There have been huge events - wars - huge natural disasters in the past - even now. And people reel from them. But eventually, over time (not generations), they process, they mourn, they go back to living
Except wars and natural disasters have explanations.
People have been killing people since the beginning of time. People have been effected by weather/nature since the beginning of time. 2% of the world's population doesn't mysteriously disappear simultaneously in the blink of an eye on a regular basis.
Then you also have to consider the scope. Wars and natural disasters happen locally. Hurricane Joaquin devastated the Bahamas. There's a war in Syria. Now imagine if those things happened on a global scale, effecting practically every single community on Earth from the city of Mumbai to some isolated tribe in the rainforests of Brazil.
And then there's the mourning process itself. These people aren't necessarily "dead" they're categorized more as "missing" because no one has any idea what happened to them. There's no body, there's no trace left behind, there's no one taking responsibility for where they went or what happened. There's no real sense of closure for the people who lost someone. You can't look at this as "people die every day, and their loved ones get over it and move on in time." Look at this as the missing child whose parents still put up flyers 20 years later. In the case of missing people, it may even get to the point where their loved ones don't expect to get them back, they just need to know what happened. And there's not going to be some serial killer on death row taking responsibility for 150 million mysterious murders.
Finally, the nature of this completely bizarre situation changes everything people knew about the world. Some natural disasters can be detected ahead of time, there are precautions you can take before they happen, while they're happening, and surviving them after they happened. Wars occur incrementally, even if your area is the first attacked, you can still potentially survive and fight back. Diseases take time to spread, there are quarantines, vaccines, cures. If someone goes missing during a normal disaster, there's immediate hope of finding them. The looming threat of a second departure with no one any closer to answers about the first is incomparable to any worry about loss under normal circumstances.
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