Is there a worst way to die?

But there's no consensus among professionals about which method of death is the least desirable. A person's fears may factor into his own personal worst way to die. Check out our HowStuffWorks article to learn more about the worst way to die.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
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(00:20):
and resolves online fraud safe secure Visa. Hey, and welcome
to the podcast. Josh and Chuck. Here a couple of
staff writers at how stuff works dot Com. How's it coming, Shuff,
It's going good, Josh, so Chuck. I hate to tell
you this, but there are people who are setting themselves
on fire all over India right now. Have you heard

(00:40):
anything about this right now? Possibly very lately. By right now,
I mean lately. No, I didn't know that. It's it's
becoming something of a widespread trend, actually terribly. UM. I
read about one guy who's a tea vendor. You know,
he just sells tea like you know, you buy a
hot dog right on the streets of New or This
guy just sells tea. Um. And apparently he fell in

(01:04):
the bad graces of a local representative of the local government. Uh.
And the guy was kind of being abused by this guy,
the the government official. Um, and in retaliation, he doused
himself in kerosene and set himself on fire in front
of the guy's house. That'll show him, yeah, pretty much. Um.

(01:25):
Now the guy lived, but he has burns like over
his body. And at this point you kind of wonder
that all right, well, which is worse? You know? Right?
It sounds like a terrible way to go. And and
the whole thing, uh kind of reminded me that of
an article i'd written into called is there a Worst
Way to Die? When I was I love this article.

(01:46):
It was like, uh, it was really interesting to write.
I talked to um, a funeral director, I talked to
a an E. R. Doctor, and I also spoke with
the guy who is the director of the Ernest beck
R Foundation. We'll talk about that in a minute. But um,
because there's no there's no quantifiable way to say, yes,

(02:07):
there's definitely a worse way to die, and here it is,
it's all subjective and even worse, there's um, there weren't
any you know, nationally recognized poles out there. I actually
contacted Gallop to find out if they'd ever asked that question. No.
I I wanted to find out what the data was
if they'd ever taken that poll, and they said that

(02:28):
they never had. I found one that was pretty close,
a gallop pole that was about UM, fear of dying,
not the worst way to die, and um. Astoundingly only
of the people polled said that they were afraid to die. Interesting,
and I think a really logical follow up question would
have would have been, how often do you actually think

(02:50):
about your own death? Maybe we should have conducted our
own pole. Maybe we will, we will, We'll get it
up on the site in no time instead of quiz
corner fear of death corner. Um. But while I was
researching it, I came across the impromptu poles about the
worst way to die. Immolation is usually ranks up pretty high. Yeah,

(03:12):
I would say, so burning to death not good, not
good at all. I would say drowning is probably up
there too. Drowning is up there too. Um. Yeah, they're
usually uh, they're usually interchangeable at the top. What's your
what's your worst way to die? Boy? Uh? I don't
know if I could say the worst method of death,
but I think that anything where I died alone would

(03:33):
be the worst way. That is very funny that you
bring that up, because I was doing extra research for
this podcast and there was a British pole um from
April this past April, and uh, the majority of the
respondents said that their worst death was a dying alone. Yeah.
Like Isaac ky Is, God rest his soul. He just
passed a few days ago and I think they found

(03:55):
him in his home jam with a treadmill going and
something is mundane said. It just seems like the most
depressing way to go. You know, you're lying there, your
treadmill still alive right next to you, and there you are,
right and and surrounded by no one. Right. Or Elvis Presley,
as you know, I have Elvis on the brain after
writing about Graceland and uh, you know Elvis famously died

(04:17):
in his bathroom reading a book and no one found him,
you know, for hours, So he was just laying there
in his bathroom. Yeah, so this the second worst aspect
of death that people came up with was not enough
access to pain relief, right, which is a big thing
to like if you basically there there's a really good

(04:38):
way to answer this question is by changing the wording. Uh,
is there the best way to die? I think you
would find across the board dying um in your sleep
would probably be the best, most highly rated way to go.
People don't want to feel pain now, people don't want
to be afraid or alone. Now. My worst death kind

(04:58):
of combines all these except for the pain part. I
don't think pain would be involved. Um plane crash, right,
I'm actually I'm flying to Malta a week or so
from now, and yeah, I'm not looking forward to the
to the plane ride. Uh. In My big problem with
with dying in a plane crash is if you're at
thirty thousand feet or something like that, it doesn't happen instantaneously.

(05:23):
A good minute or two headed straight to Earth at
like eight hundred miles an hour. But even that takes
a minute, maybe two, maybe three, depending on how high
up you are. And buddy, you're totally aware of what's
going on the whole time, right, You've got a solid
minute to three minutes to think about you know, hey,
I'm going to die, right, And the panic and the

(05:43):
hysteria just I would say with everyone on the plane,
it's not If you're by yourself, it would be bad enough.
But you have hundreds of strangers that you were probably
annoyed with just moments earlier for one reason or another,
and you're all going through this. So at least you're
not going to die alone. But I'll tell you what,
if George Gallup asked the people on a plane that

(06:03):
was going down if they fear death, I'm pretty sure
that the percentages would skyrocket that had to be hastily performed. Pole. Yeah, exactly. So, UM,
you know, basically, check our our our approach to death,
our fear of death, um, and some theorist size uh
is a result of a kind of sanitizing of death.

(06:25):
Of UM, basically, our our desire to not look death
in the face, not think about death. UM. Becker Becker
and the anatology A lot of Ernest Becker's views his
his whole field was called the psychology of death, right
and UM. In Becker's opinion, UH, culture, every aspect of culture,

(06:49):
from our lazy boy recliners, to Nascar, to whiskey to
guitar hero to the climbing the corporate ladder, whatever it is,
it all serves to distract us from thinking about our
own mortality. So culture, as has been created to distract

(07:10):
us so we can throw ourselves into it. Um. That's
Becker stands. The problem is, is we In Becker's opinion,
he he died many, many years ago, UM at age
forty nine. Sadly, I wonder if he saw that one coming.
I don't know, but I'll bet you if there was
ever a human who is walking the earth who was
cool with it, or it was Becker and he died

(07:30):
of cancer too, So I mean he knew it was coming. Um.
But in Becker's opinion, we we know that death is coming.
We're distracting ourselves. So the unconscious mind UH has to
find an outlet somewhere, and usually that outlet is violence
or aggression or war. So in Becker's opinion, if we'd

(07:52):
all just go ahead and accept the fact that we
are going to die someday and we don't know when
it's gonna happen or how it's gonna happen, we'd all
be a lot better off. We'd all basically chill, right.
And I know, along those same lines of how we
UH insulate ourselves from death as how, there's not as
many open casket funerals these days. And I know back

(08:13):
in the in the olden times, as they say, well
as recent is the nineteenth century. Yeah, people would sit
up with the dead. I know. That's a Southern tradition
where you would literally have the body in your house
or wherever they died, and uh, you know the family
is just hanging out, yeah, for for days on it. Yeah.
And one of the points of that was to socialized

(08:34):
children to death public viewings, right, Yeah. And plus another
aspect of it was, um, usually it wasn't the home
because most people died in the home because modern medicine,
you know, just kind of went, you know, good luck
with that pal see see in hell, that kind of thing. Um.
And uh, nowadays, you know, in nineteen hundred, the average

(08:54):
life expectancy was, um, it was like forty nine years old.
In two thousand and eight, it's seventies seven, creeping up
on seventy eight. If it's not, they're already. So that
extra you know, twenty almost thirty years has really kind
of um strung us out right. We are really interested
in in squeezing every last minute out of it, even

(09:15):
sadly beyond the time when the quality of life has diminished.
So what are he's saying, Well, I'm saying, we have
all these machines to keep us alive, to breathe for us,
and we know that they're out there. Um, so we
have thrown ourselves even further into this denial of death.
It right, So the very things that keep us alive

(09:36):
or distracting us from the obvious pretty much and the inevitable. Yeah,
and there was there was another aspect when you brought
up nineteenth century that I found really interesting. There was
a trend. Have you heard a bereavement photography? Uh? Yeah,
that was um Like, have you seen the movie The
Assassination of Jesse James? I have not. Yeah, he was
famously a photographed and his casket uh you know, and

(09:58):
the whole town came out. They had him on a
block of ice. The whole town came and viewed the
body and had their picture made with picture made were
from the South picture had their picture made with the
body of Jesse James. This is that what you're talking about? That? Yeah?
I mean it's it's it's it's a photograph of a
dead person. Um. For usually though it was of a
loved one, and oftentimes they'd be on a couch sitting

(10:21):
up looking like they were sleeping or in bed looking
like they were sleeping. Sometimes their eyes were propped open
to make it look like they were awake. That's really uh,
it was kind of odd, but it actually still continues today.
There are there is bereavement photography. Usually it's um used
by parents whose child was was stillborn or died at

(10:43):
a very very young age and this will be the
only photo that they ever have of them. Is this
the United States mainly, Yeah, it's um, it's you don't
want to stay time, because clearly they're they're getting something
from it, like I'm sure it poses like it creates
a sense of catharsis or finality to it. And and
plus they and say, well, this is what my baby
looked like is for a short time as he or

(11:03):
she was on earth, you know, Um, and it's a
it's very sad, but I imagine that you can get
something out of it. Who am I to judge exactly?
And and photography in general kind of has since it
since it was created, has always had kind of this
fascination with death, like breathment photography or outlaws. Um. Even
even Pablo Escobar, you know there's that famous photo of

(11:24):
him all bloated and dead on that rooftop and meta
ying or a famous photo of Lizzie Borden's father, uh,
you know, kind of sideways on the couch. Yeah, face
mashed in And what is it about as humans that
wish that that photo wasn't so greeny, that you could
make it out a little more, you know. But at
the same time we kind of lets the imagination run. Well,

(11:44):
we're a sick, sick, twisted species. We're afraid of her
own death, and yet we love morbid photography of dead people,
or at least you and I we don't want to.
I guess we shouldn't speak for the rest of humanity,
although you know, I'd say we're fairly typical. Um. But
but back to the photography part. There's, um, there's this
really cool exhibit uh by a German photographer named Walter Shells, right,

(12:09):
and uh. He did this series called Life Before Death.
And what he did was he went and visited people
who were terminally ill, spent the last you know, a
couple of days of their lives with him, got you know,
took series of photographs of him, got like the one
he's looking for, and then arranged to take another photo
of them right after they died, and he juxtaposed them

(12:29):
one right next to the other, and there's actually a
really great spread on the Guardian the Guardians UK site.
What he find it was it was it uplifting or
was it depressing? It's very subjective. It's death. You know,
there's no objectivity with death. We have no idea what's
coming after this. It's all subjective. You're scared of it,
you're not scared of it whatever. Um So it's definitely

(12:52):
one of those things where you know you're going to
take what you want out of it, and some are
more startling than others. But it's it's really it's odd
and it's oddly comforting. Yeah, i'd like to see that. Yeah,
well you can see it on the Guardians side. But
first don't forget to go to how Stuff works dot
com and read is there a Worst Way to Die?
It's a pretty cool article if I do say so myself,

(13:13):
and stick around to find out which article makes me
pretty excited. It scares the hell out of chuck. Right
after this stuff you should know is brought to you
by Visa. We all have things to think about, like, say,
what's the best site to buy a new leather jacket,
or whether to buy the three or six megapixel camera.
But thankfully we don't need to think about online fraud

(13:34):
because for every purchase you make, Visa keeps an eye
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that for peace of mind? Safe, secure Visa. So Chuck,
we're back. I know this. Uh, this article scares the
hell out of you. I like it. Tell us about it.

(13:57):
What's the missiplicity project? You want to tell everybody? Yeah,
it has to do with dog cloning, cloning your pets
and h kind of creeps me out. I know that
you love your dogs like I do, but you want
to clone yours? Do you want to have nine instead
of three? Well, my dogs are never going to die,
not if I have anything to say about it. But
if they do, I feel comforted knowing that I can

(14:18):
bring them back. Well, you better get a second job, buddy,
It ain't you. No, I know it's not. I'm saving
up already. Actually, it's like put kids through college, or
you know, bring dogs back to life. Right, And we
want to give a shout out to how stuff Works
freelancer Julia Layton for creating a really cool article. You
can check it out on how stuff works dot com.
Just type in what's the mis Simplicity Project For more

(14:41):
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