The grief of death is admitted but there’s no incredulity, no sense of thwarted entitlement.īut in western Europe in 2017 there is a narrative of lengthening lifespans, of extraordinary treatments that fend off death for decades and may, in the end, outwit it entirely. Inscriptions on gravestones acknowledge how soon the living will join those who are already under the earth, not lost but gone before. Death and the living walked hand in hand and could not easily pretend that they had nothing to do with each other. Men’s lives were scrubbed out by the first world war, children were killed by diphtheria, whooping cough and minor infections that bloomed into sepsis in the days before antibiotics. Go back another generation or so and childbirth, monstrous figure of attrition, cut short the lives of innumerable women, as it would have ended mine. A couple of generations ago I’d have done very well to live in reasonable health to the age I now am: 64. There never was, although I might have fooled myself about it.
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