Asklemmy

I held my 14-year-old dog when he was put to sleep. I wanted him to feel loved until the moment he was gone. Putting my sadness aside so he could truly feel comforted was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life.

I'm an orderly in an OR that does organ procurements from donors. The patients are already brain dead or otherwise intubated, but still technically alive. When the doctors open them up and get to where the organs are, there is a brief moment of silence and a prewritten letter in their honor is read aloud. After that they are taken off of life support and the organs are ready to be taken. The most interesting part to me is watching the color fade from their intestines. It's actually very fast from pink to gray.

I felt the very last heartbeat of my step-father while holding his arm, on his death bed. He died peacefully at 98 years of age.

I witnessed 5 police officers all hit a man on the ground with their tasers. Broad daylight.

Died on the scene of a heart attack. Apparently natural causes. The polices internal investigations found the police did no wrong, imagine that.

Unless you make enough money that you can regularly "donate" to the force, I suggest that you assume they are not there to help you and you protect yourself accordingly

I saw the immediate aftermath. Someone jumped off the 8th floor in an interior atrium after setting off the building fire alarm. I happened to look that way while evacuating and it took a moment to process what I was seeing.

My grandmother. She was 96. She saw India's Independence, and lived through the Bengal famine of 1943. What a life! She died in peace surrounded by family though.

Technically he was probably already dead, but a guy on a bicycle was killed by a van right in front of my house. I heard a crazy noise followed by screaming so I went out to see. The guy was lying still by the side of the road. His bike was mangled about 30' down the road where it had been dragged in the undercarriage. And his groceries for dinner that night were scattered along the gutter.

When I was a young teen, I watched my grandparents' neighbor die of a heart attack in his boat. He leaned over - I thought to get a life jacket or something - and his boat just kept circling backwards. Not much to say. It took the ambulance over an hour to arrive. There was a very small pool of blood, maybe 2-3 inches in diameter, on the floor of the boat.

That's it. Nothing exciting or traumatic.

When I was a kid I saw an elderly man get hit by a car. He rolled over the top, which I guess is safer than being run down, but he got a lot of air and hit the pavement hard. Just kept rolling over and over. My parents shooed us away from the scene, but I can't imagine it ended well for him.

One time I was riding a bus that rear-ended a motorcycle. I didn't see the collision itself, but the driver was pronounced dead at the scene.

We often take for granted how dangerous traffic is. Your life can end in a moment doing something we casually do every day.

I was working in a department store when a middle-aged woman collapsed in front of me. It was really warm, heat exhaustion I supposed. She looked like maybe she was drunk because she was moving kind of erratically, so I went to see if she was okay and she just fell. I'll never forget the sound her head made hitting the concrete or the fact that she didn't even blink. Remarkably, she was okay and was up in a few minutes, walked away and everything, really surprised me.

The thing that probably fucked me up the most though was some videos on YouTube. I was working for a video analytics company, and we were trying to build an image classifier that could detect firearms. Well, you need data for that, so we were scraping videos of gun crime. Mostly what we were looking for was armed robbery. Lots of videos put out by the local police of somebody holding up a convenience store, and that wasn't a big deal. But every now and then you'd find a video of someone getting shot and that really affected me. Eight hours a day of looking at gun crime with the occasional homicide peppered in was a recipe for disaster. I definitely needed therapy after that job.

When i worked in a hospital. My mom at home.

I was within 8 meters of someone dying twice, the second time I was less than 2 meters away.

The first was a truck driver with a load of cast iron pipes. Truck was on a slight angle, and when he undid the straps the load fell on him.

Second time was a load of stone going up a scaffold on a hoist, it hadn't been secured properly and a guy cut through the exclusion zone and this 100kg stone window cill just...yeah. There wasn't really a lot left of the top third of him.

I've had a lot of therapy about these and I still dream about the second one.

Saw the aftermath of a pretty bad motorcycle accident, with the rider receiving CPR. It was confirmed later by the news that they didn't make it. I was stuck at a light and able to see the scene for a few solid minutes, but it really didn't impact me heavily. Honestly it felt even less relevant than footage I'd seen before since I was having to actually drive and my attention couldn't be put entirely on the accident.

In contrast, I was there for a friend putting their dog down. The amount of emotion everyone was going through was much more pronounced - you could physically feel the sadness around you.

Seeing death always has an uneasy aspect to it, but I think the real impact comes from social ceremony. We choose to feel pain over it as a way to heal, I think.

I watched my grandfather die when they took him off life support. Also had a cat die in my arms. Cannot recommend either experience.

When I was a Boy Scout, one summer at camp, a bad storm had rolled in around 7-8pm. We had just finished dinner and made it back to our campsites when the administration decided to issue the alarm urging scouts to return to the central lodge due to sever weather being reported.

Us and another local scout unit were at a site situated at the top of a very large hill. Like, you'd get off a bike if you had to go up this thing. That kind of hill. As soon as the alarm sounded to get down to the central lodge, we booked it down the hill. As did the other scout unit from our area

A little wet but otherwise fine, all the scouts and staff from the area entered the lodge and sat on the benches. From my perspective, I heard some gasps, a thud, and some screaming for help. I had no idea what was going on initially. Came to find out that the troop leader of the other local scouts had lurched over and fell on the ground, apparently suffering from a heart attack.

All of us scouts, the leaders son included, had to sit there and watch a troop leader and father die before their eyes. It took the ambulance 30 minutes or so to get up to the campsite. The local scout administration performed CPR and did everything they could to keep him alive. He was probably dead soon after hitting the floor of the lodge.

I have never forgotten this and is one of the primary reasons I try to take care of myself. Dude was a large guy but a great leader based on what I saw of him. I felt bad for his troop and his family. I hope that family and troop managed to get closure.

I think the son was getting or had gotten that red arrow sash they give out for something scouts can do. Sorry, it's been 20-years since I was in scouts.

Yup, several times. The joys of working in healthcare.

Not to be depressing.. When i was 5 I sometimes slept in bed next to my mom. Woke up one of those days and she was already in rigor mortis. I touched her and she felt like an uncooked turkey, if that makes any sense. Took me a couple decades before I could actually handle an uncooked turkey or like, be around someone wearing her favorite perfume without almost fainting. Nobody knew exactly what killed her, maybe just sudden death syndrome.

If animals count, when i was about 6 my sister had a horse that slipped on the cement and when it managed to pull itself back up.. I don't think it's totally accurate, but my memory is that its whole body was raining blood a few feet in front of me. Like I remember my vision being framed by blood dripping like a rainstorm from a cloud. Needless to say, it didn't survive. I remember my dad using the hose to spray all the blood off the cement. I saw lots of dead pets over the years... Between all the wild animals and the back road that everyone sped on, most pets had short lifespans.

Anyway, I grew up through a lot of other fucked up stuff... And people wonder why I'm weird. And if you don't want morbid answers, don't ask morbid questions.

I was there for my grandmother's last breath. It kinda fucked me up at the funeral, the stark contrast between the last moment and then.

I was with my mother when she died. If I'd been five minutes quicker, I would have been with my father when he died. In both cases it was expected. There wasn't anything particular profound about it. Life went on.

I had a similar experience, Op. I was in traffic as it crawled by an accident, and I saw a man giving violent chest compressions to another man in the street. The motocycle was nearby, smashed. I learned later that he passed right there. 21 years old.

The same question you have nagged at me - did I witness the moment he passed? I spent time looking at the text I sent before I started driving, calculating when I would have driven by, comparing it to when first responders said they got there.

I've decided it doesn't matter if I was there to see his death. A man died. His name was Miles. I found news reports about him later, and he seemed like a good guy. A firefighter. Well liked. That's what matters.

A person 10 feet behind me got hit and run. Didn't see the diagnosis, but I don't think the dude made it

Only on the inside.

Another "already dead" anecdote:

I was commuting home from school when my ride drove past the immediate aftermath of an accident where a guy was run over by a bus. The tire ~~has~~ had gone over his head and there was brain matter splattered on the road. The thing I remember most is that the pulp-y remnants of his head had tire tread marks on it.

I saw someone behead themselves by train in Calgary

I used to work out in the Black Hills during the Sturgis motorcycle rally, and I would see a fatal accident almost every day.

One time I was the first responder; the guy was intoxicated or otherwise impaired, just drifted right into the guardrail and flipped over the handlebars. The hike kept going down the road for a quarter mile. The other staffer and I stopped our van and put the hazards on, gave first aid until an EMS tech showed up; this was before cell service was reliable in the mountains. The guy had a huge gash across his chest and had landed on the end of a cliff, a strip maybe a yard wide between the guardrail and a fatal plunge. He was still alive when we left the scene.

That was one of the milder accidents.

Last year during a flight, a passenger died of health complications mid air. They were doing CPR on her in the middle of the isle right in front of me. Even though I never knew her, it still felt personal and fucked me up for a bit. Didn’t help my fear of flying either.

I have seen a few.. I started work at a young age as an apprenticeship painter for the railways, and when I was 16 I witnessed my first fatality and had to get down onto the track and cover the remainder of her body with a sheet, I saw another lady OD in a waiting door and have her boyfriend put her on the train and jump back off again, but I witnessed the OD… plus a couple of relatives

I've seen a bird get rolled over by a truck. Feathers flew in the air for a good 10 seconds. F in the chat for the bird.

It seems like I've been obsessed over death and dying for decades.

When I was thirteen, as a form of dealing with the concept of death, I imagined hearing the news of the deaths of each of my family members and a couple of the girls I liked from school. Finding out that a person is dead is a singular experience. A few years later, I viscerally understood what was said in Unforgiven, "[death] take[s] away all he's got, all he's ever gonna have."

When I was sixteen, I did a cooperative education placement in a hospital. As fate would have it, I was placed in the histopathology department. I was surrounded by tissues removed from the dead, the dying, and those who had gotten a new lease on life. In the morgue, I helped discard any samples that were two or more years old. Removed silicone breast implants were frequent, as were containers labelled "uterine curettings." In that same morgue, I sat in on two autopsies, including one where sections of the brain were needed.

Between 13 and 18, I began to be much more aware of conflict zones; injustice, and miscarriages of justice involving death; of the legacies left behind in their wake. I became aware of South African apartheid, war — later, genocide — in a disintegrating Yugoslavia, genocide in Rwanda. The collapse of social order in L.A. in '92. Hurricanes in the Caribbean, especially Andrew, which battered Jamaica. The Bay Area earthquake. The Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. The bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City and the bombing at the Atlanta Olympics. This period also saw the formation of my opposition to capital punishment.

It wasn't until 9/11 that I saw people die live on TV. I didn't wake until 10 am that day, but by 1030, I saw both towers fall. By the end of that day, it was a buddy of mine who said, "Why don't they stop showing this??" It hadn't occurred to me that we were watching snuff film until then.

Then there was 17-18 March 2003. I sat and watched as Shock and Awe were released on Baghdad. One of the oldest cities in the world bombed for political expediency. More snuff film.

____ and ____ would later start to collect and disseminate the deadliest and the most violate material. I wouldn't go looking for it, but it would find me. Cartel violence, industrial accidents, gun camera footage, people filming police shootings... there was so much death. Busta Rhymes said it best, "numerals of funerals every day." Another thought that has not left me.

I didn't know why I needed to know. Then, in time, I came to understand that I was bearing witness.

It was about 2004 when I started to develop an appreciation for the special violence of the Israeli‐Palestinian conflict and the sheer destruction it inflicts. I read a lot about the Holocaust, Jewish diaspora, anti-Semitism, and the campaign to make genocide punishable. Then, I read about the roots of the Israeli state, its funding, protections, and the special relationship it enjoys with the warlike American state and its allies. Then, I read into America and how that state has secured its place in world history. I moved to South Korea and started to understand Korea, Japan, China, and the other nations of Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Oceania, much more clearly.

What I found out is that, to some, achievable ends are sought by bloody means. This is a pattern across most of the world. In general, average everyday people are just trying to get by and do right by their families. In the places that we can not peacefully coexist, where expropriation and indignity are inflicted by those who wield the power they seek and are corrupted by it. Frank Herbert said, "Power is magnetic to the corruptible."

Journalists, in my opinion, are those who pursue power in the practice of relinquishing it to the public. With this in mind, I understand the threat that Julian Assange was to the power establishment in the US. I saw the "Collateral Murder" release that landed him in the Ecuadorian embassy for the better part of a decade. The truly destructive part of this episode is the proliferation of instances in which military outfits across the world are engaged in similar activities. The Dutch Safety Board investigation and publications regarding the shooting down of flight MH17 are exceptional examples.

All of this is to say that we need to spend more time coming to terms with death and dying. We need to be more aware, not less, of the living conditions that cause people to die. War, famine, pestilence, climate upheaval, conflict zones, refugees from conflict and climate and corruption, drought, flooding, colonialism, austerity, and protectionism threaten almost all of the world's population.

The few who are not threatened take refuge in their comfort and contrive to maintain the status quo. They change laws, lobby, employ, and help to elect and appoint those that serve the entreched interests. A future that looks like the present is a dead future, and we are witnessing the spread of atrophy and rigor mortis each day. That's about as real as it gets.