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Photo by Twist/Find a Grave By ANDREW SELSKY Death is an everyday affair. It’s all around us: In the news headlines, in losses your friends have incurred, for example when an aging parent dies. Sometimes, and in developed countries this is rare, someone close to us is taken “before their time.” And then it becomes shocking, and personal. Some 8 billion human beings currently inhabit the Earth. Guess how many have died before us, passing from this realm into a different one (depending upon your religion, if you follow one) or passing into oblivion, into nothingness? The answer is, and this number is far higher than I would have guessed,  109 billion. 109 BILLION people, over the course of 192,000 years. That’s roughly 14 times the number of people who walk the Earth today. So it’s an everyday affair. Every year, 56 million people die. It should be routine, but it’s not. A life extinguished means the threads that tie a person to so many other people are reduced to cinders, leaving on...