My cousin's mother-in-law, who has Alzheimer's Disease, was living alone with her sickly daughter. Over a period of three days, my cousin's wife kept trying to call her sister, and her mother kept saying she was 'sleeping'. Finally, my cousin's wife got the neighbor to check on them, and her sister had, in fact, died.

Averting the Star Wars example on the main page I was led to believe (by my father) that the living ewok was dragging the dead ewok away so he could eat him. I don't know where to put this story and this seemed to be the best place.

This Troper's best friend knew a married man with a teenaged stepson and three of his own kids under ten. For reasons we still don't know, he killed his wife and stepson, and then himself. Two of the kids weren't home at the time, but the youngest was, a two-year-old boy. The police found the baby trying to wake the teenager up.

This Troper always got this vibe from the final chorus of "You Gotta Get Up (It's Christmas Morning)" by Rich Mullins. It's just WAAAYYY too slow to be a ''happy'' song about Christmas morning.

Slow or not, this troper gets the same vibe from the Everly Brothers' "Wake Up Little susie".

When this troper was a young boy, he went to his great grandfather's funeral. He kept expecting him to sit up and wave, say everything was going to be okay. He didn't.

This troper is 21, and had the exact same thoughts at his father's birthday.

This troper said these exact words when she woke up one morning and discovered that the cat, who had been sleeping in the bed with her, had died in her sleep sometime in the night. And again a few months later, when ''the other cat did the same thing''.

This troper is a very HeavySleeper. One time, his three year old cousin scared the crap out of his mom by telling her that he wouldn't wake up.

Sort of subverted and played straight at the same time for an incident when this troper (I/me) was nine. My father was dying of brain cancer and would sometimes suffer seizures. Not the jerking kind you see on TV, his looked more like he was sleeping while making snoring-like sounds (extra scary since he snored when he slept for real too, making it difficult to tell whether or not he really was sleeping) and foaming at the mouth. I had the pleasure of seeing him like this one night and had no idea what was happening or why my father wouldn't stop making those scary noises and talk to me.

You can take this troper's word for it: it's worse when they ''don't'' look asleep. This troper's family couldn't find the family dog one time, and when we eventually did, my father said "oh god...". I saw that her (the dog's) eye were open, and said "no, it's alright, her eyes are open; she's ok!" She wasn't.

My mother and I saw this occur with two gray squirrels by their house. One had recently got hit by a car and this friend/sibling/partner was standing by it's side, pushing against it with it's front paws, trying to wake it up. It didn't work...

My mom told my siblings and I of when we were little we had a litter of kittens they died from sickness or something like that and our grandpa had put them in wagon to bury them but we found them and were shaking them to try and revive them.

This troper had a cat that suffered an aneurysm while I was holding him. I didn't realize it at the time and when I went to put him down, he just fell to the floor, totally lifeless. I must have spent the next hour trying to wake him up, even after I realized he was dead. He was only a couple weeks away from turning three. ;_;

This troper has found that with little kids, it's better to just tell them the truth from the start. When someone dies, just tell them that the person has died and it means they will never come back. It seems like a mean thing to do to a small child, I know, but in my eyes, it's much crueler to give the child some false hope that their loved one will return.