Lynne, I wonder if it the total stillness bumping into our knowledge, awareness, and expectation that the form we are looking at is/was inhabited by sentience. The 'deathness' of a mammal body is always very striking, even shocking to me. In descending order, I am much less attuned to the 'deadness' vs. the scentience of birds, reptiles, fish, insects and plants when I see their dead bodies.

I think both our personal relationship and the degree to which we identify with the type of sentience and/or consciousness of a thing that is dead that was alive affects our perception. I have not always been able to tell absolutely whether a goldfish in the tank was actually dead.

When I have held a pet as it was euthanized, the exact moment the life force left the body was unmistakable. I have seen animals violently and instantly killed by cars or dogs, and it was also very apparent and abrupt when death occurred. I held my sister as she died very painfully and fearfully, and have held beloved pets as they died with struggle, awareness, and pain. In all of those instances, with the consciousness struggling, fighting, fearing, the exact point at which the body was totally uninhabited was not so clear. Perhaps the struggle to continue to live in the face of the pain and panic, combined with the awareness of dying led to the sentience of the body not ceasing all at once.

Janie