deaths mashup
Credit: Images: Sean Smith/JPI, John Paschal/JPI, Craig Sjodin/ABC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection

Why are so many of our attractions… you know, fatal?

“You always made me feel like a princess,” One Life to Live’s Didi Buchanan told husband Bo on her deathbed on September 3, 1988. “We really had it all, didn’t we?”

That, they did. For a hot minute, they were the ABC soap’s go-to couple, a yin-and-yang pairing that never failed to set hearts aflutter. And as she sensed that her end was near — she had, after all, been electrocuted along with “him”-personator Patrick London — she wanted her one and only to know a few things. “I hope in some small place in your heart you remember how much I loved you,” she whispered.

More: 10 soap couples who went from the wedding to the funeral [PHOTOS]

Loved? Bo didn’t want to hear that, not in past tense. He wanted to hear that Didi was going to fight back, to recover. “You have to make room for someone else,” she begged him. And he would do that. But it would take some time. It always did after one of the soaps’ truly killer deaths. (You can watch their whole goodbye below.)

Who else’s demise qualifies for this shortlist that no one really wants to be on? Well, there’s a General Hospital sweetheart who was accidentally taken out by the mother who brought her into this world, a minor from The Young and the Restless whose passing had a major impact on future story, and a human wrecking ball from The Bold and the Beautiful whose demise rendered her what she’d so rarely been in life: vulnerable.

Want to relive, if you can, the deaths that just about killed us? Click on the photo gallery below, and off you’ll go, down an especially maudlin vein of Memory Lane.