Rule No. 8: Never allow the death of any patient to become routine.

One of my favorite poets John Donne wrote:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.

If we cannot feel the loss of each human being, in some fundamental way we surrender the most sacred parts of ourselves. How far should we go with opening our hearts up to the tragic tug of death? As far as we can! Push it to the limit. I would urge each of us to fully integrate death, mortality, into the core of our being, the fabric of our daily lives. Ironically, we learn to live better when death becomes our routine guide. Making ourselves more vulnerable to the loss of others makes us more charitable. Understanding life’s evanescence brings each moment and breath into focus.

In both Eastern and Western civilizations, we find similar encouragement to confront our true selves through the conduit of mortality. Much has been made of the samurai admonition to “be prepared to die at every moment.” This has been misinterpreted by some who see the Japanese culture as “fixated” with death, as illustrated by seppuku (ritualized suicide), and the kamikaze pilots of the Pacific campaign. However, the ability to lose our attachments to life--to finish abruptly, completely with living--is very much admired in the Eastern cultures, especially those where the Buddhist influences are strong. The proponents of Zen teachings believed that only by accepting death in an instant, with no trace of hesitation or regret, could a person actually achieve the highest goal of living; namely, understanding the haunting beauty of life’s transience.

By the same token, Christian doctrines admonish us to “find ourselves in Christ.” In many ways, we are encouraged to see that our mortal life is little more than a veiled curtain that must be brushed aside to see the larger issue of our eternal souls. We are taught not to seek our rewards in the finite span of our lives here on earth, but instead to focus how God will judge us. Our acts will not be weighed by mortal measure but against the backdrop of our eternal souls. Again, the lesson in such teachings: Don’t become distracted by the reflection of mortal existence. It is just a mirage. Again, focusing on death, the passage to eternity, teaches us correct behavior, to live with honor—a lesson that any samurai would agree was one of the central tenets of the code of bushido.

I also want to distinguish knowing death from simply seeing it. Our entertainment industry, from our video games and movies to our popular music, has a gothic love affair with death, especially when it’s violent. On a simple, almost vulgar, level, our inherent interest in death ensures that it is a consistent “best seller.” It is this same fascination with death that makes passers-by slow down to take a closer look at a traffic accident. There is, however, a danger in the constant bombardment with violent deaths; that is to desensitize us to what death really means. To understand death, we need to see our own death in every death. The end of every life must be personally meaningful to us.

I no longer watch the evening news on television anymore. Partly, because I find the sensationalistic nature of most news on TV has become insulting to my intelligence—again, it’s aimed at appealing to the consumer’s fascination with death. But it’s also because I feel overwhelmed by so many images of death. It’s mind numbing. How can I grasp the death toll from Tsunami in Christmas 2004? How do I comprehend the devastation of a natural disaster, like Hurricane Katrina? How can I just listen passively when yet another child’s reported missing? One more woman raped? Another innocent by-stander killed by guns? Our salvation lies in our compassion, and our understanding that unless we permit ourselves to be moved by the losses of others, we will lose our selves.

It’s estimated the average child in America goes into the sixth grade having witnessed more than 10,000 deaths on television. In the age of the computer game, this number is rising exponentially higher. Now these are not the deep, profound experiences of death that I referred to earlier. At some level, we need our children to distinguish the “empty, gratuitous death” in a game, for example, from the private, significant one. The latter is an essential building block of experience, wisdom, and pathos. We are hurt and feel pangs of loss when someone we love passes away—that’s real death. The deaths kids experience on television or in video games are purposefully displaced from the context of a child’s life. Ask yourself this: how much fun would a game like “Doom” or “World of War” be if the only figures that you annihilated were recognizable images of your friends and family? I doubt such a game would sell.

In one of my favorite plays, Henry V, Shakespeare wrote:
“We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.”

As I said, keen awareness of mortality brings humanity closer to each other. As a public elementary school student during the “Cold War” of the 1950’s, I had to participate in school-supervised “air-raid drills.” Undoubtedly, there remained a psychic connection and vivid memories of the “Blitz” over London, only a decade and a half earlier in World War II. British children were drilled to get into the subway stations during bombardments. But when I practiced scurrying under my school desk, covering my head with my folded arms, it was meant to prepare me for a nuclear attack—one that would come inevitably from Russia.

One evening, I stayed over at a school friend’s house for dinner. The father of the household came home from work and we all settled around the dining room table to eat. The father asked us about school and we told him how we all had dived under our desks and Mrs. Cunningham had drawn all the blinds down to shield us from what would be a blinding explosion when the atom bomb was dropped on our neighborhood. The father just chuckled knowingly and shook his head in disbelief.

I was dumbfounded to hear him exclaim: “Oh, Christ! What nonsense! The Russians aren’t going to drop the bomb on us any more than we would drop it on them. If we did, we’ll be annihilated. You don’t think that Russian parents love their children as much as we do? They want just as much for their children to live as we do.”

This was a revelation to me: the Russians love their children! I somehow knew that what the father was spoken was the absolute truth. A Russian family would be no more willing to sacrifice its children than my own. Suddenly, I had discovered an element of the world that felt as warm and comforting as a freshly baked apple pie. It was the first time I saw the heart of humanity might simply be a more universal reflection of my own. I was stirred by the knowledge that what we felt was the same as what they felt. I began to comprehend there were more reasons to save our enemies than kill them, more to bind us close to each other than push us apart. And more security could be found in the love of parents than under a desk.

Death can do a lot.