death: people

when i was about 7 my parents went to a funeral. i asked my mom how the person died. she told me that he threw up in his sleep and choked to death. i was terrified to sleep after this and for years everytime i felt sick to my stomach i was certain i wouldn't make it through the night.

i used to believe that you had to eat a ton of earth on your death bed as my dad told me so, what he actually meant was that this is a gradual process that happens over your entire life time!

when i was around 4 i used to see the face of my mom's dad who had passed away when i was just a baby. i would see his face while we were driving in the car in the faint blueness of the mountains in the distance. i remember feeling peaceful...like he was looking after us.

i used to think that when people died, the went up and lived on clouds like monkey from monkey magic. I though they could look down on us riding around on there little white clouds!!

I used to believe that anyone who died could be brought back to life by giving them electric shocks! I'd seen it on casulty on Tv once and was sure that it could always be done!

When i was about 4 my gran's neighbour died. Iwas told that the angels had taken him. I imagined the angels arriving to take him away in their car!

When I was very young (around 7 or 8), I overheard a conversation by my parents and a few of their friends. Apparently, one of the friends had just gotten back from the funeral of a distant family member.

My father then laughed, "You know, sometimes they pop right back outta the ground after you throw dirt on 'em." and even though the others shared in his laughter, I was horrified.

When i was a child, my mother asked my younger sister and myself to go down and sit with our dying gran, until our aunt could take over. We arrived at gran's, she was asleep in a very dark bedroom with some awful radio station playing in the back ground. After a while my younger sister who was by now terribly bored, leaned over to me and said in a loud whisper "is she dead yet, cos Blue Peter starts in five minutes and we will miss it" As a matter of fact, gran managed to struggle on for another three years or so.

I remember as a very small child going with my parents to see my dying grandfather, the bed was, in my memory, so very high, I thought he was like the princess and the pea and had to have hundreds of mattress'.....needless to say it was just because I was 'wee'!!!!

My little gramma (my great gramma)died when I was six. I went to the funeral. At that time I thought that if I got to close to her she would wake up and grab me and strangle me. I sat in the back row of course.

I used to believe that eveyone died in alphabetical order, especially after i would read the newspaper obituary collumn. Hence I always wished I could be called Mr Zebedee! I'm a funeral director now, so I pretty much realise this isn't true!

When I was very young we lived by a graveyard....days were long and it seemed a safer time then. Me and my friends used to play in the graveyard for hours on end, as it was large and filled with trees and hiding places. I always belived that the glass stones that were on the very old graves as decoration, would burn your hands (told to me by my very clever mother) and so would never ever think of going any where near them. It wasn't til years later, I think sometime in my twenties (would you believe it!) that I realised it had just been a ploy by my parents to stop me playing with the 'pretty' stones!

When I was about 7/8, the long-running UK TV soap, Coronation Street, showed one of the elderly characters, Martha Longhurst, sip a glass of "milk stout" in the pub, take off her spectacles and promptly die with her head in her hands.
For years after, I always feared that, if an old-ish person removed their spectacles, they would be dead soon after.

I used to believe…

for most of my young childhood years i believed, because my sister told me, that African natives who were about to die would have their hearts pulled out of their chests so they could see them before they died. (why would they?! but hey, my sister told me so it had to be true!)

I used to believe that any gravestones in the churchyard with big railings round them were for people who had been in prison and they still had to be behind bars even in death

I used to think that you died after you had breathed a million times. This resulted in spells of light-headedness as I went to sleep each night, attemtping to maximise my time alive.