What Actually Happens To Your Body When You Die? Exploring The 5 Stages Of Human Decomposition

Death is one of the four things that all humans experience, along with birth, urinating, and getting a haircut. While it’s common knowledge that once you die your soul is carried to Heaven where Jesus stares at it without blinking and pokes it with a stick for all eternity, fewer people know what happens to your physical body after your immortal soul leaves it behind. Here is a list of the five stages of human decomposition that your body undergoes after death.

Stage 1: The body flops around for a month

As soon as you die, your body begins flopping around like a fish on the deck of a boat. The flopping is extremely violent, and your body can launch itself up to 12 feet in the air. During the flopping stage of decomposition, your friends and loved ones are advised to stay as far away from you as possible, since your flailing body is liable to smack them in the head or kick them in the stomach. Your body will flop around for about a month. If flopping continues past this point, your family may need to call a doctor to hit your body with a shovel over and over until it stops.

Stage 2: Your body becomes delicious

Once it has completed its month of flopping around, your body reaches its peak ripeness and for the next week it is delicious. Your friends and loved ones should break off little pieces of you to enjoy as a snack, because this is the best you’re ever going to taste. After about a week, you become all rancid and start to taste sour and boring. When your body is no longer delicious, it is finally placed in the grave, where it will continue to taste worse and worse until the decomposition process is complete.

Stage 3: An old woman digs you up and waltzes with your corpse

After three to six months in the grave, your body is dug up by an old woman who waltzes with your corpse in the moonlight while classical music plays from an unknown source. Police could stop this from happening by arresting the woman, but she’s been very lonely since her husband died and it’s not like dancing with your corpse is hurting anyone. You’re dead, so you don’t mind one way or the other, and waltzing with your corpse gives her a fleeting moment of human connection during these final lonely years of her life. The dance typically lasts until dawn, at which point the old woman tosses your body back into the grave and covers it back up with dirt.

Stage 4: Your tongue grows 50 feet long

Approximately six to eight months after your death, your tongue suddenly grows 50 feet long. Usually this results in your tongue bursting out of the ground where you’ve been buried and writing around like a cobra rising from a snake charmer’s basket. Your long, dead tongue will often snatch birds out of the sky, pluck fruit from nearby trees, and smack passing mourners in the face. This stage usually lasts for several months, at which point your tongue snaps back into the ground like a retracting tape measure. Once your tongue returns to your mouth, your body immediately turns into dirt.

Stage 5: A pumpkin in the shape of your head grows from your gravesite

In the fifth and final stage of decomposition, your body leaves behind its last trace on this earth when a pumpkin in the shape of your head sprouts from the ground where you’ve been buried. If you lived a happy life, the pumpkin in the shape of your head has a smiling face, and if you lived an unhappy life, the face is frowning. If you were feeling sleepy when you died, the face on the pumpkin is yawning. The pumpkin usually grows for about a year before it’s harvested by the old woman who danced with your corpse, who then eats it raw. Your body has now fully decomposed. Congratulations!