I just returned from dinner with friends and thought of a topic for here during a lull in the conversation. ( Yes, I’m a SDMB addict.)
My friends grandmother died on the same day as her best friend.
To this I will add my own:
My great uncle died exactly five years to the date after my great aunt.
My husbands best friend was driving his grandmother home after Thanksgiving dinner and she mentioned that she would be seeing Charles, her late husband, soon. Our friend commented, " Oh grandma, you are in perfect health and in better shape than all us kids, etc." The next morning, her daughter (the mom of our friend) went to pick her up for a hair appointment and found Grandma dead in bed. Died in her sleep.
Basically the same thing happened in my family. My great-aunt died of cancer, and my great-uncle, who was healthy, died a week or two later. The family blamed his grief.
I think this used to be a less notable phenomenon. I work in an archives, and while I was looking at some old documents which included death records, there was a lot of “Cause of death: Loss of the will to live” (although this wasn’t necessarily an official medical pronouncement). It was
most common if the spouse had recently died.
no interesting stories in my family, but here is one from American history- Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on July 4, 1826, exactly 50 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence
No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness…Mary Wollstonecraft
Another tidbit from the archives of my family history. Not directly my family, but about 25 years ago, someone with way too much time on their hands did a family tree that has long reaching limbs. Something like 300 families are in this telephone sized book. I only know the two pages of nuts that are my family. The rest, I wouldn’t know them if they were in a police line up.
One story in particular has stuck in my mind.
A family friend who is a priest was saying mass and right in the middle of the homily (sermon) he stopped and said (about our relative, not at the service that day due to sickness.) to the congregation " William Blahblah just died."
a good friend of mine was on his way home when he noticed that his watch had died. he then walked into his house only to have his mother tell him that his grandfather had just passed away. he asked what time, and then looked at his watch… it had stopped at the exact moment of his grandfathers death.
if wishes were fishes, we could walk on the ocean.
And when Adams died, he was upset because he thought Jefferson was still alive, and he felt less of himself for dying before him, but the irony is, Jefferson died a couple hours earlier.
On the topic, although it isn’t quite the same, my mom had these three cats she adopted all the same time, all from the same litter. They were kinda old (seven or eight, I think) when one of them was hit by a car, and within the next two weeks, the other two just died. Who says animals don’t have feelings?
“I was born in this town, I was raised in this town, and I’ll probably die in this town. Hell, I’ve already been hit by a car on this street, twice!”–if you recognize where this quote is from or who said it, please tell me.
Richard Feynman used to tell the story of how he was coming down the stairs of his fraternity house, and suddenly he got this conviction that his grandmother had died. Moments later, someone rushed in shouting that there was a phone call.
It was for someone else. His grandmother was just fine. He said he remembered the event just so he’d have a story to tell that went the other way.
He also wrote of how his wife Arlene died… one of the few possessions she had in her hospital room was an alarm clock that he had given her. A few hours after her death, he came back into the room to pack up her belongings, and he noticed that the clock had stopped at exactly 8:41… and he looked at the death certificate, which showed 8:41 as her exact time of death.
But – he knew that the alarm clock was crank; he was always having to open it up and fix it. Any motion might cause it to stop, and he recalled the nurse picking it up to see what time it was when she wrote the time in on the death certificate. That, he said, could easily have stopped it.
So, on behalf of Richrad Feynman… two stories that go the other way.
Bricker is onto the trail here. In fact there are almost an infinite number of possible coincidences in life. The ones which do not occur are of course not noticed. If there are, for example, a million possible coincidences and one occurs, we say think that this is really strange because the chance of it occuring is one in a million. In fact, there is nothing spooky or supernatural about it.
Consider the entire population of the United States. Somewhere soon, a person will die at the funeral of a spouse, child, parent,or friend. Today, a million people will worry about a friend, relative, whatever. Tomorrow, one or more of them will be found dead, have an accident or whatever. See how that works?
Before the end of the year, it is likely that several cases of a rare cancer will be diagnosed on the same block in the same small town for now other reasons than the laws of probablity. Cancer clusters, they’re called.
Adams’ last words were, “Thomas Jefferson survives!”
The most fascinating book I’ve read in many years is called How Did They Die? and is basically a compendium of famous deaths. Some of my favorites:
[ul][li]Beethoven was on his deathbed and had finally gone to sleep. In the middle of the night a thunderclap roused him awake - he sat bolt upright, shook his fist at the heavens… and fell back, dead.[/li][li]W.C. Fields had been confined to a sanitorium in his last couple of years, and was on his deathbed on Christmas Eve. As the church bells chimed midnight, he opened his eyes, look around at his gathered friends and family, put a finger to his lips (as if to “sssssh”), winked… and blood burbled from his lips as he died.[/li][li]Oscar Wilde spent his last years poor and destitute, ending up at a friend’s flat in Paris, which was quite paltry. As he lay dying, he motioned a friend to whisper into his ear, “This wallpaper is killing me - one of us has to go.” He then slipped into a coma and never regained consciousness.[/ul][/li]
Each person’s ailments are diagnosed in medical terms, and then a mostly factual account of their finalities are given from reputable source material.
The day my grandfather died my best friend called before school to ask me if I wanted her to get anything from the schoold for me since I would be gone for a while.
I asked her what she was talking about, to which she replied never mind you haven’t found out yet, and hung up.
The phone rang a few minutes later and it was my dad calling my mom to tell her his father died late in the evening before.
The odd thing about it is that I had dreamed of my grandfather the nite he died.
In my dream I was in an all white room with my grandparents, and he was packing a suitcase. I kept unpacking it telling him that he couldn’t leave. My grandmother told me to stop and let him go, because it was his time and he would be fine.
My friends phone call that morning is what woke me from my dream. Her and I were very close, but she had only met my grandfather like twice! She said that she didn’t exactly have a dream, but that she just somehow knew.
“Beethoven was on his deathbed and had finally gone to sleep. In the middle of the night a thunderclap roused him awake - he sat bolt upright, shook his fist at the heavens… and fell back, dead.”
How could a thunderclap rouse someone who was stone deaf…Hmmm…??
I have great faith in fools, self-confidence my friends call it.—
Edgar Allan Poe
My grandmother died on my dad’s 52nd birthday. He went to pick her up for his birthday dinner, and she had died in her sleep. Aside: I had bought her last meal. (No, it wasn’t the food; she was 83.)
Wrong thinking is punished, right thinking is just as swiftly rewarded. You’ll find it an effective combination.
galen: Consider the entire population of the United States. Somewhere soon, a person will die at the funeral of a spouse, child, parent,or friend. Today, a million people will worry about a friend, relative, whatever. Tomorrow, one or more of them will be found dead, have an accident or whatever. See how that works?
Gee, man. Bum us all out…
Wrong thinking is punished, right thinking is just as swiftly rewarded. You’ll find it an effective combination.
Probably more twisted than interesting, but I’ll post it anyway. This could be the hijack of all time.
Disclaimer:I swear the following is an absolutely true story, not a FOAF or UL.
I knew a guy back in high school who was eaten by a polar bear. About 15 years later a friend, who had absolutely no connection to the polar bear snack guy, brought some pictures to work. Yup, you guessed it; the pictures were from the dead guy’s autopsy. Polar bear leftovers.
UncleBeer,I am not doubting your veracity. Anyone with the handle of Uncle and Beer is aok by me.
BUT
I want to know the rest of the story of Just How This Polar Bear Snack Guy actually came to be eaten by the Polar Bear. Was there a pack of PB’s running around Toledo?
Okay. Drugs. Drugs were the end cause of this. This guy dropped a bunch of acid one day at the zoo. In a hallucinogenic haze he decided he really liked the polar bears. He contrived to stay in the park after closing and climbed into the cage with the bears. Where he was found the next morning; errr, about 20% of him anyway.
It seems the polar bears really liked the softer tissues, entrails and the meaty thighs and the like. Oh yeah, they also ate his face. About all that remaind of this poor bastard was the larger bones, ribcage, and skull. The little remaining meat was down inside his boots. Apparently the bears didn’t think it was worth the effort of chewing through the leather just to get to a stinky old foot. I gotta say I agree with them on this.
“The Darwin Award is an annual honor given to the person who did the gene pool the biggest service by killing themselves in the most extraordinarily stupid way (hopefully, but not necessarily immediately) before procreating.” www.artbell.com/darwin.html
what is essential is invisible to the eye -the fox
