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Gun violence recently surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of death for American children.

By Robert Gebeloff, Danielle Ivory, Bill Marsh, Allison McCann and Albert Sun

For much of the nation’s history, disease was the No. 1 killer of children. Then America became the land of the automobile, and by the 1960s, motor-vehicle crashes were the most common way for children to die. Twenty years ago, well after the advent of the seatbelt, an American child was still three times as likely to die in a car accident as to be killed by a firearm. We’re now living in the era of the gun...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/14/magazine/gun-violence-children-data-statistics.html

My parents lived good lives and expected to die good deaths. They exercised daily, ate plenty of fruits and vegetables, and kept, in their well-organized files, boilerplate advance health directives. But when he was 79, my beloved and seemingly vigorous father came up from his basement study, put on the kettle for tea, and had a devastating stroke. For the next 6½ years, my mother and I watched, heartbroken and largely helpless, as he descended into dementia, near-blindness and misery. To make matters worse, a pacemaker, thoughtlessly inserted two years after his stroke, unnecessarily prolonged his worst years on Earth...

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https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/How-to-prepare-yourself-for-the-good-end-of-life-13622599.php