The Final Irreducible Integer

I came across this quote this morning while reading Dorothy L. Sayers' The Just Vengeance (The Lichfield Festival Play for 1946). The thought seems appropriate in a time when death tolls continue to rise in both Iraq and the hurricane ravaged South.

Yet every man dies once,
Once, and no more. A universe is extinguished
Every time a soul goes out of it--
The same universe, in a million deaths or one,
The one is the important figure; the rest are ciphers.
The single death which each endures by himself
Is never multiplied, though it is reckoned in millions;
Nor diminished by any division, though a million men
Were summoned in a single dying man dying once for all;
That is the final irreducible integer
Of each man's reckoning. We die into something
As we were born into something; but the act of death,
Like the act of being born, is an individual matter, ...