Yes, but not a person. I was 14, coming back from school, and I saw a kitten bleed to death. I kept walking on my way to home, but it saw us, and kept following and purring at us, limping in pain, maybe asking for water and aid, after it was probably hit by a car, or bitten and thrown around by dogs. It’s flesh wasn’t gouged or anything, there wasn’t anything gory about it, but it was bleeding profusely. I did nothing, because I wasn’t able to process what happened, and continued my way back home.

Only on the inside.

When I was a kid I saw an elderly man get hit by a car. He rolled over the top, which I guess is safer than being run down, but he got a lot of air and hit the pavement hard. Just kept rolling over and over. My parents shooed us away from the scene, but I can’t imagine it ended well for him.

One time I was riding a bus that rear-ended a motorcycle. I didn’t see the collision itself, but the driver was pronounced dead at the scene.

We often take for granted how dangerous traffic is. Your life can end in a moment doing something we casually do every day.

I was working in a department store when a middle-aged woman collapsed in front of me. It was really warm, heat exhaustion I supposed. She looked like maybe she was drunk because she was moving kind of erratically, so I went to see if she was okay and she just fell. I’ll never forget the sound her head made hitting the concrete or the fact that she didn’t even blink. Remarkably, she was okay and was up in a few minutes, walked away and everything, really surprised me.

The thing that probably fucked me up the most though was some videos on YouTube. I was working for a video analytics company, and we were trying to build an image classifier that could detect firearms. Well, you need data for that, so we were scraping videos of gun crime. Mostly what we were looking for was armed robbery. Lots of videos put out by the local police of somebody holding up a convenience store, and that wasn’t a big deal. But every now and then you’d find a video of someone getting shot and that really affected me. Eight hours a day of looking at gun crime with the occasional homicide peppered in was a recipe for disaster. I definitely needed therapy after that job.

A person 10 feet behind me got hit and run. Didn’t see the diagnosis, but I don’t think the dude made it

I was in hospice with my father and I watched him die for a few days, or…was it a few months.

Yeah, all the time. Infants through adults. Never really gets easier, you just learn to compartmentalize and how to give words of comfort and let people grieve.

Yup, several times. The joys of working in healthcare.

When i worked in a hospital. My mom at home.

I was with my mother when she died. If I’d been five minutes quicker, I would have been with my father when he died. In both cases it was expected. There wasn’t anything particular profound about it. Life went on.

Just pets.

I saw someone behead themselves by train in Calgary

I had a similar experience, Op. I was in traffic as it crawled by an accident, and I saw a man giving violent chest compressions to another man in the street. The motocycle was nearby, smashed. I learned later that he passed right there. 21 years old.

The same question you have nagged at me - did I witness the moment he passed? I spent time looking at the text I sent before I started driving, calculating when I would have driven by, comparing it to when first responders said they got there.

I’ve decided it doesn’t matter if I was there to see his death. A man died. His name was Miles. I found news reports about him later, and he seemed like a good guy. A firefighter. Well liked. That’s what matters.

Not to be depressing… When i was 5 I sometimes slept in bed next to my mom. Woke up one of those days and she was already in rigor mortis. I touched her and she felt like an uncooked turkey, if that makes any sense. Took me a couple decades before I could actually handle an uncooked turkey or like, be around someone wearing her favorite perfume without almost fainting. Nobody knew exactly what killed her, maybe just sudden death syndrome.

If animals count, when i was about 6 my sister had a horse that slipped on the cement and when it managed to pull itself back up… I don’t think it’s totally accurate, but my memory is that its whole body was raining blood a few feet in front of me. Like I remember my vision being framed by blood dripping like a rainstorm from a cloud. Needless to say, it didn’t survive. I remember my dad using the hose to spray all the blood off the cement. I saw lots of dead pets over the years… Between all the wild animals and the back road that everyone sped on, most pets had short lifespans.

Anyway, I grew up through a lot of other fucked up stuff… And people wonder why I’m weird. And if you don’t want morbid answers, don’t ask morbid questions.

I’m an orderly in an OR that does organ procurements from donors. The patients are already brain dead or otherwise intubated, but still technically alive. When the doctors open them up and get to where the organs are, there is a brief moment of silence and a prewritten letter in their honor is read aloud. After that they are taken off of life support and the organs are ready to be taken. The most interesting part to me is watching the color fade from their intestines. It’s actually very fast from pink to gray.

I witnessed 5 police officers all hit a man on the ground with their tasers. Broad daylight.

Died on the scene of a heart attack. Apparently natural causes. The polices internal investigations found the police did no wrong, imagine that.

Unless you make enough money that you can regularly “donate” to the force, I suggest that you assume they are not there to help you and you protect yourself accordingly