Do some ways to die seem more horrible than others to you?

I’d hate to burn. If you survived the incredible pain of the burns (at least until the nerve endings are burned away), then you will most likely die a slow, gruesome death of complications.

A long deblitating illness that traps an active mind inside a deteriorating body is also a personal nightmare.

Burning, drowning. By guillotine

An explosion just looks gruesome and I couldn’t stand putting a burden like that on my family.

syz had my answer. Burning would be about the worst, I would think.

I don’t want to burn, freeze or drown to death. And I do concur with you, I don’t want to be eaten alive either!

Marina- you had to trump my question with a sexier question.

Yeah burning would be horrible. We’ve a garbage compactor at work and i’ve always thought that being crushed would be a terrible way to go.

Ooh. What about the woodchipper?

@syz I think you are right about burning. I can never imagine how someone could immolate themselves.

@AstroChuck I could never trump you! I loved your question. (I am going right now to give you lurve for it.) It reminded me of what I had been thinking about earlier today. My middle aged mind needs all the help it can get.

starving to death would be bad. you would literally watch yourself waste away your body eating itself until nothing is left.. i worry about dying in a car wreck more than anything because getting in a car is probably the most dangerous thing we ever do.

I have a thing about drowning ever since Jaws in 1975… but after watching “Silverlake Life” (a home-video documentary showing a partner dying of AIDS), that’s gotta be among the worst ways to go.

agree with drowning being one of the worse.

BURIED ALIVE!! Can’t think of anything worse.

acid bath? Like that womans husband. She was a chemist or something and she put him in an acid bath while he was still alive….yeah, that’s scary

I will admit to this. I don’t do cruises because the original poseidon adventure. For many years, I thought I was going to die by a tidal wave. I know it crazy…

Freezing to death, Burning to death, anything that woulld be slow and painful! Yikes!

I think being eaten is an embarassing way to go out. I mean, you’re suffering the entire time while your body is being ripped and swallowed (assuming you’re being eaten alive) and some creature is digesting you only to forget about you the moment there’s no more of you. I thought about this when I saw Cloverfield and one of the characters was traumatized when she saw the monster, she was trembling and saying “It was eating people..”

anything that has to do with suffering and pain I would hate to happen.

Y…yes… of course.
Speaking as someone who has to spend an insane amount of time studying ways that humans die and are killed… I suggest that you don’t think about it if you don’t have to.
There are things that i’ve come across that make me gag to even think about. The ways people hurt other people, in particular, are insanely horrific.

I dont want to die.

Being buried alive.

Being buried alive use to happen fairly often back in the day.

Not all that often, actually. What do you think Wakes are for? To see if the person wakes up!

(I can actually find some real data if you ask and give me like… five minutes to find two books upstairs)

http://www.snopes.com/horrors/gruesome/buried.asp

It did happen, yes. But i’m not sure i’d still qualify that as fairly often.

According to Rodney Davies, author of The Lazarus Syndrome: Burial Alive and Other Horrors of the Undead (1998), the percentage of premature burials has been variously estimated as somewhere between 1 per 1,000 to as many as 1 or 2 percent of all total burials in the United States and Europe. The percentage increases in times of pestilence or war. Premature burials of Americans during World War II and during the Vietnam War has been estimated to have been as high as 4 percent (Davies 1998, p. 133).

thats just too often for me

I say anything that isn’t quick just seems horrible.

@cheebdragon That’s why the Victorians (who had a horror of it) had little bells on their graves so if the “dead” woke up, they could ring for help.

I know ; )

@cheebdragon It is an impossible horror to think about. There should be a better high tech solution these days than the bell.

I guess there were some coffins made that had intercoms in them, and one that made a flag shoot up and light a lantern then it would ring a bell for 30min I guess.
I have also heard of coffins that had a little pocket inside for holding a gun incase suicide was the only option. Your only hope is that someone remembered to put bullets in it.

@cheebgragon / marina
I know its an impossible horror but when I found out that you’d only really last a few hours down there I felt a little better about it. Don’t get me wrong though, its not on my to do list or anything.

Yes, I think it’s probably true that slow uncomfortable deaths are more horrible than quick painless ones. But then, I haven’t died so strictly speaking, I don’t know. I actually wondered recently if getting splattered all in an instant might be agonizing for whatever spirit might survive physical death.

I have felt horrible agony while alive that got me thinking about wanting to be dead. I have also been fully anesthetized though for surgery which I imagine would otherwise have been horribly agonizing for me, and know I didn’t experience anything but a nice fluffy warm cloud dream experience and a sense of loss of time, so I like to think it’s possible to also die in such a nice fashion.

Thinking of death by suffocation has always given me the willies.

On the buried alive problem, thats solved by embalming the body. Personally I don’t want to die from cancer because it would be painful and horrible on family. Burnining alive issues are not common most people die from smoke inhalation before burning to death. Fires produce high levels of CO2 which is an aspxyant(sp) so the CO2 in the smoke kills you before you even begin to burn. We know this because during the autopsy the trachea is examined to see if it is cherry red if so they died from CO2 poisioning.