How do you want to die?
Happy Friday! Let’s talk about this!
We have a relatively new database up on STLtoday that describes the ways people in Missouri and Illinois have died. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction to the database, which you can explore by clicking this link:
More than 150,000 people die each year in Missouri and Illinois. The information comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which compiles mortality data for the U.S. from death certificates in each state. Some deaths occur from multiple causes, but an overarching cause is determined for almost all deaths. More than 36,000 people in Missouri and Illinois died of some form of cancer in 2004. In St. Louis City, Jackson County, Mo., and Cook County, Ill., more people died from homicides than motor vehicle accidents in 2004.
In my home county in 2004, for example, 10,712 people died. Of those, the lion’s share were by what is described as “natural causes.” Ischemic heart disease was the leading single cause with 2,529 deaths.
I intend to live a good long life and then die in my sleep quietly at home; it isn’t going to be a surprise to anyone. Wish me luck with that.
How do you want to go?
Kurt is the director of social media for the Post-Dispatch, where he has worked since August 2002. He's been a journalist since 1982, covering municipal government, courts, education and two hurricanes as a reporter before becoming an editor. 
As long as this bizarre question was asked hasn’t anyone said they’d like to die at 130 or 150 therby reaching new limits of the human lifespan? With medical science AND a healthy lifestyle someone living on earth today will live at least 130 years old if not longer. The future will probably see a human live to 150 or more but probably not in our lifetime.
In a gigantic explosion whilst battling an army of zombies, or archery hunting for cape buffalo.
Jay… Don’t you know that some cultures actually rejoice when someone dies and mourn when someone is born. Just depends on your viewpoint.
I hope to die with dignity and respect, not connected to tubes, machines, and tons of medications keeping me artifically alive. I feel that if we have come to the end of our time here on earth we should be afforded the respect to determine when enough is enough and be allowed to go as pain free and calmly as possible. Our society will allow us to gently and lovingly help our canine and feline friends into the next world when they are beyond our help for healthful improvement. But we allow our human friends and loved ones to be poked, prodded, subjected to days or weeks of lingering with pain or tubes and medications simply delaying the inevitable. Please, allow me at the end of my time to get as much pain medication as I may need to keep me relieved from suffering and allow me to pass on with dignity.
I want to die in a huge explosion, possibly in an old, abandoned warehouse. Quick, relatively painless, and AWESOME.
StayYng, animals don’t go anywhere when they die. Their bodies are incinerated or buried, the molecules of their corpses eventually returning to the soil to be used by other organic life in their fruitless attempt to continue their species line even though all life in the universe is doomed to end. Their atoms will eventually come to rest in a black hole or on a dark, cold body flying through space for all time as the universe tears itself apart. The same thing will happen to you.
Time HAS no memory.
And you know this for sure how Reaper? Remember: most everyone’s really agnostic.
I want to go quickly. I don’t want to be in the hospital hooked up to a machine for years where my family is put through the mental suffering and having to pay to huge medical expensives.
I have no intention of dying.
I’m going to ascend.
In a hail of gunfire.