Life Will Kill You

"The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead."

—John Maynard Keynes

Lets face it, Anyone Can Die. We are all One Hit Point Wonders in a game with All Deaths Final. But we don't want to believe that, do we?

In stories, characters are usually protected from this. They tend to live Happily Ever After. If they do die, it's in a murder or disaster or big disease or something. Whatever, as long as it's something spectacular or dramatic or at least surreal, something that we don't have to worry so much that it could happen to ourselves.

There are exceptions, however. Sometimes death is sudden and mundane and comes for no good reason. A sudden brain aneurysm, quietly drown or suffocate while unconscious, any simple accident. While a Life Will Kill You death is very undramatic in itself, it's always very dramatic on a emotional level.

Sometimes this is contrasted to the character having lived through much worse before something mundane got dangerous to a fatal level, and sometimes not. The character does NOT have to be heroic or powerful in any way, it's enough that the character lived in a setting that wasn't clearly marked Anyone Can Die. Since the trope is about how death is portrayed, it can in special cases (see the The Onion example) also cover deaths caused by aging or whatever.

Sometimes played as An Aesop about appreciating your loved ones while you still have them.

Contrast Death Is Dramatic and Death Is Cheap. See also Dropped a Bridge on Him. Compare Deadly Distant Finale, Shoot the Shaggy Dog and You Can't Fight Fate.

No real life examples, please; in the interest of avoiding debates on what really happened (and thus natter on the main page).

As a Death Trope, all Spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.

Examples of Life Will Kill You include:

Film

• In Sliding Doors, one of the main character is just standing there, having what would have perhaps been the most important conversation in a long and happy life. Suddenly a car runs over her. Downer Ending in one timeline, but it is indicated that the trauma of her own death helps her to get a happy ending in the other timeline.
• Lawrence of Arabia portrayed the protagonist as a great brave hero. After all his dangerous adventures however, he died in a road accident on his motorcycle. At the beginning of the film, no less.
• Discussed in Fight Club: "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
• In More American Graffiti, John Milner spends the movie drag racing, only to be killed by a drunk driver as he is driving home.
• Never Let Me Go: the film version ends with the protagonist thinking about how ordinary people are Not So Different after all, how we are all living our lives on death row.
• In A Single Man, the main character is a gay college professor, who decides to commit suicide after his partner dies in a car accident. At the end, he decides that life is worth living after all - and promptly dies from a heart attack.
• In Rango this trope turns out to be the reason behind the mariachi leader's repeated statements regarding Rango's eventual death.
• In In Time, this is played straight in the story while brutally subverted by the setting. Within the story, characters die from the smallest mistakes, such as only keeping enough cash for the bus ride home (without knowing that the fee has been increased), or getting so absorbed in your duty that you don't take the time to refill your clock when you have the chance. On the political level, however, it is made clear that the system has been engineered for these kinds of mistakes to occur. The government is murdering their citizens on a genocidal level, while building in an element of randomization as an excuse to pretend that it's the victim's own fault.
• In a Mexican movie called El Estudiante, the main character's wife dies in her sleep just when the movie seemed to be about to end. Saying it was something to cry about would be an understatement...
• In Last Action Hero, The Grim Reaper from the Seventh Seal movie appears in the real world and does what the Grim Reaper tends to do. When he confronts the protagonist he tells him that he will die. For one moment, the kid thinks he is going to be reaped, but the Grim Reaper just lets him know that he's going to die of old age when he's a grandfather.

Literature

• In the first Erast Fandorin novel, Count Zurov tells the protagonist about a friend he had once, an army officer who participated in the most brutal fights but died in the peacetime of an accidental alcohol poisoning.
• In Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, the final chapter concerns an army officer who shot himself in the head on a bet to prove there is no destiny (the pistol jammed), and then was killed by a drunk Cossack a few hours later.
• A character in one of Katherine Kurtz's Deryni novels survives numerous conflicts and then dies after slipping on a stone staircase. One of his disbelieving friends cries "death should be more difficult."
• Discworld: One of the seven barbarian heroes chronicled in Interesting Times dies from... Choking on a concubine (err... cucumber). This is what urges the rest of the group to seek a more glorious death for themselves (even though they have effectively settled down at the end of the previous book) in The Last Hero.
  • Also, Death is stated to believe that everyone is dying, and everyone will die, because of this trope, which makes asking him whether or not your current prognosis is terminal a moot point.
  • We see this happening to Auditors who start developing traits associated with being alive. This is justified in universe in that Auditors, not being alive, can exist for ever, but being alive implies that you will one day be dead and thus have a finite existence. Because any finite number is minute compared to infinity, any Auditor that appears to have begun to live will instantly die.
    • Hogfather plays with this by having several Auditors turn into vicious dogs in order to interfere directly with events. They are horrified to discover that life is addictive and that they can't turn back, and because they are now alive they are now also no longer immune from Death (who is, by this point in the story, royally pissed off at them...)

Death: it gets under your skin, life. metaphorically speaking of course. and the more you struggle for the next moment the more alive you become... which is where I come in, as a matter of fact.

• In Stephen King's novel Duma Key, protagonist Edgar defeats an evil force with the help of his best friend, Wireman. They both survive the encounter, but Wireman suddenly dies of a heart attack a few months after.

Live Action TV

• Invoked in almost every episode of House, and far from always subverted by the doctor somehow managing to save the patient anyway.
• Common in Dead Like Me. Since the main characters work in the External Influence department, old-age deaths are still rare, but their clients' causes of death include auto accidents, diving-board mishaps, aggravation of an existing spinal injury, and space-station shrapnel (more interesting, but still sudden and pointless).
• One episode of CSI ("Ending Happy" was the title) consists of a guy who suffered a Rasputinian Death. After surviving being poisoned (by seafood to which he was allergic), shot in the throat by a crossbow, beaten with a crowbar and poisoned again (this time by snake venom) he sits down by a pool, then falls in and drowns when the chair (which he refused to repair earlier in the flashback) collapses.
  • Made all the more frustrating for the team as four people confess to killing the man, only to have to be let go as their method ultimately wasn't the cause of his death.
    • Only the poisoning via seafood couldn't be argued as self-defense. This one was attempted murder and could probably be charged as such.
• Referenced in the Firefly episode "The Message," in which the eponymous message from one of Mal's old war buddies includes the declaration that "We went to war never looking to come back, but it's the real world I couldn't survive." Subverted somewhat in that he's not actually dead, and while he does get himself killed by the end of the episode, it's not a mundane death.
• In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy's mother is simply dead one day. While the audience shouldn't be surprised by a death (in the Buffy-verse, at any rate), it was totally unexpected that she died the way she did. One episode ends with Buffy coming home, and her mother is dead on the floor. The next episode is called "The Body", and quickly reveals that it was a simple aneurysm - caused by complications from a procedure that had supposedly cured that.
• Played with in Angel where one of the prophesies concerning the eponymous vampire is that he will "save the world, then die." Eventually it's revealed that a more accurate translation would be "save the world, then eventually die in the sense that you will become a mortal human again, which is kind of what you've been hoping for ever since you got your soul back."
  • A similar thing was done later in the series with Eve. She spends an entire episode hiding from Hamilton, claiming that if he finds her he'll kill her. When he catches up to her, he just severs her contract. When asked why she said she would die if he caught her, Eve answers that now that she's mortal, some day she will.
• Doctor Who, in the episode "Tooth and Claw": When Queen Victoria mentions the legend that anyone who possesses the Koh-i-Noor diamond must surely die, the Tenth Doctor points out that that's true of anything if you take a long enough view.
• The point of the Supernatural episode "Mystery Spot." Dean Winchester, a guy who's survived witches, ghosts, vampires, demons, urban legends, and really angry humans, is killed over and over again by things like slipping in the shower, eating bad burritos, getting hit by a car, and having a piano fall on him. It's widely regarded as one of the series's funniest episodes.
• In Choujin Sentai Jetman, Gai/Black Condor cheats death by Vyram many times and finally defeats them with the rest of the team ... then dies in the Where Are They Now? Epilogue after being stabbed by a random mugger on the way to his friends' wedding.
• On I Dream of Jeannie, Tony accidentally releases the Blue Djinn, who had decided to kill whomever finally freed him from his bottle. When the Djinn asks him how he wishes to die, Tony nervously says "Of old age." The Djinn isn't falling for it.
• Given a nod in the episode of The Golden Girls where Dorothy has what is ultimately diagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome. After being told by a number of doctors that there's nothing really wrong with her and even told by one that it's all in her head, she gets an examination by her neighbor, Harry Weston (a pediatrician), because he's the only doctor she knows she can trust.

Dorothy: Am I going to die, Harry?
Harry: I'm afraid so.
Dorothy: Really?
Harry: Sooner or later, I guarantee it.

Newspaper Comics

• In a few strips of Dilbert, Dogbert tried a stint as a fortuneteller. In an attempt to give an infallible prediction, he told Dilbert that he will eventually die.

Tabletop Games

• In Dungeons & Dragons, nothing can undo death by old age.

Video Games

• In Disgaea, it's mentioned that the previous Overlord, Laharl's father, an incredibly powerful demon who'd taken on the worst that Heaven and Hell could throw at him and won died... from choking on a pretzel. Or maybe not.
• Fallout: The "bad ending" for Junktown has town villain Gizmo taking charge and becoming an untouchable crime boss, until suffocating because of an iguana-on-a-stick that he had eaten finally kills him.
• Invoked in Fallout: New Vegas, when Ceasar offers the Courier the chance to determine how Benny will die. When asked, Benny chooses to die of old age, in his bed, preferrably after a marathon session of sex with a pair of prostitutes. Whether or not this works is up to the player.
• In Icewind Dale, one boss states that the world is dying. Why? Because it is living.

Web Original

• In this article in The Onion, all death is treated as totally unexpected, with people being surprised and horrified that people actually can die from aging.

Western Animation

• One of the Hitler Ate Sugar tactics used on the Justice League was as follows: "Since the Justice League has been around, 50% of marriages ended in divorce, the other 50%... in death!"