Death and the Brahma Vihara

At first glance Death and the Brahma Vihara may seem odd companions, however over the years they have come to make perfect sense as companion meditations.
For meditating on Death will cause you to re-evaluate your life. I found that after about six months of meditating on Death and having had the living daylights frightened out of me by realising just how fragile we are and how near Death is, that I went through my mental list of what was important to me. Perhaps it is no great surprise that the list essentially inverted itself. The material things, the house, the career went to the bottom and loving people went to the top. I realised that telling the people you love that you love them only really makes sense when they are alive. Meditating on Death helped motivate me in not only my war with depression but also my Metta practice.
It perhaps seems odd that meditating on Death would help in fighting Depression. I found that meditating on Death removed the illusion that I had forever to win my fight. I was motivated to spend more time on my cushion and to honestly find the sources of pain and to practice Forgiveness.
I think how Death helped and continues to help with Metta would be obvious. It's the same story as the one with Depression. We don't have forever to get things right and Death compels us to see and accept  this, at times extremely unpleasant fact of life.
Once we see our mortality and see the fragility of other people there is the chance for Karuna to arise. And this song by Sting illustrates this .http://youtu.be/lB6a-iD6ZOY
In my reading lately..."The Places That Scare You" by Pema Chodron there is an absolute emphasis on how interconnected we all are. When we can sit with our pain and suffering and then see that everyone of the six billion people on the planet suffers exactly as we do, the separation between us and them begins to lessen. It may lessen at the same rate in which continents drift, but it is set in motion.
Once that sense of commonality is in existence and even if it is about as substantial as incense smoke, it is there and we can see that we share not only the suffering, but also the joys of everyone else. Mudita is in existence. One of the nicer aspects of being a parent is the new things my son does on a regular basis. Yesterday he climbed into a rocking chair and rocked, mind you we had to convince him that standing in the chair was not a good idea, but he did something that he has never done before. We both had such happiness for him. And once the mind becomes accustomed to taking joy in someone elses successes in life you will find that jealousy for example isn't such an aspect of you. If someone succeeds after working hard, it is wonderful to share in their happiness. We aren't so threatened by someone elses abilities when we become accustomed to taking joy in them.
And ultimately there is Upekkha. The willingness to accept that the planet and our own bodies are essentially beyond our control. I love my son beyond all words and in ways that frighten me, but there is that quiet whisper at the back of my mind that Selina and I invited him to take rebirth and that he has always had and always will have his own kamma and will leave this lifetime when he is meant to and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. Meditating on Death helps with this. Loving my son is one thing, giving him the space in which to live and ultimately die in is another. Death gives space.
We need to be reminded periodically that we are not immortal and that a lot of the things we take so seriously are often not worth the time we devote to them, especially our angers. The Buddha himself reccomended that we be continuously in touch with the fact that Death is waiting for all of us. We tend to ignore the sheer number of tales of people dropping dead on the golf course, during sex, walking the dog or even as Ajahn Brahm tells of someone was talking to him, paused and died. Once we see Death as a constant fact in our lives, the vast majority of the nonsense disappears and what we are left with is: Metta, Karuna, Mudita and Upekkha.