In April 2007 I was coming home from work early. An intersection I passed through was partially blocked by police, fire trucks, and ambulances. It turned out that it was the fatal collision that killed author David Halbarstam.
And the winner for “Macabre Thread of the Month” goes to…
Anyway, five total that I can think of.
Both parents, lengthy and painful due to various cancers (my mom’s passing was especially mind-scarring).
Some guy sliced in half by a train in the Paris suburbs
Some guy who apparently had a heart attack while waiting for a flight in the St. John’s, Nf airport. Didn’t see the outcome but he was completely unresponsive to CPR.
Some guy on a motorcycle who had a head-on with a car in Lafayette, LA.
The Lafayette one was less than a month ago.
Fatalities: 107
Babalities: 44
Animalities: 26
Friendships: 0
I was attending my cousin’s wedding near Davie, Florida. We saw a homeless guy weaving through the traffic in the dark. I said to my dad, “Someone’s going to hit that guy,” and sure enough, the minivan behind me hit him. He went flying and we knew he was dead instantly. We pulled over, called the cops, and talked to the driver of the minivan. I think he was with his wife and a kid. Poor dude was freaked out, even though there wasn’t anything he could have done to avoid it. The homeless guy had to be either drunk or mentally ill.
Only one.
Some guy had a heart attack. His family was driving him to the hospital and he lost consciousness so they pulled over and started knocking on random doors to get someone to call an ambulance. (This was long before cell phones.) Out of a dozen people, I was the only one who knew CPR, so I got to work on him until the EMTs arrived and took over. His family called our neighbor a few days later to thank us and to tell us he had died. But, honestly, I’m pretty sure he was already dead by the time I started giving him mouth-to-mouth.
My best friend and roommate blew his brains out with a hollow point bullet to the temple. I went into his room to wake him up b/c he was late for work. I was 23 at the time. 17 years later and I can recall the image of that bedroom scene in perfect detail, unfortunately.
One: My father on his death bed.
If watching someone die in a hospice then I can say “one”.
My paternal-unit died of prostate cancer and my maternal-unit and I were there with him (or his body) when he breathed his last.
I am fairly certain that until that point I did not consider myself to be a fully-fledged adult.
I am not convinced that watching my dearly loved parent die was a good thing as I still have nightmares about it.
And I sure do miss him.
He would have been 88 this coming Friday had he lived.
Years ago–about 1980–my first husband and I were traveling through the mountains of Tennessee. He was really into driving and liked to drive fast, but he was doing about the speed limit up the S-curves through the mountains. At one point, a car came up behind us, followed us closely for a while, and then sped recklessly by. As they passed us I looked inside and saw a young girl, maybe 17, in the passenger’s seat, her long blonde hair blowing from the wind coming through the open window. She looked right at me and laughed. I said out loud, “They’re going to kill themselves.” About a mile later, we came into a flat clearing, where a small town had been carved out, and saw people running toward a field. The same car had lost control, missed a turn, and careened into the field and rolled a few times, taking a live power line down with it. The end of the snapped-off power line was sort of jiggling and sparking in the grass, and two twisted bodies were splayed out on the ground, clearly both dead. One had long blonde hair; her legs were twisted one way and the rest of her body the other. We stopped for a few minutes–maybe only two–and watched as a fire engine came and someone threw blankets over the bodies. We were absolutely speechless for at least an hour after that, and I regretted opening my mouth at all.
I’m 35 and have never witnessed a death.
Driving down Hwy 67 through IL, approaching St. Louis, I had the wife & kids in the van. A car must’ve been going 90 and zipped around us. Several cars were ahead of us. The car was taking obscene risks, passing and speeding. When the car was about 1/4 mile in front of us it went to pass another car in a no passing zone and from our vantage point I could see an oncoming car. I told the boys to look down at the floor because I didn’t want them to see something they’d have to live with the rest of their lives. Fortunately, the offending car made it safely into the right lane just before having a head-on.
No kidding. Sheesh.
An apartment I lived in many years ago overlooked a one-way street. One night I casually looked out and saw a car going the wrong way. Odd, I thought. A car going the right way swerved and hit a building, partly destroying the steps. (In the 3+ more years that I lived there, the steps never did get repaired.) The driver of the car that crashed got out and started running. He was gunned down within a second or two, by at least five guys.
Apparently they were cops and he was a wanted criminal.
Sat in a parking lot on an interstate highway in NC about ten years ago. Two hours went by before the traffic started moving again. The accident was not even a mile away from us, and it was terrible. Semi vs. some sort of car that was probably about two feet tall. I don’t know how it got squashed so bad–it looked like a giant weight had been dropped directly on top of it. I couldn’t tell if it was a regular car or a SUV or van. There was only one lane open and they hadn’t yet cleared the bodies, which were under sheets to the side of the road. At least two, possibly three.
Zero
My response was ninja’d by MOIDALIZE. The only question is, what color was the ninja?
I’ve driven past three I can think of and know there were more.
One a nun drove off the road at high speed and broke off trees at about 6 feet off the ground. The car crushed flat in the field.
One was a priest that hit the guard rail of the canal bridge. I have no idea why the Catholics are so fatally accident prone. They were both tourists.
One was guy that was working on a bridge over the interstate and he fell from the bridge frame into the rubble at the bottom.
I did see a guy that almost died by having a reinforcement rod that goes into poured road cement shoved through him. The guy was outside his car in a construction zone looking at his car with the drivers side door open. A steel tie rod was coming up through the floor near the foot brake. It was aimed at the door. A lady was sitting in the passenger seat. I bet he still shits his pants when he thinks of this.
God is a lousy copilot.
None that I know of.
My friend and her family (think a passel of little kids) were driving in Tehran a few years ago when a man suddenly landed on the roof of their car and bounced to the pavement. He was trying to commit suicide by leaping off the bridge they had just gone under. He was successful. Fortunately for my friend and her family, multiple people had witnessed this guy deliberately jump to his death, so the police didn’t waste any time thinking it was their fault for hitting him. She says the police pulled up at the scene, saw the dented roof of the car and the bloodied, smushed body nearby, and told her father to “Just leave and get those kids away from this.”
Personal life: none
Professional life: several
I’m a doctor. Fortunately all the deaths I have witnessed have been in the hospital in patients where it was not unexpected. The professional count was almost several + 1 but the guy we coded last night while I was on call was still alive when I went home.
I have never seen a fatality outside of work. While working, I’ve seen quite a few. Every time, it was sudden and unexpected due to the nature of my job. I’m an emergency responder at a Vegas resort, and the fatalities are typically heart attacks, rarely suicides, and even more rarely accidental trauma.
None, thank heavens. I’ve heard enough stories from my mom, the RN.