What Really Happens At The Moment Of Death? | Unveiled

What Really Happens at the Moment of Death?

At the time of writing, immortality is still, unfortunately, impossible. While it can seem as though the modern age of technology has taken off to fix almost every other inconvenience in life… we haven’t yet found an answer to that greatest inconvenience of all: death. Everybody lives, everyone dies, and no-one really knows why. It’s perhaps little wonder, then, that we remain so interested in precisely how the business of dying plays out.

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what really happens at the moment of death?

When it comes to talking about death, it can be human nature to fall back into euphemism. People “pass away”, they “pop their clogs”, or they “shuffle off their mortal coil”… but, however it’s put, the reality of the situation is always the same. One moment a person’s alive, and the next… they’re not. The life that was within them is no more and, to borrow another turn of phrase, we might say that they’ve moved on to the “other side” – wherever that is.

Recording (or measuring) death isn’t, though, quite as straightforward as perhaps it should be. Broadly, there are two categories to consider; cardiopulmonary death, when the heart stops pumping blood… and brain death, when (with or without a beating heart) the brain stops functioning. Medical professionals also speak of clinical death, which is when a patient stops breathing and, again, their heart stops beating. Thanks to contemporary CPR, though, you can be brought back to life from clinical death. Cardiopulmonary and brain death, by contrast, are deemed irreversible. But there’s a lot of legal controversy here, with different countries, governments and groups recognising death in different ways. For example, by some standards brain death equals full death, and the person suffering it is officially deceased… but, by other standards, they’re not. In America, the rules and laws can change from state to state, with the rights of the dead (and the dying) never universally agreed upon. The apparent uncertainty can lead to high-profile cases where the status of a person is debated and decided in court – have they died, or haven’t they?

But the wider question of the “moment of death” is of course about far more than purely the legal technicalities. It’s a prospect that’s understandably feared by many, but also treated with a seeming calm by others. Accounts of near-death experiences are often, therefore, of great interest. And today, NDE stories certainly aren’t rare. The most common traits involve bright lights, tunnel vision, and life recall – usually explained as life “flashing before your eyes”. There are various proposed scientific reasons for these phenomena, with many boiling down to an NDE being the brain’s last attempt to make sense of what’s happening to it. After a lifetime of survival, it’s suddenly receiving all the signals of imminent death, and it’s as though that stress gets converted into an NDE – so the idea goes. Those who recover from an NDE also often report a newfound feeling of gratitude and purpose in their lives from thereon out – with that personality shift perhaps, again, being the result of the unusual brain activity that they’ve just experienced, according to some theories.

Arguably the strangest NDE cases of all, however, are those which involve a reported out-of-body experience. There are ever-increasing claims of patients seeing themselves on the operating table, for instance. One argument is that this is a specific type of confirmation bias, where because people have come to expect to see their own bodies in the hospital, they then believe that that’s what really happened. It’s an argument that rarely holds up against the person reporting the NDE, though, as they remain sure that what they experienced wasn’t just a cognitive trick. There are accounts of the patient witnessing things that they can’t possibly have known about before, too, and therefore can’t have imagined. Snippets of conversation that they weren’t technically “alive” for… or small details about a room that they can’t possibly have learned unless they somehow had a “birds eye view” of it. And, while we’ve made so many other advances in neuroscience in recent decades, we don’t yet have a reliable, catch-all scientific explanation for NDEs. The mystery of death remains.

But, that said, an NDE, by definition, also isn’t death. A person may well have been brought extremely close to their demise during it… but they still never actually had that final moment. They lived to tell the tale, which in itself means that that tale wasn’t terminal. Arguably the closest thing we have to a true account of death, then, are recorded last words. Again, a person’s final thoughts and exclamations still can’t stand as their final “final moment”… but society tends to pay such close attention to what’s said just before someone passes away, perhaps in search of clues as to what it’s really like.

While famous last words are often reported differently depending on the source, and some claimed last words weren’t actually spoken especially close to the death of their speaker, some of the most widely repeated include those of Charles Darwin, who’s said to have exclaimed, “I am not the least afraid to die”; and those of the tech pioneer Steve Jobs, who reportedly said “Oh, wow!” three times over. There are also reported cases of last words that are more pained and pessimistic – the writer Victor Hugo allegedly said, “I see black light”. Although perhaps the most common theme sees last words being saved for a declaration of love… as is said to have happened with the writers T.S. Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, Emily Bronte, and more. Given that another common trait of NDEs is a claimed feeling of euphoria, perhaps there could be found some kind of biochemical reason as to why feelings of love and wonder should seemingly present themselves during a dying person’s final seconds. There are suggestions that as the brain desperately tries to combat what’s happening to the body, it revisits the best feelings and memories that it can find. Again, though, there’s no one scientific explanation for what happens… and there are no “expectations” that we know of.

In a past video, we saw that a recent study had – by chance – captured the last moments of a dying brain, when a patient unfortunately suffered a heart attack and passed away during an otherwise routine EEG scan. In this case, the patient’s brain was found to have had a surge of wave activity for around thirty seconds after the heart had stopped. While researchers were unable to say with certainty what his mind will’ve experienced at that time, there were broad suggestions that the parts of the brain linked to memory were seemingly the ones that were most put to use. Although his heart had failed him, the patient’s immediate cognitive response was to draw on experiences of his past – before all brain activity ceased, as well, shortly afterwards. However, as this was the first case of its kind (in which a brain had been monitored before, during and after death), and because it shows what happened for just one person, scientists are wary to draw too many wider conclusions from it. As with everything else, what we don’t understand about death continues to eclipse what we do.

As for what happens afterwards, the religions and faiths of the world provide plenty of options. Depending on which you subscribe to, there’s the prospect of heaven or hell, of being reborn on Earth one day, or of being transported to some other, usually higher, “next dimension”. Science does have a little more to say about this. Especially regarding the physical body, which has been tested and studied for centuries to improve our knowledge of disease, but also of decomposition and the general redistribution of the energy that had once been held within a person.

Of course, the soul and memory of a person will live on long after they themselves have passed – not least in the minds of those who knew them. But there are also increasing options in the modern world for the physical body to offer more, too. Some opt to donate all (or part of) their bodies to science, be that as an organ donor or as a general case for further study. Meanwhile, while the more traditional options of burial and cremation remain popular methods for putting a person to rest, the rise of the “green burial” industry is gaining momentum – with so-called “mushroom suits” earning more and more headlines. Designs differ, but these suits are made to be worn by the deceased, so that fungi can get to work converting their physical selves – and even the toxins within – into nutrient rich soil. In this way, when something new grows from that soil, it can be argued that life after death really and definitely is achieved.

When it comes to this topic, there remain so many unknowns. But, thanks to a combination of scientific study, NDE recall, last words on record, faith, philosophy and innovation… we can at least work toward trying to understand. And that’s what really happens at the moment of death.