There isn't a title for this one

there really isn't

It’s Monday’s newspaper, though it’s now confirmed that all 72 people onboard—passengers and crew—died in the accident.

It’s not that uncommon here, sadly, but this crash is worse, being both the most deadly domestic aviation accident in the country’s history and the most fatalities of any crash since here PIA Flight 268 in 1992.

And I had planned something else to write about entirely, but this has been front and center of my mind since Sunday. It brings me back, as these tragedies often do, to another flight that crashed on its way to Pokhara, in the late 90s. Someone I knew had a relative on the plane, an older brother, I think, though it may have been one or both of their parents. The details are fuzzy now.

I was, at the time, clueless about grief, but I wanted to be a friend. Interminable phone calls, booze-slurred voice, and I tethered to a landline (remember those?), listening, trying to say something helpful, and underneath it all, the guilty knowledge that I was tired of listening to this person. Not at the beginning, of course. But when the calls continued to come, when the grief did not abate. Hadn’t it been long enough? Why were they still stuck there, all these months later? I believe—hope—those thoughts didn’t come through in anything I said; I hope it wasn’t obvious.

But I remember what I thought and it came back to haunt me in 2003, when my mother died. Bowled over as I was by grief, I eventually remembered those calls. Now, suddenly, it was all turned on its head. How could they still have been moving through life as a functional human after what they had been through? I was struggling like hell just to put one foot in front of another. They’d been so much stronger than I’d known.

*

Years pass. More loss. Those same things I thought now have been said to me: Are you over it yet? And as intrusive and insensitive as some comments are, I can’t ever be truly angry because I have thought the same, back before my world changed forever; I get it.

In answer to the question, I don’t think any of us are truly over it. Ever. We just find a new way to survive in the world. To live in a way that is true to ourselves and honors those who can’t be with us in person any longer.

Being faced with extreme, paralyzing sorrow when you’ve never experienced it is a little like a human meeting an alien, freshly landed from an unimaginable universe. Both are incomprehensible to each other.

I’m grateful for people who have given me simple acceptance and friendship, just as I was. Am. That old person wasn’t coming back. Do you like who I now am, even if it’s a little sadder, sometimes? A little weepy?

*

We did not keep in touch, I think I was too cowardly. If I’m honest, I can’t even recall a name, but I have never forgotten, and I believe if we ran into each other today, I’d recognize them, and could say something like. Back then, I didn’t have a clue, but I get it now. You were so much braver than either of us knew: you kept going.

*

More than anything this week, I’m remembering, and sorry the loved ones of those on Yeti Airlines Flight 691 have been thrust into this alien world, too.