When Death lives nearby

Once common, childhood deaths are now so rare that those raising medically fragile kids feel unmoored from their culture

“Hello darkness, my old friend.” — Simon & Garfunkel

For millennia, humans had an intimate relationship with death. They had to. It was an ever-present reality.

It was not just that people didn’t live as long, what with their life-shortening diseases and bloodier wars.

Historical data also suggests that for most of human history, more than a quarter of inf…