There are some controversies where it’s almost impossible to choose a side because you can see it both ways, and this one a perfect example: This man refused to give up his airplane seat so a woman could sit next to her dead husband.
Yep, this is a tough one! It’s definitely hard to know who was in the right in this scenario.
Thirty-four-year-old interior designer Jackson Woodford took to the “Am I The Asshole” subreddit this week to ask users to weigh in on his actions on a recent flight. Woodford wrote, “OK, so, I’m on a 4-hour flight to Phoenix. Guy sitting next to me is clearly dead. Blue in the face, not breathing, couple of flies buzzing around him, stone cold dead. I’m thinking, great, he’s not gonna try to make small talk with me or need me to get up so he can use the bathroom, and I’ll probably get to eat his peanuts and Sprite. So I put on my sleep mask and pop in my AirPods and someone taps my shoulder. It’s the dead guy’s wife.”
Woodford continued, “She was really polite and explained that the dead man was her dead husband and she would like to sit next to him because he’s dead and she wants to make sure he doesn’t fall out of his seat or expel any weird corpse gasses or anything. I tried to be as nice as possible, but I explained to her that I would rather just stay where I was because not only was it the seat that I paid for but I was actually looking forward to sitting next to a dead guy. She said ‘OK, thank you,’ and sat back down. But a few minutes later she came back, only this time she was clearly frustrated, asking, ‘This is the last time I’ll get to fly with my dead husband. Can you please let me sit next to him?’ At this point, I’m starting to get a little impatient with this woman, so I say, ‘Was there some reason you didn’t buy your tickets earlier so you could get connected seats?’ And she explained to me that they didn’t know he was going to be dead when they bought their tickets so they didn’t really care if they sat together, but now that he was dead, she wanted to sit next to him because she was grieving her loss after 38 years of marriage. Finally, I just put my AirPods in and let the woman keep crying and yapping because it was a late flight and I was zonked.”
The responses from the Redditors ran the gamut from, “Not the asshole. No way I’m giving up a seat I paid for to anyone,” to, “I would have switched seats with the dead guy, but not his alive wife,” to, “You’re the asshole. You had a chance to be kind to a grieving widow by letting her sit next to her dead husband on an airplane, and you failed.” So, it’s clear that public opinion is all over the map on this one.
Yep, there are definitely a lot of ways to look at what played out here.
What do you think? Would you have given up your seat so a woman could sit next to a dead body? If it was your dead spouse on that plane would you expect a stranger to give up their seat so you could sit next to them? Let us know what you think the correct response would be in the comments!
