Yesterday I went to a funeral for a 17 year old who died in his sleep. Though I was not made privy to the details (I only know the family distantly), it seems fairly clear that his death was not suicide or drug related, but rather some undiagnosed health condition.
About two years ago the 22 yr. old daughter of a family at my church died suddenly of an undiagnosed congenital heart condition.
When I was a teenager I knew a 23 yr. old who died of a heart attack on a subway platform.
So I’m 41 and I know of three apparently healthy young people who died suddenly. It’s so impossibly sad.
A girl I went to elementary school with was murdered when I was in the 6th grade.
How do you quality “accident”? Last fall, a family friend’s son died after surgery. Fifteen year old kid, athletic and healthy, went in to have a pin put into a bone in his cracked wrist. They used general anesthesia, the surgery went fine. In the recovery room, someone attached his “oxygen supply” tube to his “exhale” tube, meaning that he couldn’t breathe out, so CO[sub]2[/sub] built up in his lungs, bloodstream, and under his skin. Still under the anesthesia, he quietly smothered to death while no one was watching. I have never seen such grief as I did at his funeral.
Not really all that many, but the ones I can remember are still shocking.
The first one I can remember was in my Sunday School class back in the late 40’s, when I would have been pre-teen. He had this huge cancer on the side of his head for months. The thing we kids were most concerned about was that because he had been swimming in the city pool whether it was safe for us to swim there.
There was another in a similar situation at about that same time who wasn’t as scary.
During later school years there may have been as many as five that weren’t all that close to me, but one of my playmates who was probably the most athletically gifted of our bunch just dropped dead in his early teens. Never did know for sure what killed him.
All that said, I would guess the number of under-20 types I have know of personally (whether they knew me or not) would be maybe 20-30 in number, and I doubt I could name half of them.
Zero that I can think of. Every one of the dozen or so I knew who died were all from suicide, accident or murder. I’m grouping murder in with accident as it doesn’t hardly fit into a medically related group.
A guy who was briefly in my fraternity died of an overdose a few years later, but I didn’t know much more about him than his name and what he looked like.
When I was in Ottawa in the airforce a young Lt was out for a morning jog when he had a heart attack. He was about 23 IIRC and there were a lot of questions because his physicals hadn’t uncovered the heart condition that his autopsy did.
A student in one of my undergrad classes died of synovial sarcoma at age 23. He went into remission once but then relapsed about a year later. By that point it metastasized to his lungs and there wasn’t anything they could do.
Someone else I didn’t know (freshman, I think) had a seizure in the shower, hit her head on the tile, and died. It took 6 hours before someone wondered why the water had been running that long and looked in.
One of my husband’s college friends died of a brain aneurysm when he was 20. He was out playing tag football with a bunch of guys when he suddenly collapsed. His family donated several of his organs.
My neighbors brought their seemingly healthy newborn son home from the hospital, and a few days later he got sick with a Strep B infection that turned into meningitis. He died before he was three weeks old.
Neighbor of my in-laws died of complications from Marfan’s syndrome, just a few months after his wife gave birth to their first son. They’re thinking the son has it too. He was 27 or 28.
Former coworker of my husband died of a heart attack at 31. He and his wife had two kids and she was 9 months pregnant with the third.
One of my good friends was dorm mates with a girl in college who died of cancer just before graduation.
I was friends with a really great guy in college, who developed a brain tumor. He was from the UAE studying computer science. I believe he knew about his condition, but didn’t disclose it to anybody because he didn’t want to be treated like an invalid during his last few months. He collapsed one night in his apartment, went to the hospital, and died before his family could fly in.
Very goddamn sad. He was such a sweet guy. I wish I’d known about it before he died so I could have said goodbye, but that wasn’t what he wanted.
A young co-worker (late 20s iirc) moved on to a new job, and a few weeks later we were told he’d passed in his sleep…apparently sleep apnea was the diagnosis.
Also a college-age opponent of mine in a play-by-mail game stopped corresponding, and the game administrator later told me he’d had oral surgery and apparently bled to death in his sleep when the wounds opened.
This boy from my home village in Switzerland was very sick as a young man (I forget exactly what he had) and almost died, but survived. His mother always called him her “miracle”. She was a good friend of my parents so I knew them well. He went to the USA to college, graduated, came back to Switzerland, found a good job, and the week-end before he started his new job on Monday he drowned in our local lake. The guy that went swimming with him, his American buddy, came to our house to tell my dad that the guy just went under and he tried diving but couldn’t find him (the lake is deep and muddy in some parts.) He didn’t know French all that well (my father speaks English) and anyway he didn’t feel like telling the news to the mother (a widow), so my dad had to go.
The company that hired him in Switzerland had great benefits including life insurance as part of your employment. Since he had already signed the contract his mother received the proceeds from his life insurance policy even though he hadn’t worked a day there yet.
A girl I knew obliquely (she was friends with my stepbrother) died at 16 or 17 of some lung condition whose name escapes me. She had known for years that she likely wouldn’t live to be an adult.
Also, a former colleague had an eight-year-old half-sister die pretty suddenly of some kind of infection (MRSA maybe). Basically her death went like this;
Sunday afternoon: playing outside with friends.
Sunday around supper time: complains of tummy ache.
Sunday around bed time: complains of headache, tummy ache is worse.
Sunday around midnight: admitted to E/R for vomiting and severe abdominal pain.
Monday around 3AM: Unconscious and in ICU.
Monday around 8AM: Pronounced dead.
Several years ago, an online friend’s 18-year-old daughter, an avid runner, collapsed during a training run and died a few days later. Apparently it was an electrical problem in her heart. An annual 5K run is held in her honor. Lovely girl. A terrible shame.
