Last offices

The last offices, or laying out, is the procedures performed, usually by a nurse, to the body of a dead person shortly after death has been confirmed. They can vary between hospitals and between cultures.
Name.
The word "offices" is related to the original Latin, in which "officium" means "service, duty, business". Hence these are the "last duties" carried out on the body.
Procedure.
Often the body of the deceased is left for up to an hour as a mark of respect. The procedure then typically includes the following steps, though they can vary according to an institution's preferred practices:
Bathing the dead.
Washing the body of a dead person, sometimes as part of a religious ritual, is a customary funerary practice in several cultures. It was delegated to professionals in ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, by well-off Victorians, and continues so in modern America, but was traditionally performed by "family, friends, and neighbors."
Judaism.
It is part of traditional Jewish burial rites.
During the Inquisition in Spain, bodies undergoing preparation for burial were sometimes scrutinized for signs that they had been washed, since this was seen as a marker of secret Jewish practice (crypto-Judaism).
Buddhism and Hinduism.
Bathing of the dead, known as "yukan", is also found in Buddhism. It is also found in Hinduism.
Islam.
It is a religious practice in Islam, where the body is washed by members of the dead person's family. When possible, three washings are performed: first with water infused with plum leaves, then with water infused with camphor, and lastly with purified water.
The washing is usually performed by others of the same gender, although Islamic Hausa people permit spouses to wash each other's bodies.
In West Africa.
Funerary bathing is performed in traditional funerals in some countries in West Africa. The ritual washing of the dead is believed to be one of the factors which resulted in the rapid spread of Ebola virus in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in 2014.
Cultural references.
Antigone speaks of washing the dead in accordance with the Greek custom, although she was limited to pouring water on the body of her brother Polyneikes.
The custom of bathing the dead has been depicted in a number of films. In the 1995 film "Braveheart", a young William Wallace watches as women bathe the bodies of his father and brother, who were killed in battle against English troops during the 13th century. The 2009 film "The White Ribbon" depicts the washing of a deceased housewife in a Northern German village just before World War I. In the film "A Midnight Clear" (1992), set in the Battle of the Ardennes in World War II, a small group of soldiers are able to take a brief respite from the war when they procure a bath tub and heat up some water. After all have bathed, they wash the body of a comrade who was recently killed while trying to help a unit of German soldiers.
An episode of the HBO series "Six Feet Under" shows Nate Fisher's body being "slowly and methodically" washed by his mother and brother.