When Someone Dies in the Next Bed
By Ayoposi Ojelabi · Published: 27 July 2026
I have mentioned this before, but only in passing. I have never stayed with it long enough to understand what it meant. I want to do that now.
There is a difference between hearing that someone has died and being in the same room when it happens. Not the same building. The same ward. Separated only by a curtain.
Nobody tells you directly. That is not how hospitals work. But the environment tells you anyway.
You notice it first in the movement. Families begin arriving, more than usual and at unusual hours. Some of them are crying. The curtain around the next bed stays closed longer than normal. The staff move differently. Their voices become quieter. Conversations become shorter.
You do not need anyone to say the words. You already know.
The first time it happened, I was in intensive care myself. I was critically ill and uncertain whether I was moving towards recovery or further away from it. The person in the next bed dying was not an abstract event.
It was a mirror held up at close range.
What frightened me was not death itself. People die every day, and I understood that then as I understand it now.
What frightened me was the context. I was not visiting intensive care.
I was living inside it.
I was lying in another bed, dependent on the same machines, surrounded by the same alarms, watched by the same staff. The curtain between us was thin enough to remind me how little separated one patient’s story from another’s.
What made that period even more complicated is something I have written about elsewhere but want to acknowledge here more directly.
The first time someone died in the next bed was during the darkest period of my illness, when waking up the next morning did not always feel like something I wanted.
Looking back, that creates a question I could not answer at the time.
If I was having suicidal thoughts, why was I so frightened when someone near me died?
I think I understand it differently now.
The suicidal thoughts were never really about wanting to die.
They were about exhaustion. About being overwhelmed by a body that no longer felt like my own.
About reaching a point where consciousness itself felt heavier than I believed I could carry.
The fear I felt when the person beside me died revealed something I had not recognised.
The instinct to live had never actually disappeared.
It was still there, buried beneath fear, pain, frustration, and exhaustion, but it had not gone anywhere.
Experiencing death from that distance, through a curtain, while lying in a bed of my own, changed something.
Not immediately. Not dramatically. But permanently.
It made life feel more specific.
More fragile.
More worth the effort of staying.
Not in the way motivational phrases suggest.
In the quieter way that proximity to loss changes a person.
Before my illness, I knew intensive care was where some people died.
Living there taught me something different. Death was no longer a statistic or a story I heard about.
It had a bed number. Sometimes it was only a curtain away.
Further Reading and Getting in Touch
This closes out the most difficult stretch of this collection. What follows on the site moves into recovery, identity, and what came after.
If this touched something in your own experience, you’re welcome to use the Contact page. If you are personally struggling with thoughts of suicide or self-harm, please speak to your GP, contact Samaritans on 116 123, or visit your nearest A&E department.