Reddit had an unusual discussion about deathbed confessions under r/AskReddit. A user started a discussion with a post titled “Nurses and doctors- what’s a deathbed confession you’ll never forget?” The post drew 1,800 comments as of publication.
The first commenter, who was also a palliative nurse, shared that she had held the hand of a young mom who was dying. The mother cried to hold her son, but because he was very young, his father stopped bringing him to the hospital. “It was heartbreaking as the dad was so torn, he stood outside her room sobbing. I often wonder about him as he would be in his 20s now and I hope he knows how much his mother wanted to hold him.”
Another commenter wrote about a hospice patient's confession about smothering her disabled newborn in the late 1930s. The Reddit user wrote that the baby's esophagus did not connect to the stomach and that every drop of milk came back out of the baby's mouth. According to the user, this was one of the many problems the baby faced.
“The husband was threatening to abandon her and the other kids because it obviously was because of something she did that the baby had severe disabilities, and the baby was wasting away, crying, unable to take in anything. So she smothered it. One of the saddest people I ever met,” the user wrote.
A third user wrote that their grandfather made a confession on his deathbed. The grandfather was a very strict Catholic. He confessed to using birth control with his wife despite it not being allowed in their religion. “I was already an atheist by that point, but it just made me so mad and so sad that he felt like his soul was in danger because he and my grandmother acted like responsible adults,” the commenter wrote.
Then a nurse wrote about an old lady’s confession at a retirement home. The lady had dementia and was always prim and proper. “Not too long before she passed, we had her in a wheelchair at the nurses’ station, and she told me about how she was a stripper in her early 20s. This would have been in the 1950s sometime. She really got into the story trying to shake and move. Hilarious.”
The Daily Dot could not independently verify the claims made in the thread. The details reflect accounts shared by users in the r/AskReddit thread. The commenters' identities have not been confirmed.
