death: people

i used to believe that there was an ingriedient inside birthday cakes that made you grow older and that if you ate too much cake, you would drop dead and that that's why people died. For the longest time i refused to eat cake because i didn't want to die and i wanted to stay a kid forever

My Great Aunt Louise died when I was about four years old, and it was my first funeral.
A few hours before the wake, my older siblings began explaining to me that a wake was a pagen ritual (we are Catholic, as was my Aunt) in which we would cut off the head of a chicken, drink the blood, dance around a fire in the nude, and "WAKE" the person from the dead.

Needless to say, I stuck close to my mother that entire night.

I had some idea of rigor mortis when I was young, but I thought it meant that at the moment you died all your apendages became totally straight and flat. I decided to test this by lying on the bed in a crucifix position, hands flat to the bed and fingers pointing rigidly out, holding my breath. I thought my mother would be terrified to see me OBVIOUSLY dead...but she just told my it was time for supper.

This is actually my son's belief and it is pretty macabre!
The first time he saw mannequins in a shop he turned around and asked: Mum, why did they kill people and then put clothes on?

When I asked how my grandma had died (before I was born) someone told me that it was cancer that killed her. It sounded like Cancer was the name of a person, and for the longest time I had an image in my mind of my grandma minding her own business in a bar and some western-style villain named Cancer just walked in (through the swinging saloon doors) and shot her.

When I was younger I thought that the cementaries where filled with gravestones that were reserved for when people die. I remember runnning around a cementary with my friend trying to find ours. Needless to say when I found out they were actually all dead I was pretty overwelmed!

I used to believe that if you bled to death, you'd get flat!

When I was little, I didn't know that cemataries were where dead people were buried. I used to think they were farms where people grew statues instead of trees or crops. When we drove though the country, I used to point them out to my mom, saying, "Look mommy! A statue farm!"

There also used to be graves behind the church we when too. They were covered in glittery white rocks. I used to sneak outside afterwards and pick the stones off of the graves so I could take them home because they were so pretty. I didn't realize there were dead people under the rocks.

i used to believe that a dagger from hell was launched at the same time you were born, and it would gradually make it's way to you and kill you.....I'm 44 now, and it hasn't found me yet- perhaps it is just round the corner?

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!

I thought that everyone when they died went to hell. Why? They were always buried in the ground and hell was supposedly down there. The only people that went to heaven were cremated. So I told my mother that when I died I wanted to be cremated.

When I was young, my grandmother often tell me that my grandfather has gone away to a far away place to sell salted duck's egg (in Chinese customs, it means that the old fella has gone to heaven). Each year I will wonder how come he never come back and I really though he went to sell salted duck's egg!

When I was 5 I threw a screeming fit on the interstate in the back seat of our car. I wanted my mother to pull over immediately because I saw a billboard sign that said "Jim's Body Shop". When she asked why I wanted to go to the body shop, I answered, "Because I want to see the dead bodies."

I had heard then term "kick the bucket" and took it very literally. When I was about 6 i kicked over the janitor's mop bucket at school. I was convinced I was going to die. One of my teachers was walking down the hall, and saw me sitting on the floor and crying. I couldn't manage to explain coherently why I was crying, and she just assumed I was crying out of fear of being in trouble. She alerted the janitor, who cleaned up the water. After I didn't die, for a year or so I thought that it would be ok to kick over a bucket if whatever was in it was ceaned up fast enough. Then someone explaines.

i remember when i was little a friend of the family had passed away, my parents told me that we were going to his wake, when we got there i just sat around watching the casket waiting for him to wake up. I thought everyone else was there for that purpose too.

When I was younger, my mum was watching Oprah, and Oprah was doing a show on conjoined twins. I decided that when one twin died, the other would drag around a dead twin on herself until she died many years later.