Deadly accidents, suicides, and the banality of everyday tragedy

Accidents, suicides, and the banality of everyday tragedy

What is the most brutal death you have witnessed or known closely? That question, cast into the void of the internet, has gathered a catalogue of deaths ranging from the tragically common to the grotesquely absurd. The thread collects firsthand testimonies of fatalities in the workplace, impulsive suicides, and accidents so bizarre they seem ripped from a movie.

Workplace accidents: the risk in daily life

Most stories revolve around work. Bricklayers falling from heights without harnesses, truck drivers crushed by their own load, workers killed by being buried under gravel or falling into blind wells. One account describes how a worker was torn apart by the paddles of a brick factory after falling into a mud pit; another, how a neighbor bricklayer lit a match to see inside a blind well and died in the explosion. Construction and industry take the lead in the number of stories, with one constant: the lack of safety measures.

Suicides: the pressure that claims young lives

Suicides appear in various forms: a teenager who hanged himself because his parents forbade his relationship; a young man who shot himself with his military father's pistol; another who tied a large firecracker to his neck; and the case of a man who, learning his vvife was leaving him for a Brazilian, drank a liter of bleach. In all, an unbearable emotional or psychological pressure underlies. However, the most desolating account is not that of a violent death, but of a 94-year-old man who lived eight decades plunged into untreated major depression, a death in life that the narrator himself calls the worst of all.

Absurd deaths: when recklessness kills

Some deaths defy logic. A man engaged in an erotic game that led him to sew his own urethra and die from organ collapse. A farm worker drank insecticide believing it was water and was conscious of his error before dying. A young man dressed as a superhero under the influence of ALUCINÓGENO ILEGAL and jumped out the window. Nor is there a lack of deaths from trivial causes: a heart attack while in the bathroom, or the fall of a 300 kg piece of furniture during a move. The line between drama and farce is thin.

The sarracena, if there is one, is that death knows no scripts. A life can be truncated by a slip at home, by a misunderstanding with a bottle, or by a decision made in a moment of despair. As one of the testimonies ironically remarks: 'I signed a sweet and unexpected death, but not this one.' And perhaps the most brutal aspect is the normality with which we live with the certainty that, any day, it could touch us.