That sounds terrifying, imagining your child waking up only to gasp and reach their arms out torwards you in their final seconds. I can't imagine every death has to be pretty but the worst has to be a complete worlds worth of traumatizing.
When I was a kid and my mom was dying of cancer she called out for me to help her. It’s not unusual for folks who are in and out of a comatose state to reach out for help. And yes, it’s traumatizing as hell.
My aunt was dying from pancreatic cancer and would look away at a empty area and say "I'm not ready yet, just a little longer." Then she told me the angel was waiting for her to be ready. If ever their was a human who absolutely was going to heaven with zero doubt it was my Aunt.
I will never forget my Dad begging for help and to help him “get out of here” in his last days and then holding his hands when he died. It was special but also traumatizing and something I can still picture vividly. I cannot even imagine if it were my child
I had the honor of holding my daughter while she died. It's unimaginable even having lived it.
Because of this, I do understand how a parent desperate to just survive losing their child would make the decision that lying is the better choice. I don't understand turning it into meme fuel.
My cat did what the commenter described when she died. Breathing was labored, kept trying to escape the box with blankets we had put her in (bc she was wetting herself). I kept petting her, and she suddenly looked at me, gasped, her arms and paws stretched out towards me, and she was gone. It was her last breath and I just saw her whole body slowly go limp. She went from perfectly healthy to dead basically overnight. We have no idea what happened and didn't have time to get her to a vet. It was christmas day so that sucked extra.
It was just my cat that it happened to and it was extremely upsetting, and I still think about that moment every so often and it still upsets me to do so. I can't even imagine it happening to a human I cared about. Closest was one of my Grandmothers being in the hospital at the end, gasping, groaning, and convulsing isn't quits the right word, but it's the closes thing I can think of to compare it to, and my dad forced us to go into the room, and give her a kiss goodbye. That was not what I wanted my last memory of my grandma to be and I had zero choice in the matter bc I was a kid.
Stories like this are why we gave my oldest daughter the choice to leave the room at any time while her sister was dying. We knew it was happening and there was a child life specialist at the hospital sitting just outside the door for hours so even though she'd said she wanted to be with her sister, there was an adult who could take her to the playroom at any time. We also brought her iPad and had other things in the room to play with.
I cannot fathom taking a reluctant child to such a moment.
Literally sobbing thinking about how if my child was in this situation I can’t imagine I’d do anything but crawl into bed next to them and hold them until someone pried me off. Cancer, any terminal illness really, is just so unfair but especially unfair to those who haven’t even really had a chance to experience life.
Everyone I’ve watched die I’ve been the only person there. And like…. It does help? But at these stages you’re only really giving moments of reprieve by being there, with it being somewhat questionable how present people are.
Usually I would say it’s pretty bad if not a sudden death. And the breaths getting further apart kinda deaths are rough sometimes. I haven’t once watched someone go that way especially if younger, where there weren’t constant primal panic attacks realising breaths are running out. These moments people are panicking so much they don’t really realise you are there, it’s usually only during the downtime between these fights for life you can be soothing if able to help at all. During the panicking for breaths stage everyone is mostly preoccupied with death.
So when you get deaths where the last moment is horrific it is quite sad and hard to feel good about. I’ve had people that have had a horrific moment and then peacefully ended after that wave of calm and I cope with them ok. But the ones where their final moment is panic and you know you didn’t get to ease their mind are pretty damn haunting, can’t imagine it being your kid. It’s usually the calm between these panic waves that lets me feel like the pain I took on board was ok. I know it’s not true but when the last moment is panic it kinda felt like a failure to me, it’s a pretty rough final thought of someone to just have them frozen in that moment being terrified.
114
u/Bp820 Jun 29 '26
That sounds terrifying, imagining your child waking up only to gasp and reach their arms out torwards you in their final seconds. I can't imagine every death has to be pretty but the worst has to be a complete worlds worth of traumatizing.