Ouch what a way to go

So what is the worst way to die in anyone's opinion and why? I think pain induced ones would be. Tortured to death, being drawn and quarted and the like. Anyone else?

Dying in a hideously embarrassing way would be pretty horrible. The lasting consequences for yourself wouldn't matter so much, what with you being dead and everything, but can you imagine trying to tell someone that a dear, departed member of your family was killed when a frozen block of shit fell from an aeroplane (or some other such indignity)? I can't imagine you would get much sympathy as everyone would be laughing too much.

Dying in pain obviously wouldn't be my preferred death of choice, but at least it would save my relatives some blushes!

I think we don't have to be embarrased anymore after we read how Elvis died: Pants down choking in his puke in a bathroom. Actually, Sonny Bono might be more embarrassing. Somebody start a Topic: Famously embarrassing ways to go.

There was something embarrassing about the way Princess Diana let other people run her life.

I think fire would be the worst. Or maybe drowning. Yuck. Reminds me of a quip:

I want to go fast and painless like my grandfather who died in his sleep. Not like the three passengers who were with him in his car.

For some reason, the only way I choose not to die is falling from some great height.

I can't explain this. I don't mind fire, drowning, or beheading, but I don't want to fall to death.

Perhaps it's my unnatural fear of heights.

And also being buried alive, I'm kinda claustraphobic.



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IMHO, the worst way to die would be to die alone - unable at your last breath to think of anyone who would care.

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The overwhelming majority of people have more than the average (mean) number of legs. -- E. Grebenik

Besides during sex, is there a really fun way to go? I think a roller coaster crash would be fun.

I would hate to die in any way that would cause me to be honoured with a Darwin Award.
But, the worst I ever heard of was a person in my city who hung him/herself (they didn't know the sex of the person when I read the article) in the woods. Some boys hunting with their father came across the bones more than a year after the death. Can you imagine being so alone that you felt you had to kill yourself, and then no one even finds you for more than a year? Kind of confirms your suspicions that no one cares.

Yeh, plane crash. Abject terror.
The two most often heard phrases on cockpit voice recorders are "oh shit" and "I love you, mom." ("Apple pie" did not make the charts).

Burpy sez: "Yes I have and it sucked" ... but wouldn't the ultimate thrill be asending in a roller coaster cart only to decend down a limp 50 foot length of busted track? I'd want the front seat and hell I might even wave my arms in the air for the ultimate experience.

2 words: auto-erotic asphyxiation How embarrassing to be found by a loved one after this accidental death!

"50 foot length of busted track"?!
Whaddya, wanna die at Kiddieland?

Burpy sez:
" but wouldn't the ultimate thrill be asending in a roller coaster cart only to decend down a limp 50 foot length of busted track?"

Melatonin sez: "I'm not like other people. Pain hurts me."

Worst death: Any long painful incurable disease. A maximum of suffering with a minimum of excitement.

Best death: Having a stroke during sex. The inverse of the above suffering/excitement ratio. And if it was good enough for Attila the Hun and Nelson Rockefeller, it's good enough for me.

This brings to mind my favorite bumper sticker, "I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather, not screaming in terror like the passengers in his car."

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"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
Hunter Thompson

I don't have nightmares often, but when i do it involves me being decapitated by something falling on me, like a glass ceiling. I dream that something is falling and is going to split me in two and I always get out of the way at the last possible second, screaming horrifically. I wake up on the floor with my family running toward me because I screamed in my sleep.
To me, THAT'S the scariest way to die.

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MaryAnn
Sometimes life is so great you just gotta muss up your hair and quack like a duck!

My vote:

You wake up with a priest standing over you, giving you the last rites, with a sleazy but beautiful blonde next to you in bed in a sleazy motel room, with your wife screaming at you from the doorway, and your kids looking down at the floor, and your mother, with her back turned, saying the rosary.

Best? All of the above, but you don't wake up! ;)

My vote goes for rabies.
A close runner-up would be Ebola, which overall seems like a pretty gross way to go, with the "bleeding-out" and all that. Leprosy doesn't seem attractive. I wouldn't want to die of trichonosis either. Starving to death would suck as well. Ditto for crucifixion- depending on where they nail you.
An overdose of a stimulant such as strychnine must be a bad exit. In general, people who commit suicide rarely use an overdose of stimulants. I wonder why that is.

My brother has frequently pointed out that there's really no happy fluffy bunny way to die, but if I had to choose the manner in which I shuffled off my mortal coil, I'd go for a massive stroke during deep sleep.

I have heard that burning to death is pretty much the most excrutiating way to go. Burns hurt horribly, and to die of them would take a whole lot of burning.

Mike King:
Best death: Having a stroke during sex.

Would that be coming and going at the same time?

I've long thought that the Punji stakes booby traps used in the Vietnam war would be an unpleasant way to die.
Ugh, back to the discontinued restaurant items...

I don't know if this experience would apply to a flame death or not, but I suspect it might. Many (how long do I have to be here before I can use manny?) years ago I was burned quite badly in a chemical plant accident. Due to a plugged oxygen line, I passed out and fell down in a tank of caustic solvent (lye being the caustic, toluene being the woo-woo agent). I was wearing a semi-impermeable space suit (i.e., designed for splash control, not submersion) and my nimrod co-workers decided the best course of action was to drag me out of the tank and lay me down beside a chemical shower and wait 45 min. for the ambulance driver to arrive and cut my clothes off and use the chemical shower. Result was I marinated for a while, and didn't feel a thing. I went into shock immediately, and I didn;t feel any pain until three days later.

Burpy sez: "I think a roller coaster crash would be fun."

Melatonin sez: "You've never been in a car accident, have you?"

Yeah, burning to death would be awful. I've fallen asleep with a lit cigarette before. It could happen so easily. That's the scary part.

Nevertheless, my vote goes to plane crash victims. Imagine falling from 36,000 feet, knowing all the while that you're not going to make it . . . knowing that you're about to die would be the worst.

I've always thought that burning would be the worst.

I've heard a couple of different stories on being burnt at the stake. Some say that they just tied you to a stake and lit a bunch of sticks under it, and you slowly roasted in your own juices. (BTW--how long would this method take to kill you?)
Other accounts have it that a bag of gunpowder was tied under your chin so that your head would quickly be blown off, saving you quite a bit of suffering.

I'm sure that different cultures did it differently, but does anyone have the straight dope on the stake?

-David

Guess it doesn’t matter how you go, I would like my last thought as I'm drifting away to be "now that wasn't too bad at all." Or maybe that would be the first thought, after.
As for going in your sleep. I'd like to know what people were dreaming before I choose.

JACK

Here are a couple of sites on interesting ways people have died...
http://www.officialdarwinawards.com
http://www.darwinawards.com

You can judge which one is the worst.

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"[He] beat his fist down upon the table and hurt his hand and became so
further enraged... that he beat his fist down upon the table even harder and
hurt his hand some more." -- Joseph Heller's Catch-22

As for going in your sleep. I'd like to know what people were dreaming before I choose.

Ever read "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"?

Once I had a dream that I watched these people put this lady in a chair with a spacesuit-type thing on, and a helmet. They did something to the pressure of the inside of the helmet to the point where her whole head exploded. The whole time they were changing the pressure she was screaming and screaming. It was the most horrifying dream I had ever had.

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Welfy

I wonder what the king is doing tonight?

There was an airliner crash in Chicago in 1979 where the plane lost (I mean literally dropped off of the airplane) an engine shortly after takeoff. The airplane crashed and KIA'd everyone aboard. What I remember from the reporting at the time was that, as a prelude to the inflight movie, they had a live video feed from the cockpit to all the little video screens at the seats so that all of the occupants of the plane got to watch it all come apart and catch the crew doing their "oh, shit!" and "I love you Mom!" numbers.

Sunbear: Elvis didn't die with his pants down; people just like to say that. He wasn't puking, either; never heard that one before. He was cutting his toenails. Picture him, grossly overweight, with one ankle on the other knee, leaning over with the toenail clipper, when suddenly his heart says, "That's enough, seeya."
Once when I was about 21, I woke up to find vomit all over my pillow and in my hair. I had known nothing about it. I know my friends would eventually have started looking for me, but I often wondered how long it would have taken someone to look *in* my room. Not to mention how my parents would have taken it.

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Remember, I'm pulling for you; we're all in this together.
---Red Green

Sorry, I don't read books about Elvis. I only liked the music up to 1960, so I ignore all Elvis materíal after that. Biut I heard the death dicussed by Terry Gross and the Elvis biographer, and I think Terry described a messy death and the biographer did not correct her.
She's been mostly reliable, does her homework.

I think everyone has forgotten one of the worst ways to go: long, excrutiating, insufferable: starvation. Worst way would be to have adequate water, this draws it out even more. Depending on your size and activity level, this could take a few months. Knowing the whole time that there is no rescue.

Or how about suicide by jumping off the World Trade Center and changing you mind around the 90th floor?

"There was an airliner crash in Chicago in 1979 where the plane lost (I mean literally dropped off of the airplane) an engine shortly after takeoff. The airplane crashed and KIA'd everyone aboard. What I remember from the reporting at the time was that, as a prelude to the inflight movie, they had a live video feed from the cockpit to all the little video screens at the seats so that all of the occupants of the plane got to watch it all come apart and catch the crew doing their 'oh, shit!' and 'I love you Mom!' numbers."

Video screens at the seats on a DC10 in 1979!?!? I REALLY don't think so! I remember when you had to pay to get the headphones to listen to the audio feed and the inflight movie was actually a movie, projected onto a screen. Maybe the passengers could HEAR the cockpit-to-tower radio transmissions on their headsets (I have never understood why airlines have this), but they didn't have at-seat video screens in '79, period.

So, this leads to a question to anyone who can answer it: if something is going wrong with the flight, does the pilot cut off the feed from the cockpit radio to the passenger headsets or not? (Thank God that I've never experienced this situation personally!) Either way, the passengers KNOW something's not right, and they might panic.

I would have to say the nicest way I can think of to die was reported in the case of a woman named Bhagawhandi P., reported in the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by the neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks. She died of a brain tumour; in the months prior to her death, she slipped into and out of comas, during which she had comforting and peaceful visions of going back home to India. Eventually, she fell into a permanent coma, and presumably had these visions until she died.

Hey; Soulfrost, I have read that people burned at the stake in the old days were burned with a fire made of green wood, so that they would die of smoke inhalation before being flamed up. I have also read that the Inquisition strangled or garotted people sentenced to death at the stake before they were burned, if they showed signs of repentance. No sources on this and I am not sure whether it is true or not. I hope it is because if it weren't, the fates of those victims would have been too horrible to contemplate.

My personal weird fear of the worst death possible is hanging. I can't believe they still hang people in Washington state, and they still use hanging in Japan. They hanged a couple of men about two months ago. Not to mention such other countries as Malaysia and Singapore, where they routinely hang drug traffickers. There was a story in the Economist not long ago that said that Singapore, by far, is the country with most executions per capita in the world.

Probably not the most horrible, but one of the most memorable was Slim Pickens riding the H-Bomb down in Dr. Strangelove.

I always wondered if you could fill a cup with gasoline, and force yourself to drink it. Then, light a match (or something)and swallow. Would the fumes in your throat ignite, and travel down into your stomach? I am most afraid of burning to death, and this scenario popped into my head one day.
Also, there is some evidence that a decapitated head can function for 10-15seconds. If this is true, decapitation might be worse than burning.

I imagine the most horrible way to die is crucifixion. To be beaten to a bloddy pulp, then hung on a cross to die is unimaginable. Death often took many hours, while the victims suffered extruciating pain. I am not afraid to die at all, so an airplane crash, or falling out of a building is actually a better way to go. It's over very quickly, so that's better.
Come to think of it, suicide is the worst way to die. No matter how it's done, the punishment of hell is far worse than anybody can imagine. Afterall, for the suicide victim, hell is imminent.

I can imagine the most painful of deaths would be to being locked in a windowless cell and forced to listen to Celine Dion and LeeAnn Rymes songs 24 hours a day.

On the subject of death by stroke/heart attack while bumping uglies. Yes, it would be nice for the soon to be dead person, but their partner would have performance anxiety the rest of their lives.

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Bigamy is having one wife to many. Monogamy is the same. - Oscar Wilde

Celine Dion torture maybe...but you haven't heard the song of europe competition.muzak for hell, that's how it is.See Thor's thread.

"After all, for the suicide victim, hell is imminent." ARG220
(Sure; assuming he/she believes in that sort of thing ... I should think so.)

The worst I've heard is from "Shogun" (the book, not the fabled miniseries). One of the Portuguese sailors is selected by drawing straws and gets simmered to death in a big pot over a period of about 10 hours (a trained attendant monitors the fire so that it is just right - not TOO hot, now ...). This is done in front of the others as a demonstration that they are totally without control of the situation. (Eeeeeeek!)
That's fiction, of course, but James Clavell was actually taken POW by the Japanese during WW2. The WW2-era Japanese were extremely poor hosts (nearly 40% of their POWs did not survive the experience). So who knows, maybe there's a kernel of reality in there.
A great book, BTW.

Not long after the Gulf War, I remember seeing a picture in the newspaper showing some Iraqi guy that was hanged for drunk driving (A bit exreme, but not by much :)) The most interesting part was that he appeared to be wrapped in a blanked while his body was hanging in the gallows. I couldn't tell if he was wrapped before of after the hanging.

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"I had a feeling that in Hell there would be mushrooms." -The Secret of Monkey Island

[wolfstu]

Imagine this:

You, for some reason, fall into a deep coma. They stick you in a bed in the hospital and wait a while. You can't move, you can't see, taste or smell, maybe not even sense touch. You can, however, hear everything that's going on. Your family comes to visit, and, having heard that the comatose can hear, talk to you. Your best friend, your significant other, etc. come, sit, and talk at you. They say things you wish you could reciprocate. This goes on for months.

Then, you take a slight turn for the worse. The doctors falsely conclude that you are dead, and tell your friend and family in the room, where you can hear. Then they pull the plug.

[slortar]

I'd think being boiled in oil would be the worst I can think of it. The joys of being simultaneously burnt to death and drowning...

[toadspittle]

How in the world did this thread get resurrected? And in GQ, rather than IMHO/MPSIMS?

[manhattan]

The answer to the your second question is that this thread originated before IMHO was born. (You can now see why I love that forum so much!)

I'll move it home.

[Johanna]

See a short story, "The Easy Way Out," by John Brunner (who just happens to be BRITAIN'S BEST SF AUTHOR), published in his book Foreign Constellations: the Fantastic Worlds of John Brunner (New York: Everest House, 1980).

A spaceship crashes on a barren planet and one of the occupants is badly injured, multiple fractures, cannot move. He has a device with him called the "easy way out." It emits waves that override the brain and puts the subject into a coma, giving him peaceful, pleasant hallucinations until he dies. Will he use it?

Reading the case of the Indian lady, it is so similar to Brunner's concept that I wonder if he might have gotten the idea from it.