It turns your fatty acids into something called grave wax.

Your body becomes soap,

and parts of it stay preserved for decades, if not centuries.

But more likely the bugs get you first, because death attracts insects to your body. Fleshflies arrive within minutes and they in turn attract

larger predator insects.

Ants and wasps come to eat the flies.

Maggots and beetles devour your tissues.

Further up the food chain springtails and spiders eat the predators,

and turn your corpse into just another place to live.

Your body, which ones contain hopes and dreams and thoughts and memories,

...