Death blindness

There are so many pigeons, so many finches and crows, and these birds don’t live long, but you hardly ever see a dead one. Human beings have a special innate blindness to death. You walk by dead birds every time you go out, but you don’t notice them. Sally B. of Fresno, California, had a particularly extreme case of “death blindness.” She got a job in a mortuary but they had to fire her because she couldn’t see the bodies. She had a parakeet and she continued to clean its cage and change its water for three years after it died. She couldn’t understand why it wasn’t eating.