Did you know they have morgues on cruise ships?
If you, well not you since you’re here reading this, but someone dies on a cruise ship, they take that body down to a hidden deck that’s a morgue. I know, I know, this sounds like a Snopes entry, but it is true. According to an article I read recently, 91 people have died on cruise ships between 2014 and 2017. Apparently, most deaths are natural, with the most common being from heart attacks. Did you know that when a person dies on an airplane, if there’s nowhere to relocate the body to, like an overhead bin for example, they simply strap the person into a seat, often in first class, and cover them up with blankets? I didn’t know the qualifications to getting a first class seat were so stringent, but I personally don’t think it’s worth it. Ultimately, your death, no matter where or when it happens, is an inconvenience to those around you.
When you die, suddenly everything becomes lower on the list of priorities for everyone else, and they all, finally, turn to focus on you. What to do with your remains, how to have a service for you, what happens to everything you owned. Suddenly, you’re the most important thing in the world, even if everyone ignored you up to this point. They tell stories about you, talk about your strengths and heap praise onto you like you’re a beloved celebrity. Then, they put you wherever you’re going and, if you’re lucky, they’ll occasionally look at the photo of you on their mantel or wherever and think of you once every 3 to 5 years. You…are a nuisance. You become just another thing they have to attend to in their calendar.
Whether you die on a cruise ship, an airplane, alone in an apartment or at the base of a mountain you thought you could climb because you once read a book about climbing mountains, you are just another event to be tended to. Your death is likely the most interest anyone will ever take in you, and that’s kind of simultaneously sad and beautiful.
In 2019, I came across an article from The Guardian, which is sort of like the USA Today of the UK. Regardless of their reputation within the journalism industry, the article itself was fascinating as it focused on a woman by the nameof Miyu Kojima who works for To-Do Company, a cleaning firm that specialises in the apartments of the recently deceased. Many of their jobs involve kodokushi (“solitary deaths”), where people die alone and are not found for days. And while that’s fascinating in and of itself, Kojima really stands out because she began to create miniature scenes based on the Tokyo apartments that her company has cleaned following solitary deaths.
Think of it like a really morbid doll house.
The photos that accompany the piece - which I will not post in this piece as they belong to the Guardian - are worth looking at. All miniature dioramas, portraying generally hypothetical death rooms, but one in particular, of a bathtub in which a person had died of natural casues in a bathtub that has since liquified is a fairly gruesome visual counterpart to the concept as a whole. And not totally unheard of, either. In fact, people are often found dead in bathtubs, and often in a horrendous stae of decomposition, depending on how long they’d been there before the discovery. In this 2018 piece from Enrique Dorado Fernández and colleagues for the Romanian Journal of Legal Medicine (and no, once again, I will not be including the photographs for this but not because they’re owned by anyone, and moreso because they’re simply not pleasant to look at), one woman in particular is discussed:
The bathtub faucet was closed/turned off, only a thin puddle of water was visible on the door. Four days before the find, the neighbors downstairs had complained about a leak of water appeared in their ceiling, leaving her a warning under the door. Thee corpse was partially submerged, floating in right lateral decubitus with half of the head in the water. It was in an emphysematosus putrefactive phase, with a marked venous vascular pattern in the skin and “washer-woman” hands. Thee water had left perimeter marks on the inner surface of the bathtub, indicating at least three levels reached at different times, as a result of the evolution of putrefaction.
People die alone, in homes and apartments, and go unnoticed all the time. It isn’t some rare instance, it’s in fact something that happens fairly often. And found not just in bathtubs either. Let’s examine the case of George Bell, for instance, in October 2015, an article from The New York Times by N. R. Kleinfield was published about a man who’d been dead in his apartment for a good while before being discovered. After finding his corpse, an incredible effort was made on the cities part to not just identify this man but also reunite any of his living heirs with what he’d left them, a substantial amount of money.
But the detectives in charge of discovering not just this man exact identity but any lingering familial relations were so unsuccessful in the second part of their endeavor that when he was finally laid to rest, nobody showed up at all for his eventual laying to rest. In fact, this man was so forgotten by the world outside of the people paid to deal with his afterlife expenses, that, as the article states:
On a sun-kindled day a week later, six muscled men from GreenEx, a junk removal business, arrived to empty the cluttered Queens apartment. Dispassionately, they scooped up the dusty traces of George Bell’s life and shoveled them into trash cans and bags. They broke apart the furniture with hammers. Tinny music poured from a portable radio.
Some nuggets they salvaged for themselves. One man fancied a set of Marilyn Monroe porcelain plates. Another worker plucked up an unopened jumbo package of Nike socks, some model cars and some brand-new sponges. Yet another claimed the television and an unused carbon monoxide detector. A spindly worker with taut arms crouched down to inspect some never-worn tan work boots, still snug in their box. They were a size big, but he slid them on and liked the fit.
He cleaned George Bell’s apartment wearing the dead man’s boots.
And it’s recognized even by the people in charge or associated with cases like this that these aren’t rare occurances. Gerard Sweeney, a private lawyer involved with the Bell case, even said “You can die in such anonymity in New York. We’ve had instances of people dead for months. No one finds them, no one misses them.” And Belle isn’t the only one. On January 28th of last year, Alia Shoaib of Business Insider wrote about a woman by the name of Laura Winham, who lay dead in her apartment for more than 3 years before being found in a "mummified, almost skeletal state". This one, however, is a much sadder story, but feel free to read about it if your curiosity gets the better of you.
All in all, it’s not really a mystery why people die alone and forgotten. Connecting with others is hard, especially as you age, and keeping up connections you already had can be even harder. So many people become solitary creatures, or were already, that it’s only inevitable that their lives wold end in such a way, and, not to be dramatic about it or antyhing but…I wouldn’t be surprised if my own ended like this. Some people are loners, whether in life or in death, and some don’t choose to be but end up that way anyway. And even if your life wasn’t all that interesting, at least if you die alone, you’ll wind up leaving a story nobody will forget about, whether because it’s fascinating or because you’re finally forcing the world to interact with you.
That much is guaranteed.
Have you ever heard of the Eight-Thousanders?
They are 14 mountains recognised by the International Mountaineering and Climbing Federation (UIAA) as being more than 8,000 metres (26,247 ft) in height above sea level, and sufficiently independent of neighbouring peaks. They are all in the Himalayan and Karakoram mountain ranges in Asia, and their summits are in what is commonly called the death zone. Remember that, because it’s going to be important. When you think of natural majesty, mountains are one of the first things to come to mind, right? The Colorado Rockies, Half-Dome, the list is ever expanding. When I was a little girl, my stepfather was very into hiking, and by the time I had graduated elementary school, I had reached the peak of Half-Dome at least 3 times. The view from atop such a peak is nothing short of breath taking, and even I, being the cynic I am, can admit that without any kind of disingenuity.
Did you also know that the base of each one of the mountains in the Eight Thousanders is littered with the bodies of people who died trying to climb said mountain? Oh, sure, everyone knows the Mount Everest stories. Good PR is nothing to sneeze at, even if you’re a mountain. But every single one on that list has people who died trying to scale it, and often because of the previously referred toDeath Zone. For the uninitiated, in mountaineering, the death zone refers to altitudes above a certain point where the pressure of oxygen is insufficient to sustain human life for an extended time span. This point is generally tagged as 8,000 m (26,000 ft), where atmospheric pressure is less than 356 millibars (10.5 inHg; 5.16 psi). Hell, Everest alone has had over 330 people die attempting to reach—or return from—the summit. And, perhaps even more telling, is how more often than not, the bodies are left there forever.
In fact, Rachel Nuwer wrote a piece for a BBC investigation in 2015 which concluded "there are certainly more than 200" corpses lying on Everest's slopes. In fact, in that BBC piece, they even state that teturning a body to a family costs thousands of dollars, and requires the efforts of six to eight Sherpas – potentially putting those men’s lives in danger during the process. One man recounted seeing his friends corpse while attempting to summit, and turning back as a result, despite having likely succeeded at his goal if he’d continued. And just in November of 2023, Hilary Brueck, Ashley Collman, and Maiya Focht wrote for a Business Insider piece that discusses in detail that removing said corpses is simply too expensive.
In fact, in that article, it was written:
Mountaineer Alan Arnette previously told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that he signed some grim "body disposal" forms before he climbed Everest, ordering that his corpse should rest in place on the mountain in case he died during the trek.
I find this deeply amusing, almost like a grim prenuptial agreement. But a lot of those peoples bodies are also left at the behest of their wishes, or the wishes of their families. That is the place they would like to be. It’s an odd situation, no argument. But it’s also kind of oddly beautiful in a way. These are people who died doing exacly what they loved, and though dying was likely not on their itinerary, I think it’s safe to say we’d all be so lucky to go in such a way. So sure, this one isn’t nearly as bleak as the people forgotten by time in their homes, but it’s still an unusual final resting place, and often an unintentional one at that.
Dying forgotten in your apartment is sad. Dying on a mountain is [word]. But what about when someone dies in a place nobody has ever died before? A place that would never be considered a potential spot for the end of ones life? A place like, oh say, a water tank.
On February 19, 2013, the body of Canadian tourist Elisa Lam (Chinese: 藍可兒; born as Lam Ho-yi) was recovered from a large cistern atop the Stay on Main hotel in Downtown Los Angeles, where she had been a guest. She was last seen alive on January 31 and was reported missing by her parents on February 1. Her body was discovered by a hotel maintenance worker investigating complaints of flooding and low water pressure.
A matter of interest to the public was that even police were stumped as to how Lam's body came to end up in a water tank that is difficult to access. Foul play was initially investigated as a possibility, but the coroner's office ruled Lam's death to be an accidental one, and instead her death was stated as an accidental case of drowning, with Bipolar being listed as a significant condition. But cause of death wasn’t so much the question, as much as, as previously stated, how the hell she got there in the first place.
See, the investigation had determined how Lam died, but did not initially offer an explanation as to how she got into the tank in the first place. Doors and stairs that access the hotel's roof are locked, with only staff having the passcodes and keys, and any attempt to force them would supposedly have triggered an alarm. The hotel's fire escape could have allowed her to bypass those security measures, but her scent trail was lost near a window that connected to it. A video posted to the Internet after Lam's death showed that the hotel's roof was easily accessible via the fire escape and that two of the lids of the water tanks were open.
Apart from the question of how she got on the roof, others asked if she could have gotten into the tank by herself. All four tanks were 4-by-8-foot (1.2 by 2.4 m) cylinders propped up on concrete blocks; there was no fixed access to them and hotel workers had to use a ladder to look at the water. They were protected by heavy lids that would be difficult to replace from within. The hotel employee who found the body said that the lid was open at the time, removing the issue of how she could have closed the lid from inside. Police dogs that searched through the hotel for Lam, even on the roof, shortly after her disappearance was noted, did not find any trace of her.
As far as unusual places to die go, I got to say a water tank might just top the list.
And, unlike the previous people in this column, she’s the only one who has an out and out mystery surrounding her death. Sure, there were uncertainties to George Bell, but those were mostly attached to his life, not his death. Who he had been, not who he had left as. But here is Lam, someone who dies under unknown circumstances, and what does she get? Certainly not a beautifully writen think piece on the essence of her existence from a respected publication, but a poorly received true crime documentary on Netflix. How revoltingly appropriate to our culture. Death is, like everything else, entertainment to us. If you aren’t, like the foks on cruise ships or airplanes, an inconvenience, then you’re next weeks podcast topic.
But I guess there is an upside to having a death be so mysterious, which is that you’ll never be forgotten, and always be discussed. If people wax eternal on you, I suppose you’ll always be remembered, and really, isn’t that what most people hope for after their demise? Personally, I would prefer to be forgotten about, but that’s just me, and as for where I’d like to die, if given an option, I think I’d have to go with being found in a meat freezer.
What can I say, there’s just something very poetic about freezing to death surrounded by the very things that give me sustenance.
On April 22nd, 2023, Claire Thornton wrote a piece for USA Today, which is sort of like The Guardian of the US, wherein it states a family is suing a Florida cruise company after employees improperly stored their patriarch's dead body in a beverage cooler for six days after he died of a cardiac event at the age of 78. It goes on to state that, after his death, Jones' remains decomposed so rapidly inside the cooler that he could not be displayed in an open casket funeral or wake services and that Jones' body had never been stored at a temperature appropriate to prevent a dead body from decomposing, his body had expanded with gas from decomposing and his skin had turned green.
At the very end of the article, they say that the family argues Celebrity Cruises stripped Jones "of his dignity in the sacred time just after his passing" and the mental image of their loved one's decomposed body "will surely never leave the memory of the plaintiffs." But therein lies where my opinion, and thus this entire column, diverges because I heavily disagree. What’s better? To die scared, in a hospital bed, only to be occasionally thought of when someone passes by your photograph still hung on the wall…or to die on a cruise ship and be shoved in a beverage cooler, thusly giving your family an interesting story for decades to come? One is simply a sad rememberance of a life ending, while the other is a something you can trot out for parties.
Obviously I mean no disrespect to the family and their wishes for how they wanted his death handled, but let’s be real here, wakes, funerals, they’re often for the survivors to deal with their grief, not for those who have passed on.
The dead, and again I don’t mean this in a disrespectful way but more of a logical sense, don’t give a shit what happens to them. They can’t. They’re dead. The damage has already been done, as far as they’re concerned, and quite frankly if I were in Jones’ position, I think I’d be far more upset that I’d died than at how my now defunct body was being handled after the fact. Throw me in a river, bury me in a landfill, I don’t care, that isn’t me anymore. Burial services and things adjacent to that are for the living to gather, reminisce, and move through their loss in a comfortable, familiar setting.
There are two events attached to your life that are all about you. Your birth (and subsequent birthdays) and your death (and the subsequent services that come with it). More often than not, both are planned out by those around you, and seen as something they have to attend to, whether they want to or not. If you, as I did, grew up with no friends and your parents had to then entice other parents children to come to your birthday, it kind of proves that you are of little consequence to the world. Hell, the mere fact that we give attendees “gift bags” at birthday parties simply for attending, or that a lot of times distant family members only care about your death if they get something from your will, is proof enough that you’re only valued for what you can give them, and not who you are.
So die on a mountain. Expire on an airplane. Pass over in a water tank. Make it as complicated and frustrating as possible for those who will have to then be the ones to pick up the pieces. Make it as hard to deal with you as they made it to deal with them. You only get one shot at dying.
Don’t waste it.
Addendum: This didn’t really fit in with the column, despite being tangentially related, so I’ve linked an interesting article from Cosmopolitan here about a musician presumed (incorrectly) to be connected to Lam’s death for anyone interested in reading it.
Hello. My name is Maggie Taylor. I am a 34 year old lesbian artist/author who currently lives in New Mexico with many cats and dogs. If you’re interested in supporting my work, you can buy my novels at my Payhip or Gumroad storefronts, or donate a few bucks to my Ko-Fi. You can also find my website here. Thanks for reading!