“Columbia is lost. There are no survivors.”

– President George W. Bush,

Feb. 1, 2003

Violent death is so common in our world it has become background noise, like the wail of a distant ambulance. Media coverage of the world’s mayhem is daily fare in our homes. Two hundred Americans die violently every day and most of us cannot even feel the lost beat of their hearts.

In my work a hearse is just another vehicle. Despite that, every once in

a while distant death hits us like a bolt of lightning out of the blue, catching us in a flash of transfixing light that casts shadows on the walls of our memories, so years later we still remember what we were doing when … JFK was assassinated, Challenger exploded, the planes hit the towers, and now the loss of seven astronauts in the space shuttle Columbia. (I was, respectively, in Mrs. Marshall’s second-grade class, a medical student in an Ohio ER, working at my hospital, and renovating a hall closet in my home.)

It is the suddenness and unexpected nature of such deaths that transfix us, but it is something else entirely that makes them personally painful, and that is our humanity. Without that, little would get through the emotional atmospheres of our personal worlds, and bad news about others would burn up like an inbound meteor. Then the impact of tragedies other than personal ones would be nil.

The instant we find the humanity of others and see it match our own, the moment we realize we have much in common, we begin to erode our indifference to their fate. The suffering of a mother’s child can be felt by any mother anywhere. In their faces of black and white and brown, and in their personal stories, in their humanity, strangers become people we know enough to miss, and their loss becomes ours.

Thus it is with the astronauts of Columbia. We care because we cannot look at their smiling faces – William McCool, Kalpana Chawla, Ilan Ramon, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Laurel Clark, and Rick Husband – without seeing someone’s mother, someone’s husband, someone’s courage. We cannot look without seeing someone who reminds us of one we love, someone it would hurt so much to lose. We cannot look at Ilan Ramon without seeing the hope of the tragedy-tired country of Israel, or at Kalpana Chalwa without seeing the hopes of India’s masses. We cannot look at them without thinking of 12 children who have been kissed

by those parents for the last time.

We also care because Columbia’s astronauts were doing something for us, even for those of us who were largely indifferent to their work. They were flying into space, and when we thought of them, or watched them on TV, we were with them in a place from which Earth always looks beautiful. It is a place above war, politics, hunger and other ugly realities of the ground, a place that seemed to offer a refuge from violent death. They were taking us all a little closer to Heaven, and it is perhaps fitting that the last image of them in the sky looked like a constellation of bright stars.

When they crashed to earth something of our hopes crashed with them, and it felt like they were being punished for trying to escape with our dreams for a little while. It all would not have been so sad if it had all not initially been so wonderful; as is so often true in life, crashing to earth hurts most when we fall from great heights, whether physical or emotional.

If we have an ounce of warmth left in our souls we cannot fail to be touched by the loss of such human beings. In a way we knew them; we had seen their smiles, heard their passion, embraced their dreams, and found their humanity. Thus it is that while the debris from the space shuttle Columbia was only scattered across two states, the emotional debris of the tragedy is scattered around the world.

At a time when the world’s violence is often brought into our homes in vivid detail, we should be thankful that tragic deaths such as those on Columbia still cut like a knife. The pain tells us we have not become too callused by the daily abrasion of our emotional skin by bad news, and should remind us of the need to maintain our compassion for the plight of others, even those who seem unconnected to us personally. If tragedies such as the loss of Columbia’s crew ever stop hurting we have lost that which makes us truly human; the ability to feel the pain of loss and the joy of soaring. That would really hurt.

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“But Sarah, my dear, dear Sarah, if the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those that they love, I shall always be with you in the brightest day and the darkest night. Always, always. And when the soft breeze fans your cheek, it shall be my breath, or the cool air your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.”

– Captain Sullivan Ballou of the Union Army, in a letter written to his wife Sarah one week before the

First Battle of Bull Run. He was killed in that battle.

Erik Steele, D.O. is a physician in Bangor, an administrator at Eastern Maine Medical Center, and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region.