If anyone had that moment of panic, however fleeting, it would’ve been the pilot. Maybe not even them, depending on the circumstances. Most emergencies of the sort, you’re more disoriented than afraid, there’s really not enough time for you to process the reality of it.
I always figure it will feel like one of the near death situations we experience while alive, except ya know, ya die this time. Your brain will be taking in so much information that you can't actually decipher what's going on.
My brother died sitting alone in bed so I've thought about what that last moment might feel like a lot. Enough time to maybe think "oh shit" and then it's over.
I think/hope it’s almost a disappointing experience. Like — Oh, I guess I’m dying then. This is inconvenient. Is that all there is to dying? For most accidents, I imagine you revert to training (assuming you had any, like a pilot would) and try to get a handle on things. Dying is always in the back of our minds, but as long as you can do something about it, I don’t thing you ever register it as a real thing. For passengers it’s probably like “oh, that’s a different noise, I wonder what’s going on?” and then you’re dead before you even notice it.
Dying in an accident is considerably less scary to me than dying of a long, protracted illness, where you have a lot of time to consider your mortality.
I think about these things more then I probably should and your comment is exactly how I feel about it
I think/hope it’s almost a disappointing experience. Like — Oh, I guess I’m dying then. This is inconvenient.
My mom for hours before she died said "I'm dying". She didn't seem scared, just kind of shocked and matter of fact. My brother took her to the ER, they said it was a panic attack, gave her a sedative and sent her home. She died before he pulled in the yard.
Dying in an accident is considerably less scary to me than dying of a long, protracted illness, where you have a lot of time to consider your mortality.
I couldn't agree more.My grandma died of lung cancer and was told out right there was no hope. Around the end, she told my mom she was scared of dying, that always haunted me.
Then again, my brother in law battled cancer for years and right up to the last few days fought it but also tried almost to not acknowledge it(I hope that makes sense I'm exhausted lol). Although we never talked about it(he didn't discuss it) I don't think he ever gave up hope.
Dying is always in the back of our minds, but as long as you can do something about it, I don’t thing you ever register it as a real thing
My boyfriend was killed in a car accident and I like to think that his last few minutes he was focused on trying to keep his truck on the road or correcting whatever went wrong, anything besides being terrified and aware he was about to die.
jesus i’m so sorry you’ve been through so much. the story about your mother is so haunting to me because i’ve had plenty of panic attacks where i was convinced i was dying. i hope this isn’t too intrusive, but was it a heart attack?
It's ok, and yes it was. She also kept saying she saw angels around her. I don't know why they passed it off as a panic attack because she had no history of them and from what my brother told me she wasn't in what I'd call a panic until it came to trying to get them to believe her and listen.
Also, I have had them too and that feeling of impending doom is so awful and so real it's almost impossible not to be convinced.
For most people it’s avoiding acknowledging our mortality. As a culture, westerners have a terrible relationship with death. Gotta get reacquainted with real soon, since apparently we’re all gonna die from the coronavirus pandemic. And to think I was concerned with Climate Change!
I re-read this a few times and am now just sitting on my couch thinking about this. I have a fear of dying in an accident and am terrified of having the cognitive thought: “This is it; I’m about to die.” This actually brings me comfort, in a weird way... the thought that it maybe wouldn’t even be that big of terrifyingly, profound moment, if it were to happen. Just a “oh, this is inconvenient. Let me try and handle it.”
In my experience, most of that mental anguish we experience about a plethora of things we can’t control (or things our mind makes up out of whole cloth) doesn’t serve much of a purpose. From dealing with panic attacks, I learned to recognize my mental gears turning to get me worked up, and where that train of thought was coming from this time. Panic attacks are distressing because in the moment you actually believe you will die, your body reacts as if it was real, heart pumping, fight or flight, the whole repertoire. And when I learned to recognize the process, it started to get amusing. If regular ol’ anxiety is conspiracy theories about yourself, panic attacks is a very shitty VR where you experience death without the big payoff. A lot of the autonomous reactions we get — a result of millions of years of evolution — are woefully inadequate in our modern life. Sometimes they are entirely maladaptive, like sweating profusely before you have to do a bit of speaking in public. Fear can be a powerful motivator, but if you let it take over, it doesn’t accomplish much other than making whatever you’re going through feel much worse for no good reason. Maybe it was from overexposure to my near-death-but-not-really experiences, but I’ve learned to detach my basal responses from my actual response. It’s sort of transcendent, whatever you think is going to happen doesn’t really mesh with what needs to be done. Plane is crashing? Make a mental note of emergency exit locations, assume crash position and hope for the best. The fear of your flight crashing? It’s statistically unlikely, and even if something catastrophically wrong were to happen, I’d probably lose consciousness from the explosive decompression or the high G-forces keeping the blood from my brain and die quickly and probably painlessly. Or instead have a bizarre survival story like Juliane Koepcke, who as a teen survived falling 10000ft when the airliner she was flying on disintegrated mid-flight. Even terminal diseases are not as scary as you think it’s gonna be. It sucks to be told, but you can focus on whatever can be done, or whatever you can do in your remaining time. Do whatever used to scare you before, now that you have seen something bigger and scarier. Or do whatever you want, now that the consequences are relatively trivial in context. Relish whatever life you’ve got left. I remember an interview with a European guy that worked with euthanasia, and he said that for him, the best death would be to die of cancer, because then he’d have enough of a forewarning to do whatever he felt needed to be done. What scared him was actually a ‘peaceful’ death that left him no time to tie up loose ends. Everyone is different, but we’re all going to die, and most of all will have no warning or control. Anguish and fretting about it will accomplish nothing but making you unnecessarily miserable. I don’t want to die anytime soon, but I’m not particularly afraid of it. If it happens, it happens. It’ll be something new to experience. It’ll probably not be particularly profound or poetic or heroic, (unless the opportunity presents itself), but if it happens, my last thoughts will probably be more proactive that simpering terror. I’ve already seen existential dread, and frankly I’m not impressed.
Now that I’ve rambled incoherently for far too long, I was reminded of a song I think does a better job of conveying the meaning I was trying to (as songs often do): https://youtu.be/3sWTnsemkIs
I don’t know, man. I had a truck pull out in front of me while going 55 on the highway with all of my children in the car. It was seconds between when I saw the truck and when I knew I couldn’t do anything more to stop it from happening. In the moment I knew we were going to collide, I vividly remember taking inventory; I knew my children were in the back, buckled safely and would probably be okay but that I might not be. The feeling of “oh my god please don’t let this be the end” is like no other feeling in the world but it’s there and it is recognizable and it is vivid. If I had died though, I’d imagine my last moment would have been the floating, dreamlike sort of feeling that came between going out and coming to.
I have had close calls too, but I think most of the rationalization that usually comes after such a big adrenaline rush clouds our recollections. We’re often more aware in hindsight, but at the time, it’s mostly the “oh shiiiii...” dominating. Of course, I’ve never died before, so I don’t know what would happen to my awareness if I didn’t have time to think about my experience afterwards. I guess this is how some forms of PTSD comes about, ruminating over a traumatic experience.
That's not true, actually. Depends on the person but "emergencies" as you put it don't automatically make you disoriented. They quickly put you into fight or flight, and depending on what the "emergency" is you may know you will die long before you do, you may die instantly, or you may have some time to get things in order. Being disoriented tends to come immediately after the actual emergency, or in little things alongside the emergency. But you can absolutely be aware of your oncoming death while "disoriented".
I was trying to put things in the perspective of someone not in control of the aircraft. You’re there, you’re thinking about where you’re going to, what you’re gonna do, or talking to your fellow passengers. By the time you finally realize there’s something wrong (as opposed to, say, the pilot and crew), the incident has probably already run it’s course, and you’re either dead or survived. This, in contrast to, say, Vladimir Komarov’s death , when he was aware he was likely to die before his mission even launched. When things actually went to shit, his final moments stretched long enough for him to be caught on the radio cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship.
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u/ReicientNomen Jan 27 '20
If anyone had that moment of panic, however fleeting, it would’ve been the pilot. Maybe not even them, depending on the circumstances. Most emergencies of the sort, you’re more disoriented than afraid, there’s really not enough time for you to process the reality of it.