Someone kidnapped and murdered a friend of mine I knew from going to pride and he worked at a friends hair salon and he lives a few miles away. Fucking Christmas Eve. And I know the guy that fucking did it through various academic circles because he’s a biochemist that went to the same uni as me and what’s fucking worse is that a month ago a guy escaped from his fucking basement but the cops just assumed it was a bad hookup and dropped it and I’m fucking livid

The victims of the 1986 Challenger Shuttle explosion likely did not die on initial failure of the rocket, but instead were probably alive and conscious until their fuselage crashed into the ocean some time later. Six astronauts and one civilian schoolteacher died.

The failure was due to malfunctioning O-Rings, a known problem to both NASA and the contractor hired to build the shuttle. Several NASA engineers warned against the launch and were concerned about the integrity of said O-Rings. Several chief engineers, most notably Roger Boisjoly, pleaded for the launch to be rescheduled, but was ignored by the administration.

When I was 13 my grandpa died suddenly. He came to visit every Sunday and when he didn’t, dad and I went to his house and found his body in the back garden. He’d been dead for what looked like a couple days and when I called 911 the dispatcher told me to do CPR and I kept trying to say “look he’s very dead he’s already decomposing” but dispatch wouldn’t listen to me and I just remember eventually shouting at the dispatcher “THE CROWS HAVE BEEN AT HIM HES BEEN FUCKING DEAD” and she finally shut up

An old boyfriend of mine had his mother die unexpectedly a few days before sophomore year of college started and we started dating about a month later. He started staying the night at my apartment pretty quickly after (we had been friends since freshman year and were already close) and on bad nights I would wake up to him crying in the bathroom for his mom and I would take him back to bed and just hold him until he settled. I realized that I was just a crutch for him as he was working through his grief and yeah it kinda sucks to realize you’re being used like that but I’m glad he had someone to help him through it. Like, I’d do it again in a heartbeat tbh

When my mom was pregnant with me she had a terminal patient with pancreatic cancer. He was only like 25 and when his wife found out he would die she left and took their daughter with them. Mom befriended him because they were close in age and they would just sit at talk for hours. He would always ask mom about how I was doing and by the time I was born his immune system was too weak for him to see me so mom brought in pictures of me and he kept some of them on his nightstand. Mom and dad were scheduled for a vacation to Florida when I was about 3 months old and on the night before she left he sat with him and gave him a haircut and told him that it was okay to let go. He died that night.

Something that mom remembers him saying that’s stuck with me since I first heard this story was how he was so happy to see baby pictures of me and he told mom “it comforts me to see that life goes on after we die” and idk I think about that sometimes and I just hope that if there’s an afterlife he knows that mom and I have never forgotten him

It’s really interesting to me, and sort of inexplicable, how the elderly seem to have this moment of crystal clarity in the hours before they pass away. I mean like, Alzheimer’s and Dementia patients. When my grandma was fully into the “actively dying” phase, we watched her sit up in bed and begin talking to her dead relatives. For a fleeting moment she even recognized my dad and I. She even knew my name. She could speak her mind again, it was like a miracle. She ended up passing away the next day and while I was at the nursing home taking care of paperwork, her attending nurse mentioned that it was common for people to have that pre-death lucidity that grandma had. I don’t know if there’s any research done on it but it seems to happen often enough for nurses to know about it and it makes me wonder what happens in the patients brain that creates that last hurrah before they die.

In high school I was in a criminology and forensics class and we had to look at crime scene photos and one case we were looking at the dude had an anal prolapse and his wife was mad at him for something so in the bedroom she uh, ripped his asshole out. Just. Ripped it out. Dude bled out but like what a motherfucking way to go, having your asshole ripped off. The pictures were very… interesting.

My family doesn’t place much weight on funerals. Maybe because they’re all nurses and are used to being around death? But I like it. I mean, everyone dies. It’s fine to be sad, but in my family, a funeral is more of a party than a somber event. We always cremate the bodies and spread the ashes in significant places to the deceased. My family just… has a very noble view of death. Even with suicides. My step brother killed himself a few years ago and we knew he was suffering in the weeks leading up to it. We knew he was going to do it. He was suffering and he had done just about anything a person could do in order to get better but it wasn’t enough. At his funeral we had nothing but honor for him. Honor and understanding. The same when my grandpa died. He had leukemia and he knew he was going to die. He stopped care and went into hospice. In his final days he would have moments of lucidity and he would beg to die. Beg for it to end. And so, at his request in one of his lucid moments, he died via assisted suicide. It’s illegal but no one could blame us for what we did. No one reported it. We ended his suffering and while some people might see it as immoral but it was what he wanted, and in the end he deserved the dignity to go out on his own terms and he did.

Death isn’t necessarily tragic in our family. We’ve all made peace with the concept of death and I wish more people would make peace with it as well, as it saves a lot of heartache.

My first baby Tigger died today. She was the runt of her litter so being able to spend 14 years with her was more than I could have ever asked for. When she didn’t come running for dinner I knew what had happened as she’d been losing weight over the past few months. Found her a few hours later in her favorite napping spot.

My senior year of high school, the principals daughter (a freshman) had an asthma attack while the family was out shopping on Black Friday. She had accidentally locked herself out of the house and none of the neighbors noticed. She died on the porch. The principal was a wreck and honestly so was the rest of the school.