Are there some accidents that are so horrific that you don't know how to process it?

Probably not classified as an accident per se, but the first time a saw a guy blown into little pieces of himself, I was pretty overwhelmed by lots of thoughts, including being grossed out, sympathic fear, and anatomic curiosity. Eventually, though, you can’t deny that we are all critters and we are all mortal, and every minute counts. Doesn’t make it less unpleasant, but it puts things in perspective.

Were you in the military @josie?

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@josie Hear hear!

Accidents that involve entire families or when only one family member survives. I don’t even want to process that.

Honda Civic rear-ended by 18 wheeler, doing 75. Civic stopped dead in roadway. Front bumper of truck broke rear view mirror on windshield. Honda’s driver’s shoes and body parts on road behind truck.

You often hear about people who can’t remember horrifying accidents/incidents. I figure it’s your body’s way of healing. Most people can recall those events at a later time.

Maybe it’s my perverse nature, but I try to process all sorts of accidents, catastrophes, disasters, calamities and atrocities, no matter how horrific. Generally it’s not accidents that have me shaking my head, though, but the things we do to each other deliberately (as @josie suggests), and the worse things he didn’t even mention.

Things like the forced collectivization of farms in the Ukraine, for example, which starved millions of common citizens “by government decree” and things like the Holocaust and other intentional mass murders based on race and religion bother me a whole lot more than accidents. Accidents are actually pretty easy to process alongside some of those things (as @josie surely knows). You grieve for the victims, but then process what happened to figure out what mistakes were made, modify policies and procedures, and teach the lesson so that the same thing doesn’t happen again.

It’s when we kill in such numbers and with such deliberate intent that I have difficulty in understanding “how could they?”

I’ve seen someone get hit by a car, twice. I didn’t know either person. Once was in college. I was walking home and a girl got hit. She was ok, relatively speaking. The second time, a tractor trailer lost its break coming down a mountain. At the bottom of the road was a “T” intersection. Some guy was walking on the sidewalk. Truck tried to turn, but coming down the hill at that speed, it was impossible. Truck wound up on it’s side, on the man – dead. I remember freezing and my mouth dropped, not really being able to process what I just saw.

I’m having to process these through my mind almost every day, and it isn’t getting easier.

I thought the worst was the mother who was driving to her brother’s funeral, fell asleep at the wheel and rolled the car. One of her children died at the scene, but we didn’t know which. The mother survived, unconscious for 2 days. Knowing she had to wake up to that news was hard.

Then we had the 20-year old boy who died in a house fire. They couldn’t declare death until he got to us. His lungs were ash and he looked/smelled like a horrifying pig roast. Being there when his father came in was dreadful.

Yesterday, a car full of boy scouts hit an RV head-on at full highway speed. 5 dead, 6 injured. That might be my worst yet. The dead were 4 Eagle Scouts, the scoutmaster and a toddler in the RV.

It’s a holiday in the US. Please stay careful and get there alive. We, in the hospitals, don’t want to see you.

Geerally I push these things out of my mind as fast as possible. I don’t want to here the details. Sometimes even without details an incident is just horrific and upsets me a lot. Someone mentioned about a whole family being lost except for one member in an accident. That type of thing is so horrific to me. I have never worded it as though I have trouble processing it, but I do feel as devastating as I know an incident like that would be, it is unfathomable to really understand how emotionally painful it must be for the person going through it. I am pretty sure I would be suicidal. The pain from things like that is not only emotional, but physical too.

Things like the example given in the original question reminds me in a second some sort of crazy thing can happen and your dead. I can process that, I believe it already.

Train drivers (both long distance and subway) experience this quite often when people commit suicide by jumping in front of the train. Most need psychological counseling for an extended period of time.

Personally, something this extreme hasn’t happened to me. The most extreme case was watching people jumping out of the WTC windows on 911 on tv.

Not just accidents. I remember I used to worry I was heartless because extremely sad events wouldn’t make me cry. My sister actually got mad at me on 9/11 because she thought I didn’t care. I realize now that I just have trouble processing devestation beyond a certain scope.

@mattbrowne You reminded me of an old friend who used to drive a commercial semi-truck until a woman ran out in front of him to commit suicide.

He’s still an emotional wreck and doesn’t drive any vehicles now.

Suicide is a selfish act anyway, but to take the livelihood and mental health of an innocent “tool” for suicide is something unforgivable.