How Does It Feel To Die?

It should come as no surprise that I have a bit of an obsession with the weird and morbid. I write the “Coroner’s Report” column after all and more than two shelves in my personal library are devoted to non-fiction on a variety of morbid and disturbing topics. Maybe this can be blamed on the fact that I’ve very narrowly escaped death myself several times, or the fact that by the time I graduated from college, I’d lost my mother and one of my close high school friends to suicide, my aunt to a drunk driving creep and bore witness to another close friend’s blood pooled all over a sidewalk where less than a half hour earlier she’d been hit by a car that had become airborne during a particularly brutal collision and was launched onto the sidewalk (where she was waiting for a bus). Maybe you just can’t be around that much death, dismemberment and real-life horror without developing a strange fascination with it.

But this post isn’t supposed to be about me. It’s supposed to be about a link I want to share with you. Currently in the online edition of New Scientist magazine, there’s ginormous special on Death with dozens of features on the subject, including stellar (and maybe for some, hard-to-stomach) article on what it feels like to die in various different ways. So, for those of you who share my obsession with the morbid, check it out, I promise you won’t be disappointed.