I’ll go first.
My uncle worked at the same company for over 50 years and had a small group of close friends there – five of them in total. They started at the company together and, over the years, became close friends – going to each other’s weddings, meeting each other’s children, and later attending those same children’s weddings. One of those friends had a son who got involved with the wrong crowd as a teenager. What started as trouble turned into something much worse – abuse, stealing, constant stress at home – until eventually they had no choice but to ask him to leave.
My uncle said you could see the impact it was having on his friend over the years. It changed him. He looked more and more worn down every day, like something was slowly breaking him. Then one morning he didn’t come into work. At first they assumed he was unwell, but later that day they found out he hadtaken his own life.
My uncle never really spoke about him again. The only thing he ever said was, “He was a very good man.”
I’ve heard many sad stories, but I struggle to imagine anything more devastating than being pushed to that point by your own child.
36 comments
Well this is cheery
One of my grandad’s mates fell out of his chair in front of the fire after having a stroke and boiled his brain.
Hands down the worst death I’ve heard of in person.
Im sure this is something experienced in some way by almost all reading. But sitting and watching my 40 something year old sister die from a glioblastoma is something I will never recover from.
Knowing her young daughter was at school and we would have to tell her mummy’s gone.
Me and my sister used to plan what we would do together when we retired. Then shit luck gives her a cancer that there is no possible chance of a cure from.
My friend sometimes looked after her boyfriend’s cousin’s kids, and when she was brushing the little girl’s hair, she told my friend it was nice and that she’d never had her hair brushed before. She was only 6 years old.
The cousin is a disgusting abusive piece of shit, and unfortunately social services aren’t doing anything to help those children.
About 20 years ago had a stupid argument with a good mate over not being invited to his with a couple of the other lads, didn’t speak to him for a few days before he went out on Halloween.
Spoke to one of the lads the next morning and he said I bumped into Joey in town last night, said he was gutted about the argument and was going to bell you today and make sure you were coming to the Halloween party in his so I was made up. Got another call a few mins later off someone else, Joey had been killed in a car crash in the early morning.
Still think about it and him and will till the day I die.
It changed me as a person, I never leave the house on an argument and very rarely argue as 99% of the time it’s over something petty. It’s made me step back and see reason in all instances and made me a better person.
A nice and funny girl from school who always stood out for reasons outside of her control killed herself
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My husband noticed his apprentice was coming to work on a motorbike. He also noticed he wasn’t very good on it. Which started worrying him. My husband suggested he stop riding it to work during the winter months and get the bus instead as it was only a 20 min journey, pointing out all the lads in the factory who had bikes didn’t ride them in bad weather.
My husband got a call to say he’d come off it on the way to work the following day and he is in a vegetative state today. He was only 18.
My friend’s girlfriend was pregnant with their first child. He messaged one evening when they were in a maternity hospital near me, which was unusual as it was not local to them. Chatted a little, offered help if needed while over etc. Pre-term C-section was needed to allow the diagnostic scans, and tests/scans showed girlfriend had multiple cancers after a primary metastasised but went undiagnosed as the pregnancy masked it.
She was untreatable. They married in hospital. She died a week or so later.
Their baby put up a brave fight for one so early, but joined his mum 6 months later.
To this day, I don’t know how my friend came out the other side of this turn of events. He has though, and is a testament to resilience and determination
A distant friend of a friend had a crazy idea one day to become a wrestler. I’ll call him Pete.
Did some amateur gigs, made a little bank.
As he was collecting his earnings one time, he stumbled upon the promoter being robbed. Stepped aside, let the robber past. Said it wasn’t his issue.
Later that day he was meeting up with his uncle, who was going to give him a lift home. Unfortunately his uncle had been murdered by the robber. Twist of fate and all that.
Being head over heels in love, just found out that we are going to have a baby together planning my whole future but he was getting with anything with a pulse. Never trusted anyone after that and turned into a cold hearted bitch.
The one about laika the dog that the Russians sent to space. Cunts
I knew of a guy who was a fellow Sunderland fan (he ran a comedy/meme social media page about the team) who had been kicked out by his wife in lockdown (no idea why).
He eventually managed to get his life back together and got engaged. Then his beloved elderly dog died, which exacerbated a heart ailment (he quipped that the dog’s death broke his heart).
Few months later, he got a puppy, which died suddenly after a few weeks. Not long afterwards, he suffered a cardiac arrest and also died. Sadly he never got to see us get promoted back to the Premier League.
Bloke at work drunk himself to death, got let go about a year prior for turning up pissed. Didn’t pry into the full ins and outs of it, but the loss of the job opened up the floodgates for sure. Was a genuinely nice person too.
My cousin did a spot of joyriding as a teenager, crashed and killed his mate. Judge didn’t send him to prison and said you’re the one that has to live with the consequences of killing your friend. About a year later his sister was killed by a car in a hit n run. He thought it was karma for his behaviour and then a short while later killed himself.
This one wasn’t me but my mate who used to be a police officer.
He once had to inform a family on xmas morning that their son had been killed by one punch during an altercation at a bar on xmas eve.
He said he’ll never forget the scream a mother makes when they find out their son has died.
A friend of my parents was in the car with her three kids, the husband was driving. They got hit by a drunk driver and all three kids died. The husband was left paralysed and had to learn to walk again, he always blamed himself and unfortunately killed himself about a year later.
My step dad was a police officer.
He was the nearest emergency responder in vicinity to a treehouse that had caught fire with kids inside, they’d lit a bbq to make breakfast.
His arms are covered in burns, many of the kids didn’t make it out.
Don’t fuck about with fire.
I’ve got more but I won’t share.
Life is wonderful even when it’s miserable.
We’re all a cresting wave that one day, one way or another, returns to the ocean.
Love yourself x
A neighbour wanted to move to Spain but she put it off for years while her mum was alive. Her mum passed and she made plans to emigrate with her cousin. They sorted a place to rent out there so they could search for a property to buy and shipped out their possessions. The first night in Spain and she died in her sleep.
My friends sister came home from a night out with her husband and their house was on fire; the fire service said it was caused by a hairdryer being left on. They were then housed in a much smaller flat, which they struggled with. While in this temporary accommodation, the husband was diagnosed with a brain tumour and died shortly afterwards.
I’ve had a pretty rough life. But I came across someone during one of my grippy sock trips that made me take a step back.
She was a fellow patient in the hospital ward I was on. Long story short, she had grown up being physically tortured by her mother, sold to men for drugs, social services took her into the hostel system where she then became homeless. Kicker is she was autistic. While I was on the ward with her, we became friends.
Late one night, a Male that shouldn’t have been allowed near the ward broke in and forced himself on her, while she was supposed to be in a place of saftey. The man walked past where staff were meant to be, but the staff were having sex in a back room.
The poor women ended her life not too long after coming out of that hospital.
My dads cousin was involved with building a hotel, he was in an elevator shaft while another team was raising a metal girder. It wasn’t secured.. fell onto his fucking head. He was wearing a hard hat but he had to have extensive brain surgery. If he wasn’t wearing his hard hat, he would be dead.
He was a really great bloke, he is absolutely not the same person. And needs 24 hour care, which his wife used to do but it got too much.
It changed their family for sure.
Great grandad lived well beyond 100.
He used to wake up every morning absolutely devastated that he was still alive. He just wanted to die to be with his wife.
I worked with a guy who had killed his own child.
A few years prior to me meeting him he got in his car that was parked on the drive. His son followed him out and was standing behind the car. His father didn’t see him and reversed into him.
He was 3.
A truly broken man who never spoke. I found out because someone I knew well knew his family.
I was at school with one boy who was the eldest of three kids in his family. When we were still at primary school, his sister got leukemia and died. We were young and still believed that dying was only a thing that old people did, but this was the first time seeing close up what that sort of grief did to a family.
He and I were in very different crowds throughout high school but we lived close by and would occasionally walk home from the bus together and never ran out of stuff to talk about. Years later, when we were in our late twenties, he had a severe asthma attack and died. He’d moved to a different city and lived alone so wasn’t able to get help.
I will never, ever forget the look on his mum’s face at the funeral. How someone survives that I do not know. This was 20 years ago now and the family still crosses my mind on a semi regular basis. I just hope they have managed to find some sort of peace.
Teacher at school hated Christmas. Seemed like a right Scrooge. One day, a boy in the class had the balls to ask him why he hated Christmas so much. The answer?
He was one of five children, back in the 60s. His four siblings all had cystic fibrosis. One December, they all got ill, and one by one, died over the Christmas week.
Pretty sure I’d hate Christmas if that were me too.
Once worked with a man who was a real workaholic, he came in earlier than everyone else and often still be there at close. The boss would have to force him to take his annual leave and he often just came in during his AL.
I eventually found out that a few years ago he was going on holiday with his wife and daughter, they took both cars and drove down in a little convoy, wife and daughter in one car and him in the other. Somewhere along the way his wife and daughter are in a car accident and both of them tragically pass away.
He told me one day that he ended up working all the time because he had very few friends and didn’t want to go back to his empty house alone and relive the moment when he found out they had passed again and again. I believe a few years ago he ended his life.
My partner gets upset about weird news articles, When one swan and it’s sygnete was killed by scruffy youths and then a few weeks later the other swan died of grief/ heartbreak, and she gets upset that the mars rover sings happy birthday to itself when it’s all along on a planet
I’ll never forget being sat at the desk in school aged about 8 with a girl let’s call her Jane, and a few others. Jane’s mum used to walk to school and collect her every day and we’d see her stood near the classroom window.
We’d not seen Jane’s mum for a while so we brought this up with Jane who replied ‘no, she’s dead’. We were already taken aback and then she went on to explain that she, her brother and dad had all been out to walk the dog, when they came back home her mum was found hanging in the loft.
Jane further explained that her mum suffered from schizophrenia and that it was like having a split personality – pretty sure at 8 years old none of us were at all familiar with the term. I often think of Jane and hope things turned out well for her and she’s in a happy place.
I hung about with my mate Nicky a lot as a kid and he had this cousin called Alan who was “a bad boy”. Would regularly get suspended from school, smoke and drank, generally neglected looking back, we were around about 10/11. Anyway, 1 night we were wandering about one of the roughest parts of our town and he spotted his Mum at the window of some flats. They were speaking away then she was joined at the window by a man and Alan immediately started crying and pleading with his Mum to come down and come home with him. This went on for about 10 minutes with the man telling Alan to not worry, that he would look after her etc…. Alan’s Mum then told us all to leave. He was inconsolable on the way back to their Gran’s and I was just genuinely puzzled. A few years later I found out that Alan’s mum was a heroin addict and that his reaction was probably due to seeing his Mum with a man who would have been a dealer. Alan died of an overdose at 18. I’ve never seen someone as upset as Alan that night. Heartbreaking. RIP Alan.
My partners great uncle was a very lively active man doing many sports and living a very active countryside man life, he ended up in a sporting accident which left him with locked in syndrome, unable to move or speak.
His wife left him, his kids are spawns of Satan and he ended up living 20 years in a old crumbling small wooden house with a live in nurse who I can only describe as Ursula from the little mermaid.
Last month after a long life of staring at the ceiling bed bound, he passed, the minute we heard we started looking up tickets to fly out for the funeral but his daughter did his cremation and funeral the next day on a Monday after he passed so nobody could arrive that fast.
The last time we saw him was a year and a half ago and told him we’ll see him at our wedding, unfortunately we haven’t gotten to it yet.
I work in medicine and do a lot of home visits. It gives me a fairly unique insight into all levels of society. Believe me when I tell you that on an average walk to the shops you probably pass several doors behind which there exists pain and misery beyond your most fearful contemplation
My cousin’s friend was a drug addict, and had 3 children. One day, not long after they’d came home from primary school she told them to tell their uncle, her brother, that she loved him. Then she opened the balcony door and jumped 10 floors to her death.
I cannot begin to imagine how those 3 kids felt when they realised what had just happened.
My stepfathers mum was feeling unwell at a family dinner which was unusual for her. The doctor was called for and when he arrived she got up to make him a brew, she got about 3 steps and dropped down dead. Brain aneurysm took her in front of all of her family
Going into foster care aged 4, just before I turned 5.
Me and my older sister. Being taken away by social services one morning, whilst police where called in to hold my distraught mother back and my father.
Only the day before, the 4 of us had enjoyed a lovely family day out together at a local Zoo, then had a nice trip to a beloved pub where we had such a lovely happy time. My mother and father never really got on, but even as a 4 year old I knew that that day felt really special. And it wasn’t just something I felt in retrospect : My sister, mother and father all acknowledge that day and the feelings we had, to this day.
And yet the very next day was like having the rug swept under our feet whilst being punched in the stomach at the same time. All this happening to two very young children. I remember going to the new home and the drive there and the elder social workers explaining what they could to us. I don’t remember either of us crying on that day – but my god, did it come. The saddest moment was seeing our parents for the access visits and then having to say goodbye to them a few hours later – it was absolutely emotionally devasting.
The good news is that by 7 or so months later we were back home with our mother, but life had changed forever. But those 7 months were just so heartbreaking in many ways. It left its mark on me in so many ways, and our upbringing had many difficult moments. It has affected the man I am today without a doubt – my social skills, my outlook on life, my emotional and mental mindsets.
Me and my sibling are open for the lucky ones: Life for many children in care is an absolute hell, being at the hest for a state that quite often fails these youngsters and makes life hard for them, post care. I remind myself of that often, and how lucky we are.
Of course, as we got older I learned more about the circumstances behind this (although as children growing up, both parents, then separated, were open and honest about this, much to their credit) but the decision by the authorities to do this really was unjustified, I feel, without going into to much detail.
I met someone with split personality disorder/dissociative identity disorder on my journey through the mental health system. Not the Tiktok version, the we were both in a psychiatric hospital at the time version. I didn’t have the greatest childhood myself but I cannot even comprehend the level of trauma and abuse as a young kid that it must take to cause what had happened to her.