ABSTRACT
Since the last Ice Age approximately one hundred billion (100, 000,000,000) people have died. We know little now and will never know much about how they died, how their deaths were received, where they now lie, where their souls went, or even if, in their own minds, they had souls. We have perhaps, in our own experience of death and in our own common humanity, some human empathy, some sense of the pain of death and its association with the joy of life. Donovan Ochs asserts that:
The phases of personal bereavement are universals independent of culture. There is no reason to doubt that the shock, sense of loss, grief, and pain experienced by the parents who lost a son or daughter in Vietnam or Iraq is different in degree or kind from those experienced by parents who lost a son in the Persian or Peloponnesian or Punic wars.
