Everyone has a relationship with death whether they want one or not; refusing to think about death is its own kind of relationship. When we hear about another person’s death, we are hearing a version of our own death as well, and the pity we feel is rooted in the hope that that kind of thing—the car accident, the drowning, the cancer—could never happen to us. It’s an enormously helpful illusion. Some people take the illusion even further by deliberately taking risks, as if beating the odds over and over gives them a kind of agency. It doesn’t, but it’s an odd quirk of neurology that when we
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