On October 9, 1849, Henry David Thoreau learned that the St. John, a brig bound for Boston harbor out of Galway, Ireland, had wrecked off the coast of Massachusetts. Having given up his seclusion on Walden Pond two years prior, Thoreau was en route to Cape Cod with his friend William Ellery Channing when the news changed their travel plans: “As we noticed in the streets a handbill headed DEATH! 145 LIVES LOST AT COHASSET, we decided to go by way of Cohasset.” Even Thoreau wasn’t immune to a little rubbernecking. For who among us, drawn by that mixture of fascination and horror, would not pause to catch a glimpse of death?

Thoreau took in the sights on the beach, as there were plenty on offer—a freshly dug mass grave the size of a cellar, carpenters nailing coffins below somber skies, villagers riding in wagons-turned-hearses, and dozens of bloated bodies draped in white veils occasionally peered under by prospective family members. “On the whole,” Thoreau judged, “it was not so impressive a scene as I might have expected.” Pray tell, old sport. “If I had found one body cast upon the beach in some lonely place, it would have affected me more. I sympathized rather with the winds and waves, as if to toss and mangle these poor humans’ bodies was the order of the day.” Ashes to ashes and dust to dust: in this world only death can be said to be certain. Some avoid taxes, all pay the final price.

The cost of doing business was known to Michel de Montaigne, who went so far as to declare in the title of an essay “That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die”—which is to say, learning to live with the fact of death. We deal with that fact variously, as variously as it deals with us. That an American, like Thoreau, might register word of 145 drowned Irish immigrants differently than Emily Dickinson might of her neighbor dead from a disease in “just a country town” isn’t that surprising. Death’s force often derives from proximity—if Cohasset had been California, Thoreau would be on the Cape eating cod.

Yet what of the 145? What of numbers, which are not numbers at all, but sons and daughters, husbands and wives? Maybe Thoreau didn’t know that the ill-fated St. John passengers were fleeing the Potato Famine—which had already killed tens of thousands back on the Emerald Isle—or that ninety percent of them were riding to the promised land in steerage for a fee roughly equivalent to half-a-year’s wages. His omission, or ignorance, isn’t a shocker either, for at the time of death we rarely know the full story—though a fuller story does not always a heavier heart make. “If this was the law of Nature,” Thoreau wrote, “why waste any time in awe or pity?” Magnitude may matter for death tolls, but “it is the individual and private that demands our sympathy.” Sometimes less is more.

It was upon the death of abolitionist William Wilberforce in 1833 that Thomas Babington Macaulay found reason to conclude, “If I were to die tomorrow, not one of the fine people, whom I dine with every week, will take one cutlet with peas the less on Saturday at the table to which I was invited to meet them, or will smile less gaily at the ladies over the champagne.” Well, after all, the show must go on. “There are not ten people in the world whose deaths would spoil my dinner,” he predicted, “but there are one or two whose deaths would break my heart.” Macaulay’s stomach and heart were soon tested: the following year, his sister Margaret died unexpectedly. “Indeed, I never knew before what it was to be miserable,” he confided in a letter. “What she was to me no words can express.” Everyone’s a Stoic until his sister dies.

What about four sisters—and a brother? Months before Thoreau hit the road in 1849, Charlotte Brontë lost her last sibling Anne to tuberculosis and decided, “There must be heaven, or we must despair—for life seems bitter, brief—blank.” Brontë had good reason for the supposition. “Branwell—Emily—Anne are gone like dreams—gone as Maria and Elizabeth went twenty years ago. One by one I have watched them fall asleep on my arm—and closed their glazed eyes—I have seen them buried one by one—and—thus far—God has upheld me.” Here’s fortitude as well as compassion: death is a law of Nature, like gravity—try as we may to remain stable, it moves us. Would it have touched old Thoreau to learn that, after he died, his traveling companion Channing declared that “half the world died for me when I lost Mr. Thoreau”?

We are most ourselves when overcome by happiness or by grief, for it is at either end of the spectrum that we are in the least control—which explains why most of us fear one, the other, and often both simultaneously. It may also be why eloquence has a way of finding us in mourning, as it did Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg and Yamanoue no Okura at Kyushu. Eleven hundred years pass, the song remains the same.

What changes is the key in which the dirge is set. On that bleak shore, Thoreau saw that “corpses might be multiplied, as on the field of battle, till they no longer affected us in any degree, as exceptions to the common lot of humanity.” Nowadays news of the multiplications come from farther abroad, faster, and more furiously: change the final word to SYRIA and the headline DEATH! 145 LIVES LOST AT COHASSET is good to go. In 1986, Marguerite Duras said about TV news: “You ought to modify your expression when you announce an earthquake, or a bomb attack in Lebanon, or a bus crash, or the death of a celebrity. But you’re in such a hurry to get to the laughs you’re already in fits over the bus crash. And if you don’t do that, you are in trouble. You start having sleepless nights.” Apathy is the easiest way to avoid a crippling case of cognitive dissonance.

It isn’t the only way, though—and if, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wagered, the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function, then you can rage, rage against the dying of the light while holding as self-evident the truth that dying is also one of life’s duties. The point is that the dead, whether they are gone like dreams or half the world, remain in stone and on parchment, imparting lessons to the living. In his Devotions upon Emergent Themes, John Donne reckoned that “another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell that tells me of his affliction digs out and applies that gold to me.” That bell is the same one that tolls for thee.