I am angry. I’m frustrated. But most of all I mourn a loss I cannot wrap my heart and head around. Not the kind of morning I’m used to, not the kind of mourning like when my friend died after we had played together in a band. Not the kind of sadness after the passing of a young man I mentored who died senselessly in a car accident. Not the kind of grateful sadness that accompanies the celebration of life after a grandparent passes away. My heart is broken in 67 places as I wrestle with the question of whether I could have done something differently to help prevent this.

I feel like I could have done something, and I refuse to comfort myself by saying I did everything I could. I honestly do not know if that’s true, but it doesn’t matter because you can’t change the past. What I do know is that our system is designed to ensure that aviation safety is not the responsibility of any single person. The best you can do is blame the process because everyone is trying to do the right thing in an environment that is complex, challenging, and never boils down to just one thing. That makes it nearly impossible to make an argument for a new derived requirement when there’s no budget for it and there are a thousand other competing demands and just as many voices arguing for other priorities.

I felt like I was racing against the clock. I lost. But I was so out of touch with this cascading sense of responsibility in my heart – I never had the authority to actually do anything other than advocate for change – that I did not at first even realize that I was mourning. I did not know the families or aviators directly, so I did not feel I had permission to mourn. I was not on the list of first responders knee deep in icy water and mucky silt. I am not on the accident investigation board. But I was closer to this than any other tragic moment because – not just because I was in DC, just on the waterfront across from DCA – because I was there advocating for the very changes needed to fix exactly this issue I fear may be at the root of this tragedy. And now this is a day that will be forever seared into my heart.

I felt like I had to say something, stuck in my hotel alone with my thoughts and angry that I was not fast enough, loud enough, clear enough, technical enough, bold enough – all right, ENOUGH ALREADY! So I blasted off a blog post, too soon, not thinking my voice would carry. I did not give anyone else a chance to mourn, either. And that is what leads me to this moment, and my lament. In the moments before an accident you cannot predict the thing that gets heard and the one that gets ignored, so we temper our concerns, of “one day this could happen,” with technical resolve to just spell out facts and work on improving the process to the best of our ability. You don’t go about changing something so complex as defense aviation by crying wolf, when the skies are still by far safer than the car ride from the airport. And now, the only crying I should do is in silence until the time for mourning has passed.

I feel like we have lost touch with how to mourn as a community. Human error is a convenient excuse, and you cannot blame your way into comfort. I arrived at Pope AFB just a few weeks after a horrific plane crash killed and wounded so many members of the 82nd Airborne and then went to work in a building where every morning I parked looking onto that same tarmac – I entered a community in mourning and kept silent with them. Later in my time, friends from my unit were stricken by the terrorist attack on Khobar Towers, where I had just stayed a few months before on my previous rotation. We mourned together and took action to prevent future casualties. I remember the very moment I heard of the attack on 9/11 and we scrambled to find out the details of family and friends, including my mother in law, then a flight attendant stationed in New York. The whole nation mourned together. Then the shooting at UAH where I had met just days prior with the shooter about the new startup company she was mentoring across the street from the college. Our whole small community mourned together. Those moments were not as close or intimate for everyone in the community as they were for some who lost family or friends, yet all mourned.

I feel alone. It’s only been a few days and I am home – away from the still painful nearness of those suffering in DC, Wichita, and across the nation where this moment has reached out and seized their hearts. However, I know I am not alone. I am surrounded by people in the Aviation industry who are also wrestling with how life can just go on as the news shifts. We watch people we love, who are a few more steps removed than us, and we want them to cry with us, though they do not know how. Perhaps this is much the way I may have not known how to mourn with my friends from California as I scrolled over news of the fires in LA, said a prayer, and moved on. But we cannot and should not simply move on. This morning, we must go to work and keep focus on the thousands of other things we do that no one outside our industry will understand and that still nonetheless keeps them safe. Only today our hearts are heavier.