Diablo 3 Hardcore: Win some, lose some, win some.

The thing about hardcore mode is how nervous I get. It would be hard enough on my own; I could go as slow and careful as I want, and if I died, meh, I died.
With three other people to watch, that’s just… exponentially more stressful. And this time, I picked the healer… so when someone dies, it’s my fault.
Instead of yelling “TRAP! TRAP! TRAP!” into the microphone, I have to yell “HEALTH! HEALTH! HEALTH!”
But sometimes I get carried away with dealing death because, monk, right? I was flashing around the battlefield like the Last Airbender, and things were going great. Calrain (née Ulan) died last week and caught quickly up. We got through mini-bosses. We beat some evil floating person. I can’t remember who, but she was evil and we killed her. We all got upgrades from the loot and many times returned to New Tristam to sell and craft.
Was about an hour in when Stingite (née Gleek) died. It was trees that spit green goo. Stingite spit green goo, too — turned into frogs and stuff. Anyway I was meleeing and my health started dropping fast, so I hit my heal and then Q’d a potion as I ran off, yelling into the mike (as we’d agreed) that I was fleeing for my health.
Stingite, though, was dead by then. Calrain was 12, the Spode and I were 13, and Stingite was level 0. Kinda put a damper on stuff.
We were going to end it for the night, when Stingite remembered his _other_ hardcore witch doctor, level 14, so he brought her on and we continued.
Stingite now thinks we should all make parallel hardcore characters to take over if our main dies, and while I admit that would be kind, I feel the whole point of the exercise is to level together. If I level another character in parallel, it would seem, to me, as if I was saying, hey, you guys in the group are holding me back. I could do just as well without you.
Nah — I LIKE the danger. Blizzard has clearly written the game so that people catch up rapidly for a reason. I don’t want my character to die, but I expect it will happen at some point. We’ve met two nights, and each night a character has died. It’s a dangerous world, we could lose horribly at any time — the trees showed that. Without any risk, the game is boring.
When death is on the line… that’s when the game comes alive.

Ended the night at level 14, still in Act I. I think we’ll kill the Butcher next week, unless he kills us first.
I’m looking forward to Nightmare hardcore. We have to do that with no deaths at all. It’s gonna be a challenge.