My father was a roofer, but he refused to do a lot of churches after a friend of his died that way.
My arch enemy got his hands on me, and worked my elbows and knees with a ball peen hammer, my throat, stomach and back with a blowtorch. My eyeball and lower lip each have a fishhook inserted, connected by fishing line. A very slow drip of water is hitting my chin, I can get some of it if thirsty enough, but that yanks on the fishhooks. Justin Bieber is playing on a continuous loop. I already had a migraine headache. I’m hoping the gangrene will hurry up, but the smell is, pardon, killing me.
This jumps from “Final Destination” to “Hellraiser”. :eek:
Oh that’s just wrong.
One time I was up in the middle of the night, gagging and coughing uncontrollably from acid reflux after having eaten pizza and drank lemonade too close to bedtime. I was also naked, as I usually am while in bed (which is where I was previously).
I really didn’t want to die that way. (I didn’t)
I remember reading a Twilight Zone (or a knockoff) comic story when I was a kid about a scientist who invented a suit that enabled him to walk through solid objects. A gangster found out about it and used it to rob banks. He’d use the suit to phase into a bank vault, steal all the valuables, then trot safely back to his hideout. In the final panels, he was about to escape another robbery when one of the bank guards shot him in his suit’s control unit. He managed to escape, but as he entered the solid underground, the suit gave out, and the last panel showed his face in shock as he realized he was entombed underground forever.
I sometimes recall that panel and shudder, thinking about how there would be no air to breathe, no ability to move, no expectation that anybody will hear me screaming for help, or that anybody could excavate that area and find me before I suffocate. To be frozen in place like that and have no choice but to wait for death while your body slowly fails… that’s the worst fate I can imagine.
Under-cabinet microwave ovens are held up by two or three screws through the cabinet into the top front edge, and the bottom back edge rests on a metal ledge clipped onto the wall.
So one time, I’m replacing an old, busted microwave, and I can’t find a way to jimmy the new one onto the ledge. I’m holding up the front end while trying to knock the back edge into place on the wall ledge. I stick my head under the microwave, holding it up just barely and at an odd angle, to get a closer look. It occurs to me that this would be a horrible way to die:
I get the back part into place, but it slips just enough that I lose my grip on the front end. With the back edge supported by the ledge, and the front end in free fall, it makes for a heavy guillotine. If it pivoted down, it probably wouldn’t sever my head, just break my spine at the neck, which would paralyze me.
Paralyzed, I wouldn’t be able to lift the microwave off my neck, and I’d slowly suffocate over, say, an hour while the rest of my body lies limp over the stove.
I don’t want to die that way.
I remember a McSweeney’s list about things you never want to have said about your death. The top two I remember:
“Burned beyond recognition”
“Minutes from rescue”
I saw a movie or TV program once (what follows is a summary as best as I can remember). A man had lost his family in some way that I forget, but I remember that the family was aware of the impending doom and presumably in terror for the entire specific time, like 2 minutes 10 seconds (for example). The man found out who was responsible, somehow got them onto a private plane, and arranged that the engines should shut down at the right altitude so that it would take exactly 2 minutes and 10 seconds (or whatever the time was) to crash. He himself was on the plane (he felt that his life was over anyway after the loss of his family) so that he could tell the culprits what was happening and why.
So, as one of the more realistic and possible ways I would not want to die, having that much time to contemplate my impending death by plane crash or some similarly unstoppable event is one.
Similarly, I have been on sightseeing ropeway gondolas and thought how horrible it would be if it stopped working in the middle of the run, and then we see the rope starting to fray, and there’s no way anyone can reach us in time before we all fall to our death. This would be bad enough if I were on my own (that is, all the passengers were strangers to me). I think it would be worse if my husband were there and we had to go through this together.
The 1995 book “How We Die” has vivid descriptions of death, but the one that got to me is about a young girl, about ten years old, watching a parade when a crazed man randomly stabs her in the chest. She stands there in shock and eventually collapses but still awake, with the family watching her blood drain away while she dies. Awake, aware, knowing she was losing her life, watching her family watch her die. So not that way, please.