I was somehow shielded from that; I didn't know someone who was openly HIV+ until I was in graduate school in the middle 1990s.
Early deaths: A high school classmate died of a gunshot wound a few years after graduation while trying to break up a fight, a former professor died of AIDS-related complications, a very close friend died of breast cancer, and a close colleague's son died in a car accident on a snowy road in the NC mountains. Deaths at later ages: Relatives have died of diabetes, cancer, heart attacks, and other issues connected with smoking, eating fried food, exercising too little, and/or having undiagnosed/uncontrolled mental/physical comorbidities.
I graduated with ~150 people from my small-town high school and with ~3000 people from my small undergraduate college. I could still tell you their names and recognize their faces.
While I haven't experienced the wholesale loss of friends/acquaintances/people from my past that many of you have, either through combat or by living through the AIDS epidemic, I'm not looking forward at all to growing older and finding out every so often who died recently.
NCbear (who's wondering whether the trauma of slowly losing friends and acquaintances over time is any easier to bear than the sudden shock of losing everyone at once, as in war or pandemics--and who's also thinking that making a comparison of "which is worse" isn't really what I intended, with this post: I was just wondering how any of us bear the pain and grief of losing friends, family, and acquaintances, whether it's a slow or a shockingly fast process . . . . )