After my dad died I had to identify his corpse. This was in a deliberately poorly lit room at a funeral home, with all but his head and shoulders covered with a white sheet.
At my old job I used to do the occasional trauma cleanup and while that never exposed me to any corpses, there were a few times I saw remnants such as skull fragments or clumps of gray matter, which I took to be brain tissue. I’m no coroner so maybe I’m wrong.
I don’t anticipate returning to that line of work any time soon and now that I have no remaining immediate family members I also don’t expect I’ll have to identify corpses again.
I held my Dad’s hand through his final hours of dying from cancer. In hospice, quiet and peaceful. After he’d passed I sat with him a while longer before notifying the staff.
PSA182 crash in San Diego: I was near the spot where the Cessna ended up (airliner devastation was about a quarter mile away). Saw a pair of legs protruding from underneath crumpled wreckage, and a large chunk of gore nearby.
Wife and I were seven or eight cars behind a high speed head on collision. Four people killed instantly, blood everywhere, with one of the drivers hanging half out of his window horribly mangled head.
I was first on the scene of a truck having center punched a 2 foot thick support for a freeway sign. It had just happened, because the dust was still in the air. I pulled over and walked to the driver’s side door. The cab had been compressed to about 1 foot from dash to seat. Less than that between the steering wheel and seat, where the driver was pinned. I think it was suicide, but maybe the driver fell asleep.
Not me, but a friend came upon a rolled truck in rural Arizona. He pulled over and walked up to see if he could help. Then he walked back to his car to get a blanket, returned to the wreck, and covered the driver’s severed head. Ugh.
Two. My mother in the hospital after her death. I was called at work and hurried there. Dad was there when she died and my sister beat me there.
We were in a cab going to the airport in Guatemala City early in the morning and some poor man was lying in the road in a huge pool of blood and police officers were getting ready to cover him with a sheet.
Saw a guy floating facedown in the Rio Grande. Distressed crowd of onlookers on the bridge. He was upstream of the bridge, so I’m guessing a swimmer and not a jumper.
Maybe one.
I was visiting a stranger (religion situation). He had just been at the hospital. During the discussion he had a heart attack. We administered CPR, The ambulance was called, He was DOA at the hospital. I don’t know when he died, so he may or may not have been a corpse the last time I saw him.
One, and it was during my first year of teaching. I walked out the door in the morning to go to school. At the end of the walkway, law enforcement was standing around an old man who was dead on the sidewalk. He was walking home from a local tavern and had a sudden heart attack.
FWIW, a few months ago an acquaintance of mine was pulling off a side road onto the main road in his pick up truck. As he pulled into the intersection he was broadsided by a motorcycle going something like 65ish (maybe faster, don’t remember for sure). This guy had no helmet and apparently didn’t even attempt to slow down. Somehow he survived. “They” said the only reason he survived was because the pick up truck’s airbags all went off and his head, smashed through the rear driver side window and hit the curtain airbag instead of the body of the truck.
The only body I can recall seeing outside of a funeral, was still at a hospital. I was walking down a main corridor in a busy part of the hospital and happened to notice someone in room, on a stretcher, with the lights off. I thought it seemed odd since if they turned the lights off for him to rest, you’d think they’d close the door too. As I looked over, I notice the sheet pulled all the way over his head (or maybe a toe tag?).
In any case, I mentioned to a friend of mine that worked there and he confirmed that if there was a body waiting to be transported to the morgue, that’s pretty much exactly how it would look. He said that they often don’t even cover them with a sheet until they’re at the morgue just so they don’t call attention to it as they’re being moved around the hospital.
I’ve spent over 8 years as an EMT. I’m not sure if that excludes me. Most of mine were over the course of the job. All told, somewhere in the 75-100 neighborhood doesn’t seem too high for me.
My intention was not to include deaths in hospitals or open-casket funerals. Rather, I meant bodies that were not in such settings; i.e., ‘out in public’.
I think it doesn’t exclude you. I did consider law enforcement and emergency workers, knowing that they would see dead people outside of hospitals, funeral homes, caskets, etc. But the unfortunate people they see are ‘in the wild’; so it doesn’t matter that they are seen because of one’s job.
Just one, that I know of. When I was in social work, I went to do a wellness check on a client and found him dead on the floor, his cold pizza on his kitchen counter, bottle of bourbon in his hand. I called 911, they said he’d been dead for at least 24 hours, probably choking (on pizza), likely brought on by being so drunk that he couldn’t properly swallow.
Given the clarified parameters, and assuming “hospitals” is broad enough to include ALF’s, nursing homes, and dedicated hospice houses as well as in-home settings with assigned home hospice care (a bit far afield from “hospital” but still in an environment and in a situation where death is expected) then I revise my number to “zero.”