For the vast majority of those in the industrialized, affluent west, death was – until the recent Covid pandemic – something exotic, foreign and outside of everyday experience. This distancing from death – and our expectation that we will enjoy a long, healthy, happy and pain-free life – is, so far as I can tell, an anomaly in all of human history. The luxury of viewing death as remote and “other” seems to be unique to our particular time and place.
