Full Real Human Body Decomposing Process

As gases expand, the body swells and bloats. In warmer months, bloating begins just a few days after death and lasts up to a month. The stomach, eyeballs and intestines liquefy, followed by the muscular organs. Then the skin splits and the body disintegrates, moving away from the bones. You have the fluid, you have leftover tissue. You will get adipocere, which is considered grave wax, which is basically your muscles have turned into like a soapy waxy substance, which rarely goes away. You will have all of these extras that you do not realize.

Whether a body is buried or not makes a difference too. A body left exposed decomposes twice as fast as a body in water and four times as fast as a body that is buried. There's one more clue that makes most people squirm. Within a half hour of death, flies swarm to the body, throw into orifices like the ears, eyes, nose and mouth to lay their eggs. Within 24 hours, the body crawls with tens of thousands of maggots, eating away the soft tissue. If you find smaller versus larger maggots,

that will tell you you have earlier in the decomposition stages because they haven't had the time to feed yet. After 20 hours, the maggots are about a third of an inch long. They continue to grow as they feed on tissue. And when they reach a little more than half an inch, they've been feeding for about six days. The thought is enough to make most people's skin crawl. I try to tell people that as much as we don't want to think about those, it's that your body is not going to be preserved in a state that you think it's going to.

The body farm forces us to confront the fact that we ourselves are mortal, that our bodies, once they begin to decay, will do so in a very offensive way. We prefer not to confront such a reality.