death: people

When my son was 5 years old, his great uncle died. I told him we were going to "a wake" for Uncle Steve. Naturally when we arrived at the funeral home, my son was very upset when he couldn't "awake" Uncle Steve. It was very, very sad.

When I was 4 my dad died. In trying to explain what death was my granny told me it's like going to sleep and never waking up. I thought if I went to sleep he would come get me and then I'd never wake up either.

I'm 37 and I'm still afraid to sleep.

I thought dead people were buried in laundry baskets. My mom's Daddy Ted died of cancer when I was four. My mother was trying to explain what we did with the dead. In her explanation of putting people in the ground she mentioned the casket, I thought she said basket. So for many years I thought her Daddy Ted was curled up in the ground in a laundry basket.

When I was about 6-7, I believed that when someone died, they'd come back as the total opposite of what they were. For example: If a black man died, he'd be reborn as a white woman.

When I was little, my grandpa had a heart attack while in the bathroom. For a long time, I wouldn't go to that bathroom because I thought my grandpa was lying dead on the floor.

I use to believe that when people died, they really just turned invisible, and the casket ws just a memorial to burry in their place. I was wrong when I went to an open casket funeral.

I used to think that if you went into a cemetary late at night, ghosts would come up out of the graves and steal your soul and/or take control of your body so they could be alive again.

Everyone died on their 100th birthday.

I was always told that the good die young, so then I always thought my grandparents must have been really bad at some point in their lives, cos they were really old when they died (they seemed pretty good to me)now I am getting older I couldn't possibly believe it!

I was five years old and I adored my oldest sister and believe whatever she said. She was putting nail polish on her nails when she told me to open my mouth and closes my eyes. I did and she put a drop of nail polish on my tongue. It tasted gross. To make matters worse she told me I was going to die because you can not swallow any nail polish because it takes one drop to kill you. I was so devestated until my mom told me I was not going to die because of one drop of nail polish.

I used to beleive that when people prayed at funerals that the body would get up and walk around and then get back in the casket before the prayer was over.

when i was young my father passed away. it didnt phase me and my sisters cause we were all so young, i guess when my older sister asked my mom where my dad went, my mom said upstairs, so one day i asked my older sister where he went and she said to me, "danielle, daddy died going upstairs" and i said, "wats died?" and she goes, "when you go upstairs and you never come back, it could happen to neone" seriously, till 2nd grade, i was petrified of walking upstairs, everytime i did i would hold on to the railing so tight and i would squeeze my eyes shut and i said to myself "dont died,u can do it, just one more step, dont died"

When my niece was 3, she inexplicably became hysterical one day. My sister had just come home from the store and had bought my niece a package of new underwear and told her it was because she was "getting older and needed a bigger size". My niece burst into tears and ran up to her room. After we calmed her down, she told us that she had been trying very hard not to get older because it would make her mother die. Her father's mother had just passed away and our mother had died long before my niece was born and she thought that when children got older it made their mothers die so she had been trying to prevent it. What a sweetie!

When I was very young I used to love the smell of petrol (gasoline), and one day my sister told me one of her friend's brothers liked the smell so much that he drank some. This, in turn, caused him to die - it put me off petrol for a while. To this day I still don't know whether it's true or not.

I used to believe that my grandma's tiny pistol would kill someone no matter where the bullet hit them. Kinda like a poisened bullet. I have now come to realize that my grandma's pistol wouldn't even kill a coyote. (We live in Texas, so it's not all that unusual for grandmothers to carry handguns.)

When I was 5, my grandfather died of a heart attack on the street. I don't remember how grown ups may have explained it to me, but I came away with the impression that a heart attack meant a wild bear attacked you on the street. I was 13 I think before I finally knew the truth.