Best Deaths Ever

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Fictional or not, let's unearth some classic tales of sweet demise.

The Earth blowing up, and all of us going to Heaven and meeting each other.

Man, I wish that would happen, Cockney!


I don't know about classic or sweet, but some true tales of demise that stayed with me:


8-year-old Lily survives the gas chamber at Auschwitz. Sonderkommando (Jewish inmate mortician) Leon is pulling her from the pile of corpses when she opens her eyes an asks where she is/what's happening and where he is taking her. He can't let them burn her alive! He hides her under his bed. Two days later, an SS officer finds her, takes her outside and shoots her. "Burn the body in an open pit," the officer says to Leon. "I cannot sidestep the Fuhrer's orders."


Milkos Nyiszli is a Jewish doctor and prisoner, forced to do autopsies on his fellow Jews for Mengele, in return for his and his wife and daughter's lives. He lives above a crematorium. One day, a Sonderkommando rushe up to his quarters and tells him to get down there quick; there's a girl alive in the gas chamber. He finds the girl, about 14 years of age, buried under corpses, against the wall near the entrance, in the full throes of a seizure and a death rattle. He grabs her, takes her into the Sonderkommando dressing room, lays her on a bench, injects her with something to make her stop suffocating, and waits. She coughs up a piece of phlegm and wakes up or almost wakes up. They debate what to do with her. Nyiszli goes to Mengele to ask for him to help the girl. Mengele says she will have to die like the others. Nyiszli and the Sonderkommando inmates think. They could put her with the worker women in front of the gate, but that would probably only work if she was a few years older, like about 20. They decide that girls of 16 have big mouths that they don't understand why they have to censor themselves. They decide that she would get the Sonderkommando and Nyiszli and all her fellow workers and barrack-mates killed. They decide she has to die. They send for someone to shoot her. They take her down the hall to the crematorium where she is (presumably) shot dead, a few hours after she was found alive in the gas chamber.


Then there was the girl in the Grey Zone. She was based a little more on the girl in Nyiszli's book then on the other girl, whom I don't think the makers of the film ever knew
existed. She, like Nyiszli's girl, survived the gas because being small and delicate, was one of the first to be knocked down when everyone ran for the door. Nyiszli's girl (and probably the other one too) fell with her face against the wet floor, and most of the others were on top of her, forming an air pocket. Water is an antidote to Zyklon B gas. Or at least the gas doesn't work around/with it. The girl was found in much the same manner the girl in Nyiszli's book was found in, and revived in much the same way, but she was alive and hidden for longer and the debates to do with her lasted longer. They didn't want to burn her alive and it was definitely out of the question once she'd been revived. They hid her in a dressing room. Inmates were planning a revolt, to blow up the crematoriums, as they knew the Germans would never let them live. They had still agreed to fool their fellow Jews into thinking the gas chamber was a shower room, getting them in there, then burning them and washing their blood off the walls after, just for a few more months of life, for Vodka and bed linens. They tried to save their souls by saving the girl. But during an argument in the dressing room where a guard shot an inmate after he refused to talk about the pending revolt, I think, the girl, who was hiding behind some clothes, screamed. They found her and a friendly guard was going to help her, or didn't know what to do; he kept her safe during the revolt by guarding her in the dressing room with his pistol, all throughout the events that happened next: explosions, gunfights, torture and killing of the female prisoners who worked in the munitions factory and had smuggled gunpowder to the Sonderkommando on corpses to blow up the ovens with. Finally, the dust settled and the Sonderkommando group was forced to lie on the ground facedown as they were shot one by one in the head or the back of the neck, unpredictably, so that they didn't know who would be shot next. They didn't do anything to revolt anymore. They just lay there and let themselves get shot, so that they could talk to each other for a few minutes I guess, rather than just having to fight or flee and not really be able to congratulate each other on the revolt, or whatever, and get shot dead anyway. The girl (who had been forced to watch and some of the men concluded they'd probably kill her too because she saw and heard too much) broke away from the group of SS men she was standing in nearby and slowly passed by other SS men on her way somewhere; they looked down their noses at her and wondered where she was going and didn't know what to do with her. She started to run (though pretty pathetically slow) and one of them drew his pistol after letting her run a few metres, then he let her go for a few more yards, until she got closer to the gate but still not nearly there, so that he could have some target practise I guess. He finally shot her dead and the last thing she saw was the ash-free sky, as half the crematory ovens were destroyed in the revolt.

According to legend, Greek messenger Pheidippedes ran from Marathon to Athens carrying news of a Greek victory over the Persians. He said, "Rejoice, we conquer," then collapsed and died. The story turned out to be apocryphal, as Pheidippedes actually lived a long life for his era, approximately 70 some years. However, his story gave impetus for the modern Olympic marathon.

When I think of great deaths, I sometimes prefer to imagine small things, like someone passed out in the hallway of their house in front of the bathroom. There was a picture I found cool, of a girl dressed in full goth/punk outfit/costume, looking fashionably dead but not sickeningly beautiful like the ones that "look like they're sleeping peacefully"... even though she did look like she was sleeping. Shere she lay, looking reeeally out of it, in front of the bathroom in her home or someone's home. The caption said SSRI antidepressant overdose or something.

everything leading up to and including Roy Batty's death in the end of Blade Runner is amazing. the last 20 minutes of that film are definitely some of the finest closing moments in any film.

This one is supossedly from comic legend Quino. I swear I saw this one as a comic, but can't find it. Anyway, enjoy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Pinyan

Be warned...this is one f*****g nasty tale.

http://www.snopes.com/horrors/freakish/laundry.asp
It isn't true... but it might have been, people aren't too smart at times!

The shoot out scene in Bonnie and Clyde. Classic.

Dick Shawn was a Yank comedian best remembered as the weightlifting, dim son-inlaw in "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

Shawn died on stage on April 17, 1987 in San Diego, California, at the age of 62, doing a comedy bit about himself and the audience surviving nuclear war. Due to the nature of his act, audience members were at first unaware that he had suffered a massive heart attack and had died. Earlier in the act, Shawn had been portraying a politician, reciting various campaign clichés, including, "if elected, I will not lay down on the job." When he fell and lay face-down on the stage, the audience thought it was part of the act. After some time had gone by, there were catcalls. Finally, someone appeared on stage, kneeled down to look at Shawn, stood up, and called out, "Is there a doctor in the house?" Another person came up on stage, turned Shawn over, and began administering CPR. At this point, someone told the audience to go home. Nobody (or almost nobody) moved – since no one knew if this was part of Shawn's act. Finally, paramedics arrived, and the bewildered audience began leaving, still not sure of what they had seen. A notice in the following day's San Diego Union newspaper (not on page 1) clarified that Shawn had indeed experienced a heart attack on stage and died.

Hard to beat dying on stage, in the middle of your comedy routine ....

there’s a book i think its called the darwin awards or something full of stupid deaths, it has a special mention for a guy who tried to kill himself by cyanide, hanging and a bullet to the brain over a tank of water. But as he dropped his hand slipped and he shot the rope wich broke and dropped him into the tank, that broke and he through up the cyanide with all the water he swallowed. He died in hospital of pneumonia 2 weeks latter

but thats not necessarily good