Why are dead bodies so heavy?

Because of the lack of normal muscle tension. A body is easier (if awkward) to carry while in rigor. A flaccid dead body just sort of oozes through the path of least resistance, and makes it really hard to carry them. They seem heavier.

Not that I’ve had any experience with hauling around dead bodies, I want you all to know that, but a 185 pound dead body, for example, isn’t any heavier than any other thing that weighs 185 pounds. Live, awake people provide some help, they hold on, they assist, I think. A 185 pound dead body is just like a 185 pound sack of anything else.

@dubsrayboo : I’m sorry you lost 2 dear pets in so short a time.

As the others have mentioned, the weight remains the same alive or dead. However, the bodies were more than completely relaxed when dead. They were utterly free of tension in any sense.

@dubsrayboo I so very sorry about your guinea pig; I had a guinea pig when I was a kid and intended to give him a “Viking” funeral. I built a raft for him and I was going to set him and the whole thing on fire and send him off to sea but my parents wouldn’t permit that so I ended up burying him, on and with his little raft, in the back yard. He is still there.

And both my dear, long-lived cats, died at home. I knew Bugsy was dying, he had been dying for a while, but when the end came, when Bugsy was 18, I took one of my father’s quilted flannel shirts and laid it on the dining room table and laid Bugsy on it and he died in my arms. I lined a basket I had with blankets and put him in there before rigor set in.

A couple of years later, my dear Casper, at the age of 21, who was dying of terminal cancer, fibrosarcoma, curled and snuggled up, in the crook of my elbow, with his head nestled in my armpit, one last time, and when I woke up in the morning, he was dead. Rigor had already set in and that was incredibly painful and upsetting. My once alive and wonderful, full of personality cat was now dead and stiff; but he seemed light as a feather; he didn’t seem heavy to me at all.

It’s the difference between carrying 20 Kg worth of a single block of, say, wood, and carrying 20 litres of water in a flexible container. The weight tends to slide off you because of gravity, so you can’t balance it properly and it feels much heavier.

It’s actually just as heavy, as any scale would testify, but the fact that you can’t maximize your efficiency means you will waste more energy than usual.

And the perfect illustration of the origin of the phrase: “dead weight”

It would be about the same as if you were sleeping or in a coma.

I just has the ahem pleasure of learning this first hand as I found my nephew’s full-grown American bulldog dead last week.

I wrapped him in a blanket and lugged the 110lb. body down three flights of stairs and into the trunk of my car – alone.

That was an adventure.

@AshlynM Actually, when you sleep you do still have passive reactions to outside stimuli. Carryig a sleeping body is not the same as carrying a dead body.

@Thammuz is exactly right. Things weigh what the weigh, but when something is able to kinetically react, it will feel lighter and often your reaction to how it moves and wiggles, as in the case of the guinea pig, masks it actual feeling of mass in your hand. It is, of course, a perception ‘slight of hand’ if you will.

Being a small person who has to carry a lot of things, I notice how much the shape of an item has to do with how difficult it is to carry, regardless of weight. It may feel that a larger, more awkward box is heavier to lift than a smaller box of the same weight.