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Mon, 3 Feb 2003 08:22:51 -0500

I write a column for my local newspaper and thought perhaps you all would
appreciate these sentiments.

COLUMBIA - THIS TIME, NO ROUND TRIP
By Erik N. Steele, D.O.

"Columbia is lost. There are no survivors."
President George W. Bush  2/1/03

	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
lightening 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 Roman, 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 Roman 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.

"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.

Thanks

Erik

Erik N. Steele, D.O.
Emergency physician
Vice President For Patient Care Service
Eastern Maine Medical Center
973-8270    esteele@emh.org

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