What actually happens when an eldery person “dies in their sleep”?
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It’s kind of the same as dying “of natural causes”. It’s basically a nice way to say that someone was very old and had some standard medical conditions as can be expected for a person of that age. Stuff like heart attacks, stroke, organ failure, cancer, diabetes, infections all qualify. They all act on the body differently, but the common thread is that age reduces your body’s ability to fight back and after a point it is just considered inevitable.
“Dying in one’s sleep” is just, dying…. while asleep. That can be caused by a bunch of things.
Whenever someone “dies of old age”, what they mean is that they either had some type of organ fail (eg. heart attack) or that they succumbed to an illness that a younger, healthier person could’ve survived (e.g. pneumonia). They say “died of old age” because it’s softer sounding.
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Im not what I would call “elderly”, but I had a stroke while sleeping. Fortunately I woke up but if it had affected a different part of my brain, maybe I wouldn’t have. So there’s one way.
apparently they just stop
a buddy and his wife were maybe 60 years old but not elderly. they were very active, scuba diving, snow shoeing, etc.
he woke up one morning and started his day, leaving her in bed to continue sleeping. after a while he went to check on her and found she was gone
It was determined she had died in the middle of the night, several hours earlier.
He was very emotionally and/or psychologically dependent, and her death was a tremendous shock to him, so much so that he passed away that afternoon
In the case of my father it was heart failure – as it happens, my mum was awake next to him, and saw it happen – she phoned the ambulance and we all tried for a long time to bring him back, but he was gone
If mum wasn’t there, or if she’d been asleep, then we simply would have found him dead in the morning and he would have “passed peacefully in his sleep” – instead it was incredibly traumatic for everyone involved, except dad – as far as he’s aware, he passed peacefully in his sleep!
Usually heart failure.
To actually explain like you’re 5, as we get older our bodies just kind of break down. We need parts of our bodies, like our hearts, to keep us alive. When they get so broken down that they fail, then we die. It happens eventually to everyone. Me. You. Everyone.
According to my nurse sister people generally don’t die “peacefully” it’s a nice thought for family, and a comfort for people, but dying is usually really hard and can be excruciating and deeply uncomfortable.
Whatever the cause, the thought of dying while asleep has always spooked me. I’ve always found that prospect extremely terrifying, more so than the thought of dying while awake, and I’m not sure why. But it just seems extra spooky or creepy to just up and die while being asleep.
I suspect it usually means they died while YOU were asleep. They might have awakened in great pain and then died, like from a brain aneurysm.
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