I've attended dozens of deaths over the years, and many hours of medical training. Yes, some folks do appear to die peacefully. And some folks don't sleep thr

I've attended dozens of deaths over the years, and many hours of medical training. Yes, some folks do appear to die peacefully. And some folks don't sleep through it. And some folks will die through particularly ugly and unpleasant processes. In some specific cases, we do know that the death did not entail any struggling or other manifestations of discomfort. And you are quite wrong about your concept of how a heart attack can present itself. Some are quite silent. Some - in older men and particularly in older females and reportedly due to differences in and degradations in the cardiac innervation - can be undiagnosed or misdiagnosed or missed - and sometimes these cardiac problems might only trigger a so-called syncopal episode. The person "zones out" for a little while, or "faints". This due to a transient drop in blood pressure. In cases I'm very familiar with, the person simply stopped talking to me, and appeared to doze off, and the cardiac monitor went into alert. In others, I've encountered a number of cases where the only evidence of a heart attack was in the cardiac enzymes test, or due to specific artifacts seen in subsequent cardiac monitoring.