How do extremely old people just drop dead if they don’t catch a disease?
My maternal grandmother was 76 when she was found unresponsive on the living room floor. Her 87-year-old husband had fallen, and she had tried to help him back in bed.
The bed was located in the living room because my grandfather could not manage the stairs anymore. Life had worn him out, and at that stage in his life, he hardly did anything else than sleeping. It was as if one day he would keep sleeping, and never wake up again.
But now he had fallen, confused and not able to stand up again. And so my grandmother had tried to pick him up from the living room floor with all her strength, and something snapped. And she fell herself to depths totally unknown to her. She was in a coma for a week before her body finally gave in.
We never saw her again.
She was diabetic, yes. And slightly overweight, yes.
But she also had an aortic aneurysm no one knew about. And that was what burst inside when she tried to lift her husband. That was what ended her life. It might have been there for many years, and it could have remained in the same state for many years too, but she happened to make the wrong exertion at the wrong place in time.
That’s exactly why sometimes very old people drop dead without any obvious external sign of a life-threatening condition —
You never know what lies beneath.
SOURCES: Annie Stebler-Hopf, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
