"That's All Folks." (Image by Wildhartlivie.)

Ben Ehrenreich’s “The End.“ is an excellent 2010 Los Angeles magazine article which examines the act of dying in L.A. County. It rightly won a National Magazine Award. An excerpt:

“So here you are, dead and alone. Chances are you didn’t want this, but your wishes were ignored. Whatever happens to the part of you that you recognize as somehow quintessentially you (call it soul, self, spirit, spark), the other part isn’t finished yet—the fleshly part, the limbs and guts that ached and pleased you in so many ways, the meaty bits that you vainly or grudgingly dragged around for all those years. That piece is still of interest to the bureaucrats. It is still a potential source of profit. In your absence its journey is just beginning.

The path forks before it. Which way it goes will be determined by the cause of your demise. All the state wants is a death certificate: Think of it as a letter from your doctor excusing you from paying income tax forever. The county, though, wants to know why you died and if there might be a reason to push the cops and the courts and the jails into motion. The coroner holds the key to all that machinery. The key itself is what you once called you. If you have not been under the care of a physician for six months, if you die during surgery or as a result of injuries sustained in an accident or an assault (self-inflicted or otherwise), or if there’s any suspicion that your death might be something other than ‘natural,’ your next stop will be the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner—which is, assistant chief coroner Ed Winter tells me more than once, the busiest such department in the country.”

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The L.A. County Coroner’s souvenir shop: