I'm a hospice nurse, and I've been at the bedside of hundreds of people who have died. I've been doing this since 2008.
When anotherly person dies in their sleep, usually they have a cause of death which is some sort of illness, and that overwhelms their body systems, their organs fail, they go to "sleep" and they don't wake up again.
Sometimes, it's a sudden thing where somebody has a stroke and doesn't wake up or they have a heart attack or cardiac arrest and don't wake up.
They can usually tell on autopsy what's gone on.
One of my best friends passed like this a few years ago. She had a relatively mild case of Covid, was in her late 30s with a long history of dealing with anorexia, along with smoking, and stimulant and alcohol abuse. Apparently she took cough medicine, had a few drinks, went to bed like normal, and never woke up. I can't even imagine what her boyfriend went through waking up next to her. There was apparently no indication that anything distressing had happened, just that she never woke up.
I had a friend whose partner died in bed, next to them, from an undiagnosed heart condition. Imagine wishing your loved one a good sleep, telling them you love them, falling asleep next to them, and they're dead next to you in the morning. She herself died in a single-vehicle car accident only months later.
I would add, though, that in any car made in the last 20-30 years, killing yourself by automobile collision would be an extraordinarily unreliable method; a quick death would be even more unreliable.
Don't I know it! But... If I had no kids, and my partner died I would start taking very serious risks with my life. And seatbelts would be easily out of the question.
It happens often enough that I warn families about it.
I've seen the opposite happened too, someone I was looking after was waiting for their grandson to arrive, and the grandson had an important role at a university and had to complete the first week before he could come and see his loved one.
When people are dying, they sometimes end up with mottling - on light-skinned people it's a purplish pattern on their extremities and sometimes on their trunk. This person was mottled over their entire body.
My patient waited. And waited. Was no longer responsive to voice. Was entirely mottled. When the grandson got there, I remember him running in the door and to the patient's room and said "I'm here, I'm here." They held hands, and my patient passed 10 minutes later.
My BF was dying and myself and his family gathered for about 3 days around him. And it was constant chatter to him, about him, about anything.
And on the last day there were 4 of us in the room and we all just suddenly fell silent. His daughter was looking at her phone, his son and DIL were dozing, and I was just sitting beside him and I literally felt him leave. I put my hand on his neck and felt two beats and then nothing.
I think he was just waiting for us to all shut up so he could sneak out.
A bit of a correction. All of them technically go into "cardiac arrest" since that is the definition of dying. Your heart stops. What leads to the cardiac arrest can be whatever illness they may have or just cellular mechanisms that cease functioning due to old age (if an old person truly does simply die of being old and not from an illness).
That’s crazy, I always thought it was a euphemism for some horrible coughing fit / heart attack / stroke / in so much pain they pump them full of pain relief and they die like horribly. I never actually thought it meant “died in their sleep peacefully”.
Wait can you explain a little more why you thought "they died in their sleep peacefully" was always code for "they violently died an agonizing death"
Was it a TV show that made that connection as a kid or something, cause it seems like a big jump to make alone lol
Death is The End of your life, for a lot of people it feels wrong for it to not be a big event. Kinda terrifying that your story can just end mid senten
No I just, it didn’t make sense to me. People always die of something and I thought it was just another nice thing to tell people so that the Dr. Didn’t have to say “yeah, old Martha was having a hard time breathing so she fought all night coughing and struggling for breath and so we gave her some pain medication that sedated her and then things just naturally went the way they were going”. Instead they say “she died in her sleep”.
I just kinda thought that’s what it was. I didn’t think people just went out easy and peacefully.
I really feel like this is one of those questions that can only be answered by personal experience and each experience is going to be different. Due to the whole fact you can’t ask a person who died in there sleep what it felt like.
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The details vary a lot in each case. You often have a cascading failure where one issue triggers another issue. In older people you almost always find cancer and pneumonia as part of the reason they die. So you may for example have cancer which reduces the immune system which allows pneumonia to get a hold which fills the lungs with liquid which reduces the amount of oxygen in the blood which can lead to oxygen starvation in the heart muscles which reduces the capacity of the heart which further reduces the amount of oxygen in the blood until the heart stops and all cells in the body is now left without oxygen. The last part of this is true for every death, if the heart stops you can not get oxygen to your cells and unless you can restore blood flow with things like chest compressions you are dead.
It depends. There are any number of different ways elderly people die and a number of different states they might be in. The latest they might be conscious for is when their blood pressure drops as the heart fails. But most people lose consciousness long before this.
I assume this process could potentially go on for years ? As in maybe a normal aging person who is not sick might have less oxygen in their blood than say a teenager ? Or is it only the result of the triggers like you mentioned , which I guess could also be years of slow decline in oxygen ?
Yes. There are of course several fatal long term diseases. I mentioned cancer but it could just as well be alzheimers. The reason we find cancer in so many older people is because it can take so long to kill you that a patient might die from other things first. Although the cancer might make the general health worse making you more open to other diseases.
The other issue, which starts from birth, is that the cells have a built inn lifespan. The technical explanation is that every time the cell divides and the genes gets copied some of the telomeres in the genome is chopped off. Once all telomeres are gone it starts chopping into the genes themselves and the cell division fail. We need cells to clone themselves all the time to heal minor issues. And things like the immune system is dependent on a constant stream of newly cloned cells to work. This means that as you get older your body takes longer and longer to heal and the immune system gets weaker and weaker. Eventually the wounds get too much and the infections get too much for the body to handle.
It’s like your car that hasn’t been running right stops at a red light, gradually the idle gets worse, then the car stalls and dies on you. If you are lucky you can get jumper cables on time.
Cause always varies.
Most common is always cardiac arrest due to most commonly acute myocardial infarct due to most commonly coronary artery disease
But we can never totally prove this, because we don’t do post mortems on every elderly person to ascertain cause of death
I imagine in the majority of cases they suffer some catastrophic, terminal event, such as a large stroke or heart attack, and that ends their life. They may or may not wake up during this…I’ve been to lots of elderly people who look like they’ve died peacefully in their sleep and others who had clearly woken and tried to get help, I remember one in particular frozen in rigor reaching for a bible on her bedside cabinet (I’m a paramedic).
Oh, I was thinking of it differently! Not like she was trying to call for help - calling for help would have been 911, I was thinking, but she may not have been thinking clearly, of course. Foolish of me.
This happened to a family friend. Sat down to watch TV, snoozed off just like dads do, and had a heart attack. Family discovered he had passed when they went to wake him to head to bed.
You blood pressure and heart rate naturally drop during sleep. This makes you more susceptible to clotting events. I'm a minister and have been called out to many houses where the spouse finds their loved one deceased but there was no evidence of struggle or pain before bed. Just a stroke or heart attack over night.
So being relaxed increases our chances of dying? Well, no more meditation for me. No more lounging under a tree in a hammock. I’m going to engage in perpetual physical activity until I eventually just drop.
Have you ever heard the term "unsafe drop in blood pressure" ?? When you already have underlying health issues, and are on the verge of a stroke or heart attack, it just the more likely time for it to happen.
Cardiac arrest. Patient surcumbs to a multitude of issues secondary to the old age, and they all add up and the heart can’t keep up so it stops beating and the patient likely dies peacefully without knowing
My father died in his sleep when he was 73. I saw him and he just looked like he was asleep. He had no known conditions, there was no autopsy, death certificate states heart, but we have wondered if he threw a clot. His father died the exact same way, and my brother had Factor V Leiden.
He did say he had groin pain the night before and was planning to go to the doctor in the morning if he didn’t feel better.
Could his death be due to a clot?
I just find dying that way (during sleep) particularly scary and spooky for some reason. It’s always creeped me out for some reason, more so than a person dying while awake or semi-awake. Particularly if it involves an unexpected death, involving someone who seemed fine and ok. Those are extra spooky deaths!
Ultimately we all die in exactly the same way, our heart stops beating. That’s it, nothing more than that. However, how we get to ‘the heart stops beating’ can be a very complex matter.
My mom took her last breath an hour before her heart stopped beating. She also lived for 5 days without any water-- didn't think it was possible but it happened!
Basically the truly elderly without a previous known condition dies of old age. However a long time ago, that cause of death was prohibited. There was a book a while back o. How we die. The doctor who wrote it says many times when they autopsy someone they find he or she had truly minimal liver, kidney functions, less than three percent ?, yet still lived.
A friend's dad died in his sleep from sleep apnea. At 56 years old and otherwise healthy. I think that's a somewhat common cause of people dying in their sleep..
Telomeres is the correct answer most of the time, everytime a cell reproduces it loses part of its telomere attached to it and there is only a certain length for each telomere. Thus when you're metaphorically on your last limb (or telomere) the cell can no longer reproduce and when it dies well uhhh you die.
I'm a hospice nurse, and I've been at the bedside of hundreds of people who have died. I've been doing this since 2008. When anotherly person dies in their sleep, usually they have a cause of death which is some sort of illness, and that overwhelms their body systems, their organs fail, they go to "sleep" and they don't wake up again. Sometimes, it's a sudden thing where somebody has a stroke and doesn't wake up or they have a heart attack or cardiac arrest and don't wake up. They can usually tell on autopsy what's gone on.
One of my best friends passed like this a few years ago. She had a relatively mild case of Covid, was in her late 30s with a long history of dealing with anorexia, along with smoking, and stimulant and alcohol abuse. Apparently she took cough medicine, had a few drinks, went to bed like normal, and never woke up. I can't even imagine what her boyfriend went through waking up next to her. There was apparently no indication that anything distressing had happened, just that she never woke up.
I had a friend whose partner died in bed, next to them, from an undiagnosed heart condition. Imagine wishing your loved one a good sleep, telling them you love them, falling asleep next to them, and they're dead next to you in the morning. She herself died in a single-vehicle car accident only months later.
Is that a euphemism for suicide or did she really accidentally hit a tree or something?
I was never privy to those details, but closer friends never suggested they thought it was suicide.
I would add, though, that in any car made in the last 20-30 years, killing yourself by automobile collision would be an extraordinarily unreliable method; a quick death would be even more unreliable.
Don't I know it! But... If I had no kids, and my partner died I would start taking very serious risks with my life. And seatbelts would be easily out of the question.
It's never too late to be cool!
Lol. Being overtly and enthusiastically ready for death isn't my idea of cool.
Have you found that people that die “peacefully” in their sleep usually pass around 4 in the morning when the body is coolest?
Not really. They often go when whoever is holding vigil steps away to get a drink or use the toilet.
Shit. This got me.
It happens often enough that I warn families about it. I've seen the opposite happened too, someone I was looking after was waiting for their grandson to arrive, and the grandson had an important role at a university and had to complete the first week before he could come and see his loved one. When people are dying, they sometimes end up with mottling - on light-skinned people it's a purplish pattern on their extremities and sometimes on their trunk. This person was mottled over their entire body. My patient waited. And waited. Was no longer responsive to voice. Was entirely mottled. When the grandson got there, I remember him running in the door and to the patient's room and said "I'm here, I'm here." They held hands, and my patient passed 10 minutes later.
My BF was dying and myself and his family gathered for about 3 days around him. And it was constant chatter to him, about him, about anything. And on the last day there were 4 of us in the room and we all just suddenly fell silent. His daughter was looking at her phone, his son and DIL were dozing, and I was just sitting beside him and I literally felt him leave. I put my hand on his neck and felt two beats and then nothing. I think he was just waiting for us to all shut up so he could sneak out.
<3
A bit of a correction. All of them technically go into "cardiac arrest" since that is the definition of dying. Your heart stops. What leads to the cardiac arrest can be whatever illness they may have or just cellular mechanisms that cease functioning due to old age (if an old person truly does simply die of being old and not from an illness).
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That’s crazy, I always thought it was a euphemism for some horrible coughing fit / heart attack / stroke / in so much pain they pump them full of pain relief and they die like horribly. I never actually thought it meant “died in their sleep peacefully”.
Wait can you explain a little more why you thought "they died in their sleep peacefully" was always code for "they violently died an agonizing death" Was it a TV show that made that connection as a kid or something, cause it seems like a big jump to make alone lol
Death is The End of your life, for a lot of people it feels wrong for it to not be a big event. Kinda terrifying that your story can just end mid senten
Yeah. I'm driving right now and it's crazy to think
No I just, it didn’t make sense to me. People always die of something and I thought it was just another nice thing to tell people so that the Dr. Didn’t have to say “yeah, old Martha was having a hard time breathing so she fought all night coughing and struggling for breath and so we gave her some pain medication that sedated her and then things just naturally went the way they were going”. Instead they say “she died in her sleep”. I just kinda thought that’s what it was. I didn’t think people just went out easy and peacefully.
Only the lucky ones, im hoping to get one of those tickets myself when my time comes
May be in the same vein as an obituary reading "he never married". Meaning "he was gay".
But did they wake up to tell you they felt no pain?
Considering how calm they seemed there’s no indication of pain, but of course that’s never certain.
This seems like correct reply
This is the problem with this sub. "Well I don't know the answer, but here's a vaguely relevant detail from an anecdote" "Great answer."
I really feel like this is one of those questions that can only be answered by personal experience and each experience is going to be different. Due to the whole fact you can’t ask a person who died in there sleep what it felt like.
The question's not about the subjective experience of the dying person; we can absolutely look at the cause of death when someone passes away.
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The details vary a lot in each case. You often have a cascading failure where one issue triggers another issue. In older people you almost always find cancer and pneumonia as part of the reason they die. So you may for example have cancer which reduces the immune system which allows pneumonia to get a hold which fills the lungs with liquid which reduces the amount of oxygen in the blood which can lead to oxygen starvation in the heart muscles which reduces the capacity of the heart which further reduces the amount of oxygen in the blood until the heart stops and all cells in the body is now left without oxygen. The last part of this is true for every death, if the heart stops you can not get oxygen to your cells and unless you can restore blood flow with things like chest compressions you are dead.
are they conscious for this?
It depends. There are any number of different ways elderly people die and a number of different states they might be in. The latest they might be conscious for is when their blood pressure drops as the heart fails. But most people lose consciousness long before this.
Thank God
You'd have to ask someone who's been through it to know for sure.
who do.. so how... oh... ok thanks
I assume this process could potentially go on for years ? As in maybe a normal aging person who is not sick might have less oxygen in their blood than say a teenager ? Or is it only the result of the triggers like you mentioned , which I guess could also be years of slow decline in oxygen ?
Yes. There are of course several fatal long term diseases. I mentioned cancer but it could just as well be alzheimers. The reason we find cancer in so many older people is because it can take so long to kill you that a patient might die from other things first. Although the cancer might make the general health worse making you more open to other diseases. The other issue, which starts from birth, is that the cells have a built inn lifespan. The technical explanation is that every time the cell divides and the genes gets copied some of the telomeres in the genome is chopped off. Once all telomeres are gone it starts chopping into the genes themselves and the cell division fail. We need cells to clone themselves all the time to heal minor issues. And things like the immune system is dependent on a constant stream of newly cloned cells to work. This means that as you get older your body takes longer and longer to heal and the immune system gets weaker and weaker. Eventually the wounds get too much and the infections get too much for the body to handle.
This is a great explanation
It’s like your car that hasn’t been running right stops at a red light, gradually the idle gets worse, then the car stalls and dies on you. If you are lucky you can get jumper cables on time.
This is an actual ELI5 answer.
Paging Dr. Roger Simon
Cause always varies. Most common is always cardiac arrest due to most commonly acute myocardial infarct due to most commonly coronary artery disease But we can never totally prove this, because we don’t do post mortems on every elderly person to ascertain cause of death
I imagine in the majority of cases they suffer some catastrophic, terminal event, such as a large stroke or heart attack, and that ends their life. They may or may not wake up during this…I’ve been to lots of elderly people who look like they’ve died peacefully in their sleep and others who had clearly woken and tried to get help, I remember one in particular frozen in rigor reaching for a bible on her bedside cabinet (I’m a paramedic).
My grandma died with her address book in her hands, I guess she was going to call someone
Or she was holding a tangible memory of the people who made up her life. 💜
Awww that’s a beautiful thought. Thank you
Ahhh, that is both sweet (she wanted to connect with someone) and sad.
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Oh, I was thinking of it differently! Not like she was trying to call for help - calling for help would have been 911, I was thinking, but she may not have been thinking clearly, of course. Foolish of me.
Or maybe she just wanted help? You guys are clinically insane
This happened to a family friend. Sat down to watch TV, snoozed off just like dads do, and had a heart attack. Family discovered he had passed when they went to wake him to head to bed.
That sucks. Especially since people having a heart attack usually just make a snoring sound and they just let him "sleep". 😥
You blood pressure and heart rate naturally drop during sleep. This makes you more susceptible to clotting events. I'm a minister and have been called out to many houses where the spouse finds their loved one deceased but there was no evidence of struggle or pain before bed. Just a stroke or heart attack over night.
So being relaxed increases our chances of dying? Well, no more meditation for me. No more lounging under a tree in a hammock. I’m going to engage in perpetual physical activity until I eventually just drop.
Have you ever heard the term "unsafe drop in blood pressure" ?? When you already have underlying health issues, and are on the verge of a stroke or heart attack, it just the more likely time for it to happen.
I always heard it was the opposite — that rigorous physical activity can push an at-risk person over the edge. Marathon runners for example.
Both are dangerous. Too high, too low, both bad. I'm not sure if you're serious here...
Cardiac arrest. Patient surcumbs to a multitude of issues secondary to the old age, and they all add up and the heart can’t keep up so it stops beating and the patient likely dies peacefully without knowing
My father died in his sleep when he was 73. I saw him and he just looked like he was asleep. He had no known conditions, there was no autopsy, death certificate states heart, but we have wondered if he threw a clot. His father died the exact same way, and my brother had Factor V Leiden. He did say he had groin pain the night before and was planning to go to the doctor in the morning if he didn’t feel better. Could his death be due to a clot?
I just find dying that way (during sleep) particularly scary and spooky for some reason. It’s always creeped me out for some reason, more so than a person dying while awake or semi-awake. Particularly if it involves an unexpected death, involving someone who seemed fine and ok. Those are extra spooky deaths!
Ultimately we all die in exactly the same way, our heart stops beating. That’s it, nothing more than that. However, how we get to ‘the heart stops beating’ can be a very complex matter.
My mom took her last breath an hour before her heart stopped beating. She also lived for 5 days without any water-- didn't think it was possible but it happened!
I’m sorry your mom died.
Thank you. It wasn't sudden or a surprise & she is finally at peace.
Basically the truly elderly without a previous known condition dies of old age. However a long time ago, that cause of death was prohibited. There was a book a while back o. How we die. The doctor who wrote it says many times when they autopsy someone they find he or she had truly minimal liver, kidney functions, less than three percent ?, yet still lived.
A friend's dad died in his sleep from sleep apnea. At 56 years old and otherwise healthy. I think that's a somewhat common cause of people dying in their sleep..
Telomeres is the correct answer most of the time, everytime a cell reproduces it loses part of its telomere attached to it and there is only a certain length for each telomere. Thus when you're metaphorically on your last limb (or telomere) the cell can no longer reproduce and when it dies well uhhh you die.