How long does a corpse stay in the hospital before it is moved to the mortuary?!
Question:
How long does a corpse stay in the hospital before it is moved to the mortuary?
Also, how long does the mortuary keep the corpse for? Is it completely dependent on the family and when they bury/cremate it?
Answers:
It depends. Normally if someone dies in the hospital, they move it to the morgue downstairs immediately, but the needs of the living patients comes first, so if it's busy in the hospital, it might sit there for a couple mins until they can get some extra people from somewhere to take it down or wait until everything else is taken care of. (Like if someone dies and someone else goes into cardiac arrest, the dead person can wait).
The hospital morgue keeps the corpse as long as it needs to do an autopsy, contact family members (if necessary, like in a car accident), have the family make funeral arrangements, etc. It is kept preserved in a big cooler that usually only has like, 2 or 3 spots, but I guess it could be bigger, so it doesn't really matter how long it stays there as long as no one else dies and needs those spots, but they try to move them out pretty quick. They normally want it out of there within a couple days to make room for more people as they die.
When the family finishes making funeral arrangements, the undertaker will come to the morgue and take the body to the mortuary in the funeral home where it is embalmed, dressed up, makeup and stuff is put on, it's placed in the casket, posed, etc. The burial is normally a day or two later. (Usually the viewing is one day and the funeral is the next day because the body starts to decompose after longer than a week).
The whole process can be faster though. For example, some religions (like Judaism) don't believe in autopsies and they believe the body should be buried before the next sunset (without being preserved with formaldehyde or anything), in which case, the process is shorter and usually takes less than 24 hours. But if the person is involved in a murder or some kind of suspicious death, it might take a little longer before the body will be released to be buried because of all the tests, autopsies, photographs, evidence collection, and more that need to be provided to the police. I thought that murder cases took longer than just a day or two, but another Yahooer (a funeral director) emailed me and corrected my information, she said that she normally gets the bodies within a day or two, regardless of how they died.
Most of the time spent there depends on the family, but not all of it. And if the family never claims the body, like the person was homeless or outlived his/her family and had no burial plot, it is usually cremated and taken to "Potter's Field" (a plot of land where unclaimed bodies have their ashes spread or buried and the township/government pays the expenses).
My dad died on a Wednesday morning at home, he was taken to the funeral home within an hour, we had the viewing and the funeral on Saturday. My grandmother died on a Monday in the hospital, she was kept there for a day and then released to the funeral director by Wednesday, and she was held at the funeral home until the viewing and burial on Saturday.