I was thinking about travel safety, and how it would be ironic if one were to be killed in an airplane or car crash on the way to someone’s funeral. After all, surely the deceased wouldn’t want anyone to literally die for the sake of his own remembrance! Anyways, I decided to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation (ignoring air travel) to see how common this sort of thing is. Figuring:
~1 killed per 100 Million vehicles*km
~ 50 km per trip to funeral
~ 50 vehicles per funeral
gives 2.5*10^-5 fatalities per funeral, or someone is killed on the way to about 0.003% of funerals
Now let’s take this a step further. Suppose someone dies of a traffic fatality. This means there is about a 0.003% chance that someone will die in traffic on the way to the funeral of someone who died in a traffic accident. But then that person may also have a funeral. Then there is a 1000.000030.00003 =~ 0.0000001% chance that someone will die in a traffic accident on the way to a funeral for someone who died in a traffic accident on the way to a funeral for someone who died in a traffic accident. Given that there are about 2.5 million deaths in the US each year, this should happen once every few years here in the US. Across the globe, it should be happening almost daily. I find this fascinating. Has anyone seen a news story with an account of this sort of thing actually happening?
I don’t have time to go through all your calculations, but this one is clearly wrong:
> Given that there are about 2.5 million deaths in the US each year, this should
> happen once every few years here in the US. Across the globe, it should be
> happening almost daily.
The population of the U.S. is something like 4% or 5% of the world population. That is, the population of the world is something like 20 or 25 times the population of the U.S. If something happens once every few years in the U.S. and there’s no reason to think that it happens more or less often in the U.S. than the rest of the world going strictly by the population, then it should be happening every few weeks or every few months in the whole world, not almost daily.
The way the funeral homes’ chase cars zip in and out of intersections around here during funeral processions, I’m surprised I don’t read about more such deaths.
Why is that ironic? Is there some safety precaution that exists while traveling for a funeral that doesn’t exist while traveling for any other reason? Are employees of funeral homes who make a living out of traveling for funerals at any less of a risk of traffic accidents than any other professional who makes a living on the road?
Traffic accidents happen. Even while traveling to traffic accidents. It’s not ironic. It’s coincidence.
It is both a coincidence and ironic. In my OP I explained why I find it ironic:
After all, surely the deceased wouldn’t want anyone to literally die for the sake of his own remembrance!
I find it ironic because it feels incongruous that one’s life would be taken for taking the risk to travel to someone’s funeral, a ceremony whose only purpose is to honer the dead.
You are right – this was of course just an order of magnitude calculation, and I jumped it up an order of magnitude in my head my rounding from “weeks” to “days” without realizing it. Although, to be fair, in some of the most populous places in the world, like India, traffic fatality statistics are far more dire than I have used in my calculations!
Well, honoring the dead is not the only reason people travel to attend funerals. They also do so in order to offer support and comfort to the bereaved, to reunite with other family and/or friends of the departed, and in some cases for reasons relating to the distribution of the deceased person’s property or the division of his/her estate.
OTOH, *fatal *accidents are strongly concentrated in the wee hours when the sleepy drunks are driving home. Funerals are concentrated in the afternoon. So whatever the fatal accident rate is, the rate associated with funerals ought to be less.
Maybe I’m just an unsociable shit but I’d bet 50 cars as about 5x too many for an average US funeral. For me I’d think my survivors will be hard pressed to find 6 pallbearers. IMO & IME, a big funeral procession is 15-20 cars. All bets are off for funerals of celebrities or cops / firemen. But for the 99.5% rest of us, a bunch less than 50 cars is much more plausible.
Whatever. The OP seems to think there should be an expectation of safe travel from death by traffic accident when one is observing the funeral of another. That’s just silly. Not ironic.
People travel by cars daily. Cars crash. People die in traffic accidents. Travel by motor vehicle, though relatively safe, is inherently dangerous when things go wrong. People travel by plane to attend funerals. Planes crash. People die in plane crashes. Travel by jet, though relatively safe, is inherently dangerous when things go wrong. Things going wrong often have nothing to do with reason for traveling by car or plane. Wouldn’t it be ironic if a guy drives through Boston to get to a get on a plane from Logan to LAX to attend his mother’s funeral dies that day in a fiery plane crash? No. That would be tragic. Tragedy is not synonymous with irony.
Play with the numbers, sure, it’s an order of magnitude guesstimate. Still looks like it should have happened a few times at least.
And I think you may be underestimating how many casual acquaintances and colleagues from past and current work will come to memorials. Both my parents, who died separately but recently, and were not the most sociable, had upwards of 50 each come to their remembrances, many of whom were former or current colleagues.
Still don’t see how that is ironic. How does a family member dying have any effect on the relative risk of traveling by vehicle? How does it matter what the deceased would want? Would it be less ironic to you if the deceased despised the person who dies in a traffic accident while traveling to the funeral of the deceased?
You don’t seem to understand what irony means. Webster:
incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result
Events of tragedy and coincidence are not a disjoint set from those that are ironic. For example:
Is it a tragic happenstance to die of a self-inflicted gunshot wound while practicing gun safety? Yes. Is it also ironic? Yes.
Where on earth did I give you impression that the relative risk of travelling by vehicle was affected by a family member dying? I’m simply following the statistics. Many cases of irony are just coincidence pure and simple. There is nothing in the definition of irony that requires ironic events to be anything other than coincidence or random happenstance.
It is more ironic if we make the fair assumption that the deceased loved those attending the funeral, yes.
You don’t seem to understand what incongruity means.
Webster:
*1: the quality or state of being incongruous
2: something that is incongruous
*
***Incongruous **
: lacking congruity: as
a: not harmonious : incompatible <incongruous colors>
b: not conforming : disagreeing <conduct incongruous with principle>
c: inconsistent within itself <an incongruous story>
d: lacking propriety : unsuitable <incongruous manners> *
What about this hypothetical traffic accident is any of those things? Traffic accidents don’t have any compatibility or conformity issues with funerals. It is not inconsistent with traffic accidents in general in which the destination has nothing to do with the traffic event itself. There is no more impropriety in dying in a traffic accident on the way to a funeral than there is dying in a traffic accident on the way to work.
As to your analogy: Practicing gun safety is a means of preventing accidental death by misfiring a gun. How is attending a funeral a means of preventing traffic deaths?
Based on your use of the term irony, it seems your expectation for fatal traffic accident is different if the victim is traveling to a funeral than if the victim is going anywhere else simply because the deceased would rather not be honored than to see their loved one die in a traffic accident. As I said, this seems silly to me.
You didn’t answer my question. You distinctly noted irony in the fact that the deceased wouldn’t want for the attendee to die on the way to his/her funeral. I don’t see the connection. What if the deceased didn’t feel that way? Would it still be ironic? What if the deceased didn’t want the attendee to die before the funeral and s/he did? Would that be ironic? Would it be ironic if the victim died in the same traffic accident that killed the deceased? Would it be ironic if the victim was the offspring of and also a passenger of the vehicle the deceased was driving? Most parents don’t want to kill their children either, but is it ironic when they do while driving a vehicle?
For fucks sake, start a new irony thread if it matters that much. This thread wasn’t started to debate what is or isn’t ironic. The OP is asking for examples of his scenario actually happening and being reported. He didn’t ask for a vocabulary lesson. Get over it.
Alright then. The answer to the OP’s question is no. To expound on that, given the many miles traveled by car to destinations other than funerals by comparison to the significantly smaller number of miles traveled by car to funerals, the scenario is statistically insignificant (as noted by the OP despite faulty analysis). Further, since the hypothetical scenario is statistically insignificant and also unlikely to be the result of any reasonably preventable condition unique to that event, it’s highly unlikely that any reputable statistical analysis of such a random coincidence exists.
Much better answer, but don’t be so quick to say “no”. Here is a link to a story about a traffic fatality of a man leaving the funeral of a traffic victim.