What actually happens when an eldery person “dies in their sleep”?
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Dying in your sleep or dying from old age can be used as a collection of different causes of death. Often it is some kind of organ failure, as this is then the actual cause of death.
Due to the medical conditions someone is suffering, they might become more exhausted the more critical their condition is. Which can appear as falling asleep and dying some time afterwards
**Edit:** Please read the comment of u/Flame5135 aswell. Especially if this comment here was the first one you’ve read. u/Flame5135 is a Paramedic and more knowledgeable about this topic than I am. By writing this I want to acknowledge the experience of u/Flame5135 and give the deserved attention.
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As the overall topic can be very taxing onto someones mental health, I want to give some attention to r/SuicideWatch. They have a great collection of resources. It can be a good start to read them, if you feel like you need any help for mental health. Even if it is only starting out to affect you.
Most often the cause of “dying in their sleep” is heart attack or stroke, but obviously there are many other potential causes as well.
My grandma died in her sleep by heart attack.
My grandpa died in his sleep to a head-on collision with a semi truck
A friend of mine died in her sleep to hypothermia. Lost the keys to her car and couldn’t get into the warmth.
My wife’s grandma just died last week to organ failure because her heart was just getting too weak to pump blood anywhere. Her legs were purple for weeks, and that purple just kept moving up her body till one day, she finally yielded
Dieing in your sleep can all be caused by different things, both external and internal. It’s sorta more a euphemism for many different causes of death
Paramedic here.
Becoming unresponsive is a late sign in many disease processes. When we don’t feel well, we often go lay down and sleep it off. The story we always get is “X decided to sleep in today and isn’t waking up now.” Most of the time, we’d get the calls mid to late morning.
What may have started off as a nap may progress to becoming truly unresponsive and then they just never wake up because whatever made them go unresponsive finally did them in.
Usually it’s cardiac related. Every engine goes out eventually. Cardiac stress often manifests as low energy and weakness. Prime candidates for a nap, right?
When we respond to Dead on Arrivals (DOA), the coroner usually rules them as a presumed cardiac cause of death barring any significant medical history (end stage copd, cancer, other chronic terminal disease processes).
Often it’s an arrhythmia, person never knows that their heart stopped pumping correctly
A heart attack can certainly lead to an arrhythmia that kills someone but often the person feels this and wakes up.
A massive stroke can also result in a death that no one is aware of until the next morning.
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Not sure but my grandpa in his later days was mostly bed ridden.
On his last day. He woke up bright and early. Ate breakfast in the kitchen for the first time in weeks. Promptly after breakfast he stated. “I’m gonna go lay down for a while.”
And that was it. He went to lay down and never got back up. It seemed rather peaceful.
It means they were sleeping when they died. It never says anything about the specific cause of death. If you think of all of the illnesses or diseases that could cause a person to die while they’re awake, they can also typically cause death while asleep. The term is used to imply the individual died without suffering. It doesn’t say *how* they died, but it says they weren’t conscious when it happened, indicating less pain/discomfort than they might have experienced while awake.
A misconception a lot of people have is that old age kills you. That’s not what’s literally killing you. What’s killing you is as you get older your body breaks down and you become more susceptible to injury and disease, and one day you’re not gonna be able to recover from it. So when old people die in their sleep, it just means they were unconscious before whatever got them got them
Typically major organ failure. When a heart, which is a pump, has been beating 24/7 for decades it wears out and eventually just stops working. It can be true for other organs, but the heart is a common failure and a complete heart failure is always fatal. We cannot survive unassisted without a heart to pump our blood.
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