More of the dead came into my home again last week, because more helicopters had gone down, more bombs had gone off, and more of our soldiers had gone home flag-draped to taps and headstones. When they come briefly through my home I feel it is my duty to watch them, to be a silent witness to the only passage these dead will make through my life, and to acknowledge their sacrifice. In doing so I also accept my share of the pain every one of us should feel when one of them dies.

They came to me last week, as they always do, in the “Honor Roll” of American war dead on the Public Broadcasting System’s “News Hour with Jim Lehrer.” The program shows the photographs, names, ages, ranks, and hometowns of American service men and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan as the information becomes available. It is the ultimate in reality TV, and no seconds on television last any longer than these.

Picture by picture, I look at every one, at their faces and their eyes, and think about each. I wonder what made so many of them smile in the photos shown, and believe those smiles on those loved faces will occasionally haul happy memories up from the depths of their families’ sea of sadness. One of those recently killed was an orthopedic surgeon. Occasionally a photo is that of a woman, infrequently enough to still be a surprise but frequently enough that it is no longer a shock that women have an equal right to die for our causes. One was the first-ever African-American woman to be the top cadet at West Point, a star at 21 and dead at 22.

When the 18-year-olds make the Honor Roll, as two did last week, I wonder how kids who are so young they probably still laugh at fart jokes and love skateboarding are old enough to be fighting for us. It is difficult for me as a parent to watch the Honor Roll without bitterness, without thinking how unfair it is for someone who should have little idea what mortality even is to lose his or her life, and without acknowledging what a collective failure it represents for a generation of parents to send their children off to war.

If I was the parent of a child in combat and saw two uniformed military members walking toward the front door of my home I think I would run out the back door in the desperate hope that as long as they could not tell me of his death, he could not be dead, and run forever if that would make it so.

When I watch I also think of the physicians and nurses in the U.S. military’s Baghdad Green Zone emergency department who tried to save the dead when they were still just dying, when there was still perhaps a thin pulse and a thin hope of keeping the wounded off the Honor Roll. In my heart I can sense the crushing weight of loss a trauma team feels each time they lose a tug-of-war with the Grim Reaper and are midwives to the birth of more misery. I can hear the silence that suddenly descends over a busy ER when the lead doc says “That’s it, everyone, time to stop. Time of death is ….” I know the urge some of them have to sink to the bloody floor and cry like babies, partly for this dead soldier, partly for the next one, partly for themselves because having seen what they have seen, they will never be the same.

More than 3,000 men and women have died since our wars started in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that many departed souls leave a lot of holes behind. As I watch the dead go by, I think of their families, too. There are lovers who will not be caressed and babies not made, favorite baseball gloves missing the confident hand that flicked them easily and accurately in front of bouncing grounders, and favorite meals that will never be made again without the spice of sadness.

There are clothes that will slowly lose the familiar smell of the forever missing, but until then will provide soft comfort when held close and filled by memory with the warm form of a lost one. If he is lucky, Dr. Brian Allgood’s son will always remember the feel of his father’s hand on his shoulder, but he will never see it there again; Allgood was killed with 11 others when his helicopter was shot down in Iraq a few weeks ago.

Every death means calls bearing the news to family members, an agonizing one at a time. I have been on both ends of such calls, and as I watch the Honor Roll, I think of that crystalline moment just before one heartbroken family member has to speak the shattering words, and another family member has to hear them. Life as they knew it fragments like glass in a framed photograph that someone dropped; it gives a whole new meaning to the term “breaking news,” and such news has been given out in more than 30 American families already this February.

If you have trouble feeling your share of the burden of our nation’s pain from the Iraq war you need to watch the Honor Roll on the PBS News Hour, or go to CNN’s Iraq war Web site at www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/, and take a walk with the dead down memorial lane. It is your turn to look at the faces of the fallen, look into their eyes, imagine something personal and probably true about each of them and their families, find your share of the pain of this war and place it like a pebble in your shoe to walk on each day.

But don’t delay; next week there will be more dead needing your witness to their passing.

Erik Steele, D.O., a physician in Bangor, is chief medical officer of Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region.