What's it like to have someone die in front of you?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Hi SD,

Fortunately, I have never been in a situation where someone has actually died in front of me. But I would like to know what it is like. It certainly isn’t common, unless you are a seasoned EMS worker or hospital doctor/nurse, or similar.

I always wonder if someday I will have to endure that. Does it change you? How does it change your ideas about life and living? Maybe there’s a lesson we can take from people’s experiences.

For those who have gone through this, how has it made you live your life differently? I am in a rut, and could use some stories to inspire me to live better, with more gratitude, and with more respect for the fragility of life.

Thanks,

Dave

2

I have had it happen. I witnessed a cop shoot a man who had a knife, and I testified at the inquest.

I’m sorry to have to tell you that it did not change my life in any way. It was scary to see, and testifying was a nuisance, but it did not “change my ideas about life and living.” I am the same person, and I rarely think about it.

3

I have seen several people die.

The first was a suicide that was sitting on the train tracks. I was on the train. The rest is in the spoiler box because not everyone wants to know what happens when a fully loaded passenger train hits a bare human body at 80 mph.

He basically exploded like a water balloon hitting a wall. Blood, gore, and small fragments of muscle and bone sprayed across the windows of several cars like thick salsa or tomato sauce. With chunky bits. I think there were some larger chunks left back at the impact site but it was at least a half a mile behind the train and frankly I didn’t have much of an urge to look. Clean up of the train consisted of hosing it off.

The effect? Initially horror and sadness but as we were parked longer and longer as the investigation into the accident wore on, the hysterical train engineer was removed, and a replacement found and brought to the train to continue the journey, I got mad at the inconsiderate asshole who used our train to kill himself and inconvenienced hundreds of people and worried even more (this was before the days of ubiquitous cellphones so we had no way to contact worried family and friends waiting for us at train stations all along the line). It was yet another piece of why I loathe suicide in general.

I was at my mother’s side when she died, along with my father and one of my sisters. I was holding her hand as she died. There was a feeling of relief, that her long ill health and suffering were over, and great sadness because my mother was dead. I had an urge to leap up and start CPR, but didn’t because she had a DNR and even if she had been revived it wouldn’t really have been a life, she was in and out of a coma-like state most of her last few weeks. But, mostly, I think it was a relief.

I was at my husband’s side when he died, along with the same sister. I was also holding his hand as he died. His breathing became irregular, then intermittent, then stopped. His face relaxed. Again, his suffering was over, he was no longer in pain or fearful. I was devastated with grief and sadness yet, again, there was a feeling of relief as well.

Did any of those my life? Um… not really that much. Well, going from being married to being a widow was a big change in some ways, but not in others. My views on life and death I think are pretty much unchanged. None of those change the way I live, except now I live alone after 30 years of living with someone else. But then, my sister says I’m ruthlessly practical in many ways. I think about my husband’s death a lot partly because it’s so recent. The other two, not so much.

I didn’t have some great epiphany witnessing the deaths of other human beings. It’s sad. One of them left a horrible disgusting mess that had to be cleaned up and that sucked. Also caused severe mental trauma for at least one other person, and that sucked even worse. You deal with the situation then you get up and get on with the rest of your life. It’s hard the first week or three, but eventually you return to a form of normal.

I don’t like witnessing death, but I don’t fear doing so either. If I have to be present I’d prefer death from old age or illness to violence - violent death is bad enough on its own, but then you have other people freaking out over it and you have to deal with that, too. And it can be extremely messy. Although death from illness can be pretty bad, too.

Me, personally - I hope to be apparently healthy and simply go to bed one day and just not wake up. But I’m in no hurry to get to that point.

4

I was in the room when my father died. Like Broomstick’s experience with her mother and her husband, my overwhelming emotion was relief. My father had dementia, and it had been growing worse for years. I watched my strong, adventurous father become fearful of everything, and angry because he knew he had lost memories and abilities. His death was calm and peaceful. His breathing got shallower, then irregular, then it just stopped. No trauma, no excitement, no fear. Just gone.

Did it change me? Maybe a little. We all knew this was coming, and soon. I was anxious about being there when it happened. I didn’t know how I would react. So you could say that watching it happen reduced my fear of death a bit. I can now visualize the end of a life as peaceful and calm.

5

I watched an elderly woman die at a restaurant. Food had just arrived at our table, we were just about to dig in, and we noticed a commotion at the next table. She was choking, her immediate family was on their feet around her, slapping her on the back with increasingly excessive force, and one of them began screaming, “Where are her pills? Get her pills!” Amid the shocked silence of the rest of the restaurant and her family’s hysteria, she looked me straight in the eye. For just a split second, I thought about it and decided to look straight back with all the tenderness and the sweetest smile I could muster. It might have lasted only 10 seconds but it felt much longer.

Well, I didn’t do much (maybe not anything; our gazes were locked until she became unresponsive, but I can’t be sure she even saw me at that point), but I didn’t shudder and look away like my girlfriend did, or run away like I’d wanted to for just a split second. So the lesson for me was that, when someone’s in a much worse situation than I am, it’s not so hard to put my immediate needs in second place (and it feels a whole lot better in retrospect).

6

When its a very close relative, and something you were expecting - such as a parent with a chronic degenerative illness, one thing you feel is that something has changed. You have become sort of conditioned to the situation and finally it has changed - you have the emotions of sadness but also you sort of feel a bit lost - because you no longer have to live with the situation that you have become used to.

As for other deaths, well in prison when an inmate takes their own life - you have the mix of dealing directly with the personal effect on yourself and colleagues - then you have to deal with the investigation - did you follow the procedures? did you preserve evidence correctly? was there anything else you could have done? were you given the correct information to try and prevent the death? Trust me, being a witness in an investigation is bad enough - being a possible subject in the investigation is rather worse. This is just the internal investigation - usually these are started but must be adjourned until the formal public inquest can be held - it can take a number of years before all the findings are in.

Oddly enough, when prisoners murder each other its generally easier to handle - even though its likely to be a violent death, the main subject of the investigation is obviously the killer and it tends to reduce the pressure on prison staff to a great extent.

Naturally at such a stressful time the organisation still expects you to continue with your normal work, where if you are really unlucky you can come across a couple more suicides - such as happened at HMP Woodhill where there were 4 suicides in a month. This is one of the reasons I am glad I do not work directly on the accommodation units.

Traffic accident fatalities - not great but you do sometimes wonder if you could have done anything different - I’ve been around at one serious incident to a cyclist who survived and different one where they did not but in both cases the drivers were at fault. Initial reaction was cluelessness, then a realisation that something had to be done, and then some of the first aid training starts to assert itself and relief when professional help arrives. After that I pretty much wrote these incidents off and moved on.

7

I took my then 13 year old son to be at his father’s side when they ceased life support. We had not parted on good terms and it was very hard to go in that room although my ex was so out of it I doubt he knew we were there. My mother joined us also, and although she was also no fan of my ex (I’m trying to be tactful here), she sat on his bed and held his hand and spoke kindly to him. I was really impressed by her ability to do that. I found no such sympathy in myself.

The nurse came and shut down the machines, letting us know that the end would come within a few minutes. I talked to my mother and my son, and saw the moment of realization on his face.
To me, this is the story of the day a hard thing happened to my son, rather than a story about a person dying. That person didn’t really seem to be present anyway.

8

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

I was holding DesertWife’s hand when she died; her older daughter was holding the other one. She suffered from ALS and it got to her diaphragm early, nine months after diagnosis. She could not see herself living the rest of her life on a ventilator so her first crisis was her last. After four days on supplementary O[sub]2[/sub] she seemed to be getting stronger so the tube was removed to see if she could do on her own. When her breathing started to fail again within an hour, she refused to be intubated again, a decision I and both her daughters supported, given her active life style. She was moved from ICU to a hospice room in the same hospital, and died about eight hours later. As with Tastes of Chocolate’s father, hear breathing simply grew shallower and shallower until the next one did not happen.

Nietzsche has said that what does not kill you makes you stronger. I do not feel stronger.

9

I worked in a cath lab for years (as a film tech), and I’ve seen several people die in front of me. I didn’t participate in the resuscitation attempts when the patient coded; all I could do was silently encourage them as the patient fought for their lives. It was sad when they lost.

10

24 years ago I stayed at my Dad’s side during his final 12 hours in Hospice. He was “lucky” in that his liver cancer killed him so rapidly that he didn’t have time to suffer. From diagnosis to funeral was only 9 weeks, and his “agony in spite of morphine” phases were intermittent and only during the last couple of hours before he went into pre-death coma. I held his hand throughout those 12 hours.
Oddly, I felt sadness but no profound grief, and have never understood why (we were close, and pals). What I did feel was a sense of “He helped usher my way into life, now I’m helping to usher his way out to whatever’s next.” I felt honored to be his steward. When he finally exhaled for good, I felt mostly relief, along with an odd wish to congratulate him for having graduated with honors.

Same here although I wasn’t left without my wife. The life changer for me was walking away with suprerficial injuries from a horrific car crash that should have killed me two or three different ways.
36 years later I clearly realizing “I’m about to be killed / so this is how I die / Hm. Isn’t that interesting.”

11

Better late than never: “36 years later I clearly remember realizing…”

12

I have been with several older people who passed away somewhat peacefully after struggling sometimes for days to breath.

I have witnessed at least 3 fatal heart attacks and 1 fatal stroke in the workplace.

1 drug overdose

the worst was a guy bled out from a motorcycle accident he was screaming to get help their quick, he knew he was bleeding out, he started saying he was going to pass out and within seconds he passed out and in just a minute or two he was gone. There were several of us there and we couldn’t stop the bleeding, I think he died in less than 5 min after the crash.

It never had any kind of lasting effects on me that I am aware of.

13

I did volunteer work in a hospital from 1980 to 1983. (500 hours, which I’m quite proud of.) There were four or five occasions when the nursing staff asked me to sit with a terminal patient. And in these cases I mean terminal within an hour. It’s been a long time but I don’t recall ever conversing with any of them. Just talking to them in general and holding a hand. Strangely to me, once death occurred I was also charged with wrapping and tagging the body and taking it to the hospital morgue.

Since that time I have always thought of death as just a part of existance. When people I know die I can and do dismiss it easily as a “normal” sort of event, not a big deal.

14

Early or mid 1980’s, it was a high speed head-on in front of Walter Reed Hospital.

A woman was trapped in the passenger seat, and the crowd that formed became convinced that “we need to get her out right now, before the fire starts”. So they commence violently rocking the car, which I’m sure was doing her no favors, but the door wouldn’t budge. Another guy shows up with a long fence pole, so he and I use it to pry the door open, but just a bit. It was all we could manage.

You could see she was in bad shape, semi-conscious and moaning, with labored breathing. I reached in to clear her airway, but she was now barely breathing. By this time the fire truck had arrived, but there was nothing to be done until the Jaws of Life could be summoned to the scene.

As I held her limp body upright, her breathing just got softer and slower, until I couldn’t tell if she was breathing at all. Until she wasn’t.

15

I’ve thought about that day from time to time, but I wouldn’t say it changed me in any way that I’m aware of. It was just a sad thing that happened, and thinking about it saddens me for a minute.

I suppose it was my first real glimpse into the eyes of death, but the specter staring back seemed just so utterly banal; “is that all there is to you?”, I’d like to have asked, but the answer would be only silence.

Sorry I’ve got nothing more profound to offer.

16

My own daughter died in my arms in the hospital from one of the most rare genetic diseases in the world. It is the most devastating thing that ever happened to me and destroyed my health for a while and my marriage permanently. It is the worst thing in the world to get only get to spend 10 minutes with a dead child before they are taken away to be cremated.

I wish I could say it all worked out but it didn’t. Hardly anyone knows how to address it including family. People say really inappropriate things after something like that. I know they try to mean well but it almost never works. I had to cut off lots of family relationships because of inappropriate responses. Other old friends responded very well so I know it is possible.

We had another daughter less than a year later and she is self-conscious because people have told her that she is the “replacement”. If you want me to go psychotic, that is the way to do it. She is not a replacement. She is a welcome gift and I will hurt anyone that says otherwise.

I have also been among the last visitors to see someone dying in the hospital. I was perfectly aware that they were dying and knew it would come within hours and the doctors did too. I just didn’t tell that to the dying person. They are usually pretty sedate if they are conscious at all. I just wanted to talk to them one last time before they passed and they always have within hours to a few days.

17

I have told this story - I was crossing the street with a friend after a night out, and some guys were drag racing. One of them hit and killed her.

I was the first one there - naturally. I was just missed by the car myself. Her heart was beating when knelt down, her eyes open, but not seeing or blinking. I told her I was there, and that I would take care of everything. I told her I loved her.

Her heart stopped.

We did CPR, and got it beating again, but the injuries were too grave. Basically we have her family time to say goodbye.

It changed me deeply.

18

My mom died in hospice, unconscious from large amounts of morphine necessary for pain control. She’d had a lot of visitors.
When she went, her face slowly turned grayish.
I huddled and cried with my brother, his wife, their oldest daughter.

We knew it was going to happen and had been there for hours that day.

Did she hear anything anyone said to her? Maybe. I hope so.

19

This happened in 1954 when I was 17, just as I was about to graduate from HS. My grandfather had a heart attack one Saturday morning. There was nothing like 9-1-1 those days and we called our family doctor (we all used the same one). He came to the house (doctors made house calls 63 years ago) and set him up with an oxygen mask, which he always carried in his car. We called an ambulance. Ambulances were supplied by the taxi company–they were called cabulances. I was designated to administer the oxygen, which just meant making sure the mask didn’t slip and the hose didn’t tangle. An hour or so later, the ambulance still hadn’t come and his breathing changed. After a few minutes, he just stopped and that was it. An hour later the ambulance arrived.

It really had no long term effect on me. I knew that people died and witnessing it directly really didn’t change much. His time had come and that was all. Something unrelated that happened the same day had a profound and lasting positive effect on my subsequent life, so perhaps my recollection is colored by that fact. But that’s a story for another time and place.

20

I watched my closest sister die in her hospital bed. I had to make the call to take her off the drip that was keeping her heart beating and that was awful. She was unconscious already. My other sister was there as well as my niece, so that was a comfort.

She predicted it. She’d had a series of infections and was being moved from hospital to hospital over the last few months. When we checked into this last one she told me that she didn’t know how she was going to get out of there. I think we were all wondering where this was all going.

Between 2005 and 2010, my father, sister, then mother died. Both parents died in the same bedroom from lung cancer. I don’t know how much different I am since then. The only thing I really care about anymore is spending time with my family. My twin daughters are 14 and beautiful and insane and they’re going to be gone and doing their own thing in the blink of an eye.