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1) How did you come to learn of what your wife was doing?

2) What kind of injuries did he sustain?

3) What was prison life like for you?

You can't think of them as a person. When you look at a person who has been dead for an hour, a day, a week, a month - longer, you can't think to yourself, 'that's a human being.' It isn't, it's the body of a human being. When you think about it, what is a human being? It's a being that speaks, sniffs, burps, laughs, cries and coughs. It's a being who can move and show emotion with the slightest movement of muscles. It's a being with blood flowing through veins, with a heart pumping with such force that it can be heard audibly from outside the body.

But that's not what you're looking at. When you're standing in the room with a body that was once a person, be they 7 or 70 years old, you cannot for a second imagine them in death as they were in life. It will drive you mad, and is the sort of thing that has left many colleagues of mine with voices in their heads. It's just an... object. A cold, hard object in the room, eyes usually staring at you accusingly, as if you were the culprit. Those eyes... Fuck they're different on a dead body. They're like porcelain - the shine just vanishes from them, fuck I hate dead eyes. Especially when you need to look at them for signs of asphyxiation. Yuck.

There is a reason that those crime scene shows are bullshit. They don't convey the stench of death like it is in reality. It seeps into your clothing, it worms its way into your brain and lodges itself in your mind - liable to be remembered and even tasted as if it were food at any time. It's a dank, evil-smelling musk that you will never forget as long as you live. Even now I'm sitting in the comfort of my own home and can smell it as if there were a body next to me.

We're a weird bunch who work around dead bodies, either from time to time or every day. Black humor helps, fitness helps, alcohol doesn't. I just wind up with nightmares.

Wow. I didn't intend on hijacking this AMA with my bullshit. Sorry.

(Edit: thank-you for my first Gold, Reddit friend! I wish it was on a nicer comment, but here we are.)

I'll jump in as someone who works in Crime Scene and say, 'no'. But once you smell human death (not the same as say, a dead animal) you will never not be able to forget it or summon the smell to your brain on cue. It's something else entirely. It's also the single saddest smell you can imagine when you're in a house looking for someone who hasn't been seen in a while and you get the faint, stale smell wafting into your nose. It sucks.

And what do we say to cleaning up bodies left next to heaters for three weeks?

Based on how technology is progressing, how long do you believe it will be until conditions like quadriplegia and paraplegia will be considered as totally curable?