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.

Yep. I held my father's hand when he died. When it was over I hugged him and told him we'd be okay on our own now and that we'd manage.

I was mostly right. Mostly. The waves came and went and I thought I'd be over the worst - but now, a year later I sometimes miss the guy with a pain that feels like it will never end in that moment.

I planted a tree and put a bench under it at the end of a small valley where I now own some meadows and where we used to go together and chop firewood. When it gets too bad I take my dog up there and sit down and tell my dad what's going on.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Only on the inside.

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.