I held my 14-year-old dog when he was put to sleep. I wanted him to feel loved until the moment he was gone. Putting my sadness aside so he could truly feel comforted was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life.

I’m an orderly in an OR that does organ procurements from donors. The patients are already brain dead or otherwise intubated, but still technically alive. When the doctors open them up and get to where the organs are, there is a brief moment of silence and a prewritten letter in their honor is read aloud. After that they are taken off of life support and the organs are ready to be taken. The most interesting part to me is watching the color fade from their intestines. It’s actually very fast from pink to gray.

I felt the very last heartbeat of my step-father while holding his arm, on his death bed. He died peacefully at 98 years of age.

I saw the immediate aftermath. Someone jumped off the 8th floor in an interior atrium after setting off the building fire alarm. I happened to look that way while evacuating and it took a moment to process what I was seeing.

My grandmother. She was 96. She saw India’s Independence, and lived through the Bengal famine of 1943. What a life! She died in peace surrounded by family though.

When I was a young teen, I watched my grandparents’ neighbor die of a heart attack in his boat. He leaned over - I thought to get a life jacket or something - and his boat just kept circling backwards. Not much to say. It took the ambulance over an hour to arrive. There was a very small pool of blood, maybe 2-3 inches in diameter, on the floor of the boat.

That’s it. Nothing exciting or traumatic.

Technically he was probably already dead, but a guy on a bicycle was killed by a van right in front of my house. I heard a crazy noise followed by screaming so I went out to see. The guy was lying still by the side of the road. His bike was mangled about 30’ down the road where it had been dragged in the undercarriage. And his groceries for dinner that night were scattered along the gutter.

When I was a kid I saw an elderly man get hit by a car. He rolled over the top, which I guess is safer than being run down, but he got a lot of air and hit the pavement hard. Just kept rolling over and over. My parents shooed us away from the scene, but I can’t imagine it ended well for him.

One time I was riding a bus that rear-ended a motorcycle. I didn’t see the collision itself, but the driver was pronounced dead at the scene.

We often take for granted how dangerous traffic is. Your life can end in a moment doing something we casually do every day.

I was working in a department store when a middle-aged woman collapsed in front of me. It was really warm, heat exhaustion I supposed. She looked like maybe she was drunk because she was moving kind of erratically, so I went to see if she was okay and she just fell. I’ll never forget the sound her head made hitting the concrete or the fact that she didn’t even blink. Remarkably, she was okay and was up in a few minutes, walked away and everything, really surprised me.

The thing that probably fucked me up the most though was some videos on YouTube. I was working for a video analytics company, and we were trying to build an image classifier that could detect firearms. Well, you need data for that, so we were scraping videos of gun crime. Mostly what we were looking for was armed robbery. Lots of videos put out by the local police of somebody holding up a convenience store, and that wasn’t a big deal. But every now and then you’d find a video of someone getting shot and that really affected me. Eight hours a day of looking at gun crime with the occasional homicide peppered in was a recipe for disaster. I definitely needed therapy after that job.

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When i worked in a hospital. My mom at home.

I was within 8 meters of someone dying twice, the second time I was less than 2 meters away.

The first was a truck driver with a load of cast iron pipes. Truck was on a slight angle, and when he undid the straps the load fell on him.

Second time was a load of stone going up a scaffold on a hoist, it hadn’t been secured properly and a guy cut through the exclusion zone and this 100kg stone window cill just…yeah. There wasn’t really a lot left of the top third of him.

I’ve had a lot of therapy about these and I still dream about the second one.

Yup, several times. The joys of working in healthcare.

Not to be depressing… When i was 5 I sometimes slept in bed next to my mom. Woke up one of those days and she was already in rigor mortis. I touched her and she felt like an uncooked turkey, if that makes any sense. Took me a couple decades before I could actually handle an uncooked turkey or like, be around someone wearing her favorite perfume without almost fainting. Nobody knew exactly what killed her, maybe just sudden death syndrome.

If animals count, when i was about 6 my sister had a horse that slipped on the cement and when it managed to pull itself back up… I don’t think it’s totally accurate, but my memory is that its whole body was raining blood a few feet in front of me. Like I remember my vision being framed by blood dripping like a rainstorm from a cloud. Needless to say, it didn’t survive. I remember my dad using the hose to spray all the blood off the cement. I saw lots of dead pets over the years… Between all the wild animals and the back road that everyone sped on, most pets had short lifespans.

Anyway, I grew up through a lot of other fucked up stuff… And people wonder why I’m weird. And if you don’t want morbid answers, don’t ask morbid questions.

Saw the aftermath of a pretty bad motorcycle accident, with the rider receiving CPR. It was confirmed later by the news that they didn’t make it. I was stuck at a light and able to see the scene for a few solid minutes, but it really didn’t impact me heavily. Honestly it felt even less relevant than footage I’d seen before since I was having to actually drive and my attention couldn’t be put entirely on the accident.

In contrast, I was there for a friend putting their dog down. The amount of emotion everyone was going through was much more pronounced - you could physically feel the sadness around you.

Seeing death always has an uneasy aspect to it, but I think the real impact comes from social ceremony. We choose to feel pain over it as a way to heal, I think.