My sister and I were talking about this recently (at a funeral in our family). We're in our 40s, and people older than us had largely been to a dozen funerals or more by their teenage years, while people younger than us often went to their first in their 20s or later (or perhaps when their own parents or grandparents died and to no others). We have not-entirely-negative memories of growing up going to funerals, because that's where we saw and caught up with extended family, so funerals are... well, not exactly easy, but they're not traumatic in their own right. For some of our slightly younger friends, though, even attending the wake and funeral in our family, they were having a harder time than we were. And almost none of our cousins brought their kids. For the author, six by 16 probably was a lot more than any of her friends, yes.

It's an interesting shift. A loss, I think.