What compels us to instinctively close them?
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It’s less creepy. Can you imagine the reaction when the dead person’s eyes start following you?
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When you look into someone’s eyes, the you unconsciously look for a connection with that person. Its an subconscious behavior that humans seek out. Knowing that the person is dead it just feels wrong because you know there is no longer a connection to be made.
If you’ve ever been in the room with a corpse, you’d know: it’s unnerving.
Dead eyes don’t look like alive eyes — they’re fixed and still, and their reflective qualities start to change immediately. It’s an uncanny valley where the once living person looks like a doll of themselves, and to non-psychopathic people it is disturbing to see.
Eyes tell a lot about living things. You notice tiny changes when someone is looking directly at your eyes, or if they’re looking a half inch up at your eyebrows. You can tell if someone is focused or zoning out. (Which is why the polar express movie is so creepy: they didn’t get the eyes right). I think it’s in the primitive part of our brain when we’re unnerved by vacant eyes. Also, there’s a strong association between death and eternal rest. The idea of the dead person looking like they’re sleeping is easier to emotionally understand than, say, a body in a coffin with open eyes and a slightly open mouth
We feel more comfortable if a dead person looks like they are sleeping, because we are used to seeing people asleep. That’s also why we use words like ‘laid to rest’ to describe burial. Closing their eyes is a big part of this. Also, a persons eyes are normally very responsive, so a face with eyes that don’t respond is particularly upsetting, and it is easier to see the person with closed eyelids. In my experience, it’s also a gesture of caring that helps the person with them when the die to feel that they have ‘helped’ in some way. In practical terms, it is also important that the body is ‘tidied up’ before rigor mortis sets in and the tissues stiffen, which is one reason why a nurse or other attendant will do this straight away.
Because a dead person can almost look like they’re sleeping if their eyes are closed which is easier to stomach than leaving them open. It’s unnerving to look at and the eyes are one of the first things to go when you die so in the few days between a person’s death and their funeral if their eyes were left open you’d just have to look at your loved one with a blank dead stare with milky yellowy eyes staring back at you. It’s also a general sign of respect.
Because the eyes are the windows to the soul and after they are dead you can see they still look the same. This gets really confusing for religious folk and we don’t want them to burn the mortuaries down. (Sorry, I got jokes today)
In addition to the unnerving aesthetics of leaving them open, which has already been touched on, there’s also the association of death being eternal rest/sleep, so closing the eyes gives the impression of sleeping and the deceased being at peace.
Also simple explanation from my nan – eyes work like mirrors and in Ukraine where I am from you often can see all the mirrors in the house where the person died covered with tissue – so that the death does not mirror and repeat one more time. So you kind of closing the mirrors that eyes can be. Always found that explanation pretty fascinating.
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