[anongraddebt]

You get a sense of death in various ways. Life-threatening illness. Experiencing the death of friends and family members (and not just experiencing, but processing your emotions and not running from the pain by choosing to simply ignore it as if it is not really there). Spending time with and caring for the sick and elderly.

There are more ways.

I've only been in a life-threatening situation once in my life, but I've experienced the others a number of times.

My point was that our culture seems to discourage absorbing loss (within oneself) and transforming it from pain into maturity, resilience, increased desire to help others, increased motivation to maintain communities, etc. Instead, there seems to be a pressure to make death (and loss) something ephemeral, such that the loss never really occurs.

[fapjacks]

No, your point was that you were trying to use my post as a springboard into passing your value judgments about western culture. Which was itself incredibly ironic both in your actually using the word "irony" and in your sort of amazingly insensitive attempt to hijack my small message of encouragement to this poor dude (to try looking at and thinking of his torment in a different way) in order to interject your theories. Which was for me, in the end, the thing which QA folks call an indicator.