Question: once you die does your blood carry on flowing for a few minuets or does it just stop?

Catherine Mansfield answered on 12 Mar 2014:

Thanks for your question.

This is a difficult question to answer because these days it is difficult to define the exact moment that someone dies, and people have different definitions of when someone is dead. For example people can suffer a heart attack, where the heart stops beating, but with modern CPR we can restart the heart again and they are alive.

To answer your question … Blood will continue flowing for as long as the heart is beating. The heart is an organ that can function without the brain, so if someone died by a sudden loss of brain function the heart would continue to beat after the person was brain-dead and therefore blood would continue to flow. Some people refer to a person being dead simply as when the heart is no longer beating and so in these cases blood will not flow after the person is dead.