I don’t mean murder or torture, I mean something that could conceivably happen in the course of normal events.
For me, the idea of not being able to breathe is the worst. Either drowning or choking is just so horrible. Even when I get a little somthing stuck in my throat, I just get panicky.
Drowning has got to be the worst. I mean, you can come up with all sorts of complicated contraptions and stuff that cause death…but drowning…I couldn’t even watch The Abyss when that guy was drowning. How horrid.
yeah but what about the chinese torture of a thousand cuts? I’d rather be alone and unloved that sliced to ribbons with a razor blade and left to bleed to death.
I think that burning to death would be the worst way. Just think of the pain of the burn and then you add the natural fear most people have of being burned and that makes it even worse.
(a side note: the quote is from “Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost.)
Being eaten alive by some ferocious animal like Kyle McLachlan did in in that “Tales From the Crypt” episode, or Griffin Dunne in An American Werewolf in London.
I watched my mother and mother-in-law both die long drawn out deaths from cancer. For my mother, it was 4 years of hell. Got me to quit smoking and watch what I’m eating. Definitly not the way I want to die.
The worst way is for your death to betray something you believe in. It could be something simple, like that pedestrian/bicycle safety advocate who got hit by a bus and killed.
During a spacewalk which is humanity’s last chance to secure a cargo of nuclear waste that is in danger of falling back to Earth and causing massive human casualties, you make a really stupid mistake that kills all your astronaut buddies and simultaneously sends you adrift into space. You smack your hand to your forehead and accidentally crack your helmet’s visor and begin to very slowly depressurize.
“This is the kind of thinking that kept me out of the better schools” - George Carlin