Sad over historical deaths?

[Personyouneedisnannymcphee]

Obviously death happens every day and there are many recent, very sad deaths. But some historical ones actually make me ache a little when I think about them I think due to the details and historical background of them more so than sometimes things I hear on the news. Some of these being:

-the Romanov children. Of course the Tsar was horrific but how they died thinking they were going to safety and then didn’t get killed by bullets as jewels in their clothes protected them so they were finished with bayonets.

-Anne Boylyn’s death because the details of her ladies not letting the men touch her afterwards for fears they’d violate her headless body.

AIBU for sometimes being incredibly sad over these people I never knew or do you have your own historical death that makes your stomach drop when you think of it?

Hefner is buried next to Marilyn, not above her. The creep whose crypt is above hers is Richard Pochner. Obviously both had pretty grim reasons for wanting those plots. Poor Marilyn.

My great grandmother was 44 when she died of TB. She had lost two husbands and a baby daughter to the same disease. She died two months after the declaration of WW2 and I am convinced that her death was hastened because her sons were 20, 18 and 14 and two of them had joined up. I wish I could tell her that her three boys survived the war and went on to live long, happy lives, and all of them named a daughter after her.

Off the top of my head: Ruth Ellis because I watched Dance With a Stranger (again) last night. And then that makes me think of Alma Rattenbury and Edith Thompson.

And then Daniel Pelka. Kept thinking of children with similar lives during lockdown school closures.

So many more of course.

Oh and those who rushed off to fight in WWI thinking it was all going great fun and heroic.

I agree with all of these

The children murdered by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley

Natalie Wood.

Margaret Clitherow I am sure she was pregnant at the time too

I am currently reading Women Who Kill Viciously. A young mother of two was murdered by the woman her husband was having an affair with. She lured her into a car by pretending to be an officer. Just so creepy.

Sarah Everard

I’d never heard of Suzanne so I’ve just looked up her story. That poor poor girl. I will never comprehend how humans can carry out such depravity.

Lots mentioned here I’d not heard of. Googled and read them all. May. It have been the best idea before bed.

Thanks all for posting. I’ve learned (and been horrified by) a lot tonight.

Well anyone's - but particularly childrens' - whose deaths I have read about, or seen portrayed truthfully on the television. But the first one I heard about when I was a child, and that made me cry the most, was Jesus Christ's horrendous death.

Whether you believe in any of his miracles or not, and whether you belive he was God's Son or not, surely you agree that his death was horrific. In my opinion he was a very good person, with exactly the right morals, and he trusted the people he cared about the most, and yet he was deceived, and murdered in one of the cruelest ways possible.
I always find "Good" Friday very sad.

Junko Furuta, absolutely heartbreaking.

I still get really sad and upset about a young girl stoned to death in Iran back in early 2000s. I think she was only about 16, the video released by the news outlets were horrific, she was begging for someone to help her while rocks and slabs of concrete were thrown at her (by the men in the village of course) it was truly awful, poor poor girl.

The Miami Showband

Her name was Du'a Khalil Aswad, poor girl.

YANBU, but YABU re Anne Boleyn. She was very conniving and was happy to screw over Katherine of Aragon and her daughter, who I feel more sorry for as she was a kind and loyal wife who didn't deserve her fate

It's true that Charlotte Brontë died tragically young and before she could give birth to her child, but by all accounts, she was happily married for the last nine months of her life.

I don’t get sad by the way they died so much as the fact that a person has lived out their entire life and are completely forgotten. Their children forgotten. Grandchildren.

I watch very old recordings on YouTube, sometimes children from the 1800s and I think how sad it is that they’ve grown and died so long ago that they hardly ever existed. I wonder what kind of lives they had.

I can't even remember who they were or what it was, there was something on the news where grown men had died (it may have been in a mine, or they were trapped in a cave or something I can't remember the details - probably on purpose), but these men knew they would die and they were crying out for their mothers. Makes me weep just thinking about it 💔

I discovered a book in a charity shop years ago about a woman called Bridget Cleary. Irish woman who for some reason her husband and (I think) his family thought she was a changeling. Her death was horrific. It was a fascinating book but haunted my fir a good long while.

That’s interesting (and still creepy) - I have always read that it’s Hefner, never any mention of anyone else.

How much agency do you believe women had back then?

I think you have to view their choices (such as they were) and actions in context of the time.

It's interesting because that happened about a decade before the Queen was born which would affect her perspective given they were relatives - the idea that political circumstances can change and it can be your head on the block simply to remove you as a political rallying point. Would have happened had the Nazis made it over. Explains her somewhat cagey attitude/complicity re corruption in the British State - it's better the devil you know, they can turn on you without warning so don't rock the boat.

How the families were treated by South Yorkshire police - who effectively defamed an entire city and hid the truth for nearly 30 years - is pretty much State protocol, it's of course 'victim-blaming' along the lines of 'It's not us, it's YOU' where you blame the victim for your own misdeeds. The Post Office did it recently with the postmaster generals over their failed Horizon computer programme, it also happened to the Contaminated Blood families but there are numerous other examples. Highly effective as nobody has done jail time for the Hillsborough scandal, nor for any of the others mentioned.

One thing that made me sad was visiting a WWI memorial that listed the ages of the soldiers. Because it's historical and they have old fashioned names, for some reason, they never struck me as 'young' in my head. But going down the list, the ages were like 18, 19, 21, 19, and so on. That got to me.

Katherine of Aragon had multiple miscarriages and children who died before she had Mary including a son who lived for only a few days. I often think the luck or chance of having a boy affected her and Anne so much. If Katherine’s son had lived then Henry probably wouldn’t have divorced her; if Elizabeth had been a boy then maybe he wouldn’t have gone along with the lies about Anne to get rid of her.

So many of these give me physical pain too- makes me ache to think in a wealthy country like ours we still lack sufficient police and social services resources to help these children and families that need it. Children and women are basically the most vulnerable and the lowest priority for government. The lack of protection for female only rape support/women's refuges is also horrific and makes me fear for women and girls in future.

Does anyone know whether there's any potential for a kind of private police/social services care system? Given we have private healthcare which has operated for decades why couldn't this work? To focus on child abuse and mothers escaping domestic violence basically. Run by women only/mainly perhaps given we know the lengths some men would go to to get access to vulnerable children and women.

I am a bit boggled at the people saying Katheryn Howard was just acting like a teenager. She was one of the few people executed by Henry VII for doing something that was actually a real crime.