Why do I have Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died” running through my head?
Jason was driving his four-wheeler in the woods with some friends. He overturned going too fast around a curve and it crushed him.
Hattie got sickle-cell anemia. Nobody could even believe that disease was still around.
You’re not the only one. It reminds me of the time when an online friend had cat scratch fever and everyone had to bite their lips to avoid making the jokes.
I was never allowed to ride a bike because some damn fool of a kid–not even in our neighborhood–but my mother’s cousin’s neighborhood, went head over handlebars and died. There were no helmets those days (it would have been around 1945). So i never learned to ride a bike. Oddly, my younger brother and sister did learn to ride.
A kid in my neighborhood fell off a rope swing that had been rigged up over a steep gully. He fell wrong and broke his neck, or that was the story anyway. Well, he must have broken something pretty significant, because it killed him. He was 14 or so.
When I was in fifth grade (about ten years old), there was a boy in my class named Kevin, one of a set of twins, Kevin and Ken. Kevin was a nice guy (unlike some boys in the fifth grade), smart, good in math. Kevin and Ken had three siblings, one in second grade, one in eighth grade and one in high school. They were having some work done on their house, and some electrician was careless and some wiring set some insulation or something to smoldering. The house slowly filled with smoke that night, and all five kids and their mom died in their sleep. I couldn’t understand how you could die if you were just a kid.
When I was in high school there was a guy in my American History class (I didn’t know him); one night he and three of his buddies got drunk and wrapped their car around a tree. The rest of us graduated high school; some went on to college, got married, had kids, whatever, but he’s still a dumb 17 year old.
Then when I was in college there was the guy at the other end of my dorm floor who suffered from depression and hanged himself one weekend while his roommate was at home, because his girlfriend had broken up with him, but that’s getting away from “childhood stories”…
Not my experience directly, but I have a friend who grew up in a tiny, remote logging village in Canada. One day a handful of boys were playing down by a creek when they spotted a mama bear with two cubs. One of the boys threw a rock and actually hit one of the cubs. The mama bear saw this, ran along the creek past the other boys and killed the kid right there on the spot in front of them and then left.
I grew up with twin friends Ricky and Dicky. Ricky was dating a girl whos parents owned a boat. He, her and her family went picnicking by boat to an Island on a local lake. The boat started drifting away and Ricky swam for it. He didn’t make it.
His older brother, Elvis who was aslo a close friend, later died in Vietnam.
The events tore their family apart. Rather than just getting a divorce, the father shot the mother in the stomach with a shotgun. She lived.
I was 9 or 10 when a friend of mine and his younger brother, scions of the family that owned the local gravel operation, went snowmobiling on their own. The older one driving, the younger one on the back. The younger one fell off as they went over the cliff. He survived. My friend did not.
I had a number of people I knew just out of highschool either kill themselves (such as the brother of a very good friend of mine - his second brother to commit suicide) or wrap themselves around poles while driving. One guy I was briefly friends with in highschool drove this crappy blue van. One day I was driving past a major intersection and saw two police cars stopped and his van having run slightly up a bent over pole. I figured it was just a minor accident and he was probably getting arrested for DUI. Found out the next day he had been killed. To this day it amazes me that he was killed when his van was pretty much undamaged.
I was just about to post this:
mmm
Joey Romig was my age and from a very large family of about 15 kids. In the fifth grade, he contracted polio. They came to our classes and asked us donate for an iron lung and we gave pennies, nickels and dimes. But Joey died anyway, of a disease that could have been avoided with a simple vaccination.
Reading Mahaloth and Larry Mudd’s posts reminded me that when I was sixteen I got a job at a drive-in as a carhop. It was bought for a young woman a few years older than I by her father in order to make money for college. She ran it with an iron fist and made a miserable boss.
One night the other carhop and I showed up for work and the door was locked. The other girl told me that something bad had happened and our boss wouldn’t be opening the drive-in that night. I made the smart remark that whatever happened to her, it couldn’t be as much as she deserved.
Later I found out that she had been killed in a car wreck. I felt horrified that I had said that. And it was a useful lesson in guarding my tongue.
Most of the deaths I’ve had in my life have been learning experiences. I’m glad I don’t have to learn that particular lesson again.
My stories aren’t very interesting.
In junior high school, a friend of mine named Jeff was dicking around and jumped on the hood of a girl’s car pulling out of the parking lot after a dance, He fell off and cracked his skull and died a couple days later.
In 10th grade, the kid who sat behind me in biology, who I had a casual acquaintance with, was riding shotgun in a pickup truck, dicking around racing in a junk yard with some other idiots. Somehow, the truck he was in tipped over and fell sideways while he was hanging out the passenger side window and he got squashed like a bug.
When I was in high school, I was a lifeguard at a pool that got rented for a private, kid’s birthday party. The renters didn’t want to pay for a lifeguard at the party. Some kids (5th or 6th graders) were dicking arouind dunking each other, and they ganged up on one kid and held him under until he was unconscious. The adults were drinking and not paying attention. The kid never came out of the coma and died the next day.
I had known K since we took a dance class together as toddlers. We did a happy dance when we found out we would be in the same 5th grade class.
About a month after school started and only two days after her 10th birthday party, she was hit by a truck crossing the street while attempting to sale crap for a school fundraiser. She didn't see the truck and the driver didn't see her (he wasn't speeding or intoxicated); it was dusk and there was a slight curve in the road. She died on the scene.
I'll never forget the viewing a couple days later. A group of us met up outside and went in together. As we waited in the reception line, I could see that her parents were clearly upset but holding it together. When we got to them, K's mom looked at us and her face went blank for a few seconds, then contorted and she fell to the floor sobbing. Five healthy little girls, her dead daughter's friends.Mike drowned while swimming in a reservoir. I don’t know if alcohol was involved or not, but the place where he was swimming isn’t known for drownings–I can’t remember the last time someone drowned there. It may still be Mike, and that was 15 years ago. He was 15, maybe 16, and dated an acquaintance of mine.
Another kid, whose name I knew back in the day but have forgotten, died while playing Russian Roulette. A friend of mine named Billy was at the party where it happened, and left when the kid got his dad’s gun out. He was maybe a block away from the apartment when he heard the gunshot.
Incredibly intelligent kid with muscular dystrophy died our senior year of pneumonia. It was sad–he was a really nice guy and he never had a chance.
I was in 8th grade and Eddie was in 6th grade. We rode the same bus and usually got off at the same bus stop. He lived just down the road from me. This particular day I stayed on the bus because I was going to my friend’s house and the next stop was closer. Eddie got off. I felt the bus lurch and thought the bus driver had run over the sewer at the corner like he always did. Nope, it was Eddie. He had run up to the bus and was hanging on the window outside to shoot a spit-ball at one of his friends. He slipped when the bus started moving again and the bus ran over him. I remember we all got off the bus and tried to help him until the paramedics came. He didn’t survive the night.
David was the cute curly headed kid one year younger than me who lived on the next street over. I alternately had a crush on him or his older brother (who were both friends with my older brother). One day driving back from the beach with some friends they got in an accident and rolled the pickup truck they were in. David was on the passenger side at the time and ended up being partially ejected from the truck and crushed in the rollover. He was 15 at the time.
Another kid named David got brain cancer just before our freshman year in high school. He did not live through that year. The yearbook has a memorial photo. I was friends with his sister.
The family that lived on the corner of my street had four kids. The oldest one I didn’t know very well. He put a shotgun in his mouth one morning and blew his head off. His brother, Ronnie, who was a close friend, found him. I was home from school and heard the shot, I thought it was a fire cracker. Ronnie was never the same. I was 13 at the time, Ronnie was 14 and the brother was 18 or 19.
Late teens stories -
My fiance and I spent a fun day in March at Cumberland Falls, Kentucky. It was spring run-off season so the falls were really beautiful - lots of water. That night I called my high school best friend in Lexington and told him about it. He went down there the next weekend with his older brother, and died going over the falls.
A high school classmate plowed her car into the back of a flatbed truck, instantly decapitating her. Another one, right after graduation, had a cinder block wall he was building fall on him. A fourth one died while holding up a 7-11 in Florida.
So, out of 141 graduates of my senior class, four of them didn’t see age 20. 
This is the most horrible anecdote here, IMO. My god, how that must have affected everyone involved.
Morgan and I weren’t super close but we liked to goof off in 8th grade health class and talk about anime and boys. It was because we weren’t all that close that I didn’t hear anything of her until a few years later, when I found out that she and her sister had been trapped in their burning house and suffocated.
John was a year older than me. His sister Kristy was my age but I was in Elementary School classes with both of them over the years because we had mixed grade classes. John was a very odd kid but well liked.
The story goes that John was practicing a magic trick that made it look like he was hanging himself. Unfortunately he was doing it at the top of the staircase and he didn’t rig it correctly. The thing collapsed and he fell down the stairs and broke his neck. Kristy found him later and thought he was joking around so she started slapping him until she realized he was dead.
He was 12 or 13.
Ben was in the 2nd grade when I was in the 3rd grade and we rode the bus to school together. He was constantly running late and missing the bus. One winter morning he wasn’t at the end of the driveway after the bus driver honked twice so she went on. We picked up a couple of other kids and turned the corner.
One of the boys on the bus yelled for the bus driver to stop because Ben was coming through the field to meet us. He was running across a frozen pond and it broke underneath him. The bus driver just froze in shock and everyone started screaming. Two older boys ran out to try to save him while she just sat there staring. Finally she snapped to and called for help on the radio.
Two of the boys jumped in the pond and tried to save him but he had his backpack on and I guess he sunk to the bottom. Luckily the two boys who jumped in were able to be pulled back. We lived in the country so it was about 15 minutes before help came. It took too long to find him.
Poor Ben