Over the weekend, I saw a breaking news story about a skydiving plane crash. There were no survivors. As heartbreaking as that fact was, it wasn’t what weighed on me.
The article noted that some of the victims’ family members were at the airfield and witnessed the crash.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about them.
Before I go any further, I want to acknowledge something important: all grief is different. All grief is personal. There is no hierarchy of loss, and no one person’s grief should be judged against someone else’s. The circumstances may differ, but every loss matters because every relationship is unique.
As I thought about the families who witnessed that tragedy, I found myself reflecting on conversations I’ve had in grief groups at Solace House. Some people in those groups lost their person after a long illness. Others experienced a sudden and unexpected loss. Over time, I’ve noticed that while grief eventually asks many of us similar questions, it often begins in different places.
When my husband John was living with cancer, I experienced something called anticipatory grief. Long before he died, I was grieving pieces of the life we thought we would have together. Each treatment that stopped working, each change in his health, and each difficult conversation forced me to confront the reality that our future was changing.
That experience shaped my grief after he died.
One of the books that many people find meaningful is Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. In it, she describes moments when she found herself thinking that her husband might walk through the door, despite knowing he had died.
I remember reading that and realizing how different grief can be.
I didn’t have that experience. By the time John died, I had spent months watching his body decline. I had already begun grieving the loss of our future together. That didn’t make his death easier. It didn’t make the grief smaller. It simply meant that some of my grieving had begun before his death rather than after it.
Not everyone who experiences a sudden loss lacks anticipatory grief. Life is more complicated than that. Likewise, not everyone who loses someone after an illness grieves in the same way I did.
Still, I have noticed that the first questions people wrestle with are often different.
For those who experience a sudden loss, grief often begins with a search for answers.
What happened?
Why did it happen?
Could it have been prevented?
What were their last moments like?
I hear these questions often in grief groups. People try to piece together timelines. They replay conversations. They search for details. They want to understand how the unimaginable became reality.
As I thought about the families who witnessed that plane crash, I imagined how important the investigation will be to them. Understanding what happened won’t remove their grief, but seeking those answers is a very natural part of making sense of a sudden loss.
For those who have spent months or years caregiving, grief sometimes begins elsewhere.
Did I do enough?
Did they know they were loved?
Who am I now?
What does my life look like moving forward?
Those questions can appear after any loss, but they often arrive earlier when someone has already spent time confronting the reality that death was coming.
What I’ve learned is that the starting point doesn’t determine the depth of grief. It simply influences the questions that occupy our minds in those early days, months, and years.
One thing I’ve also observed is that grief is rarely solved by finding a single answer.
Many people believe that if they could just uncover one missing piece of information, they would finally feel at peace. Sometimes answers do help. Sometimes understanding what happened provides comfort or closure.
But grief isn’t a puzzle to be solved.
Even when answers come, the loss remains.
And over time, the paths of grief often begin to overlap.
The person searching for answers about what happened may eventually find themselves asking who they are without the person they lost.
The caregiver who spent months preparing for a death may still find themselves wrestling with questions that have no answers.
What would our life have looked like?
What moments will they miss?
How do I carry them with me while continuing to move forward?
The older I get, the more convinced I am that grief shouldn’t be measured or compared. We don’t all start from the same place. Some people spend months preparing for a loss. Others are thrust into it without warning. Some search for answers about what happened. Others search for answers about who they are now.
The questions may be different, but the longing underneath them is often the same.
We are all trying to make sense of a world that has been forever changed by the absence of someone we love.
