Mini rant.

I hate euphemisms for death/died.

I particularly dislike it when newspapers attempt to evade using the D words.

What is so hard about saying, “He died yesterday”?

What is wrong with that?

Does “passes away” (the current preferred euphemism) somehow make someone less dead?

Does it give comfort to someone who misses the dead person to hear that they “passed away”? Does that make them less dead?

Have we become so unable to deal with the concept of death and dying that we can’t even speak the plain, simple words? Do they have some strange, mystical powers that might strike down the rest of us?

The trigger for this? I just saw a major sports organization announcing that someone “passed away”. A usage which seems to be increasingly prevalent, by the way.
Print media should never use “passes away” or “succumbed” or whatever the next euphemism is.  (A century ago, and I have seen the microfiche of old newspapers, people sometimes went “beyond the shadows”.)

When I die, I hope those who know me will say, “Dude died.”

“Yep, he’s dead.”

“Died a couple of days ago.”

“How old was he when he died?”

“Not sure, but he’d been talking about dying and being dead for decades.”

Please, do me this favor. If a print product somewhere is still running obituaries, just say I died. Call if what it is.

I do not plan to pass away.