“This is so sad.” My husband said as he read a post on Facebook.

A former student of his, now working as a nurse in Wichita, had found her soulmate and recently became engaged to a man at the hospital where she worked. He was an EMT on helicopter runs. They excitedly planned a wedding and looked forward to their future together.

Then the helicopter he was on crashed in Oklahoma on a return flight from delivering a patient. Her fiancé, the love of her life, died in that crash. And her world fell apart.

It is sad. My husband looked at me and asked, “Do you think it would help her if we sent your book?”

He was referring to my memoir In the Shadow of the Wind, telling my own story from younger years of a lost love and how I was able to embrace life after the loss. “Someday maybe,” I answered. “This is too fresh for her. The book can be hard to read if your grief is fresh.”

It got me to thinking about grief again. We all experience the devastation of loss at times in our lives. To love someone is to risk heartbreak. One or the other in a loving relationship will someday face that inevitable loss. You just hope it will be years down the road, not tomorrow. But when a tragic accident happens, what can we do to help the survivor?

First, I think, we need to understand that every loss is complex. If no two people are identical, it can also be said that no two losses can be the same either. Nor is there any “proper” way to grieve. Each survivor has to find their own way forward, best done without others suggesting that they need to try a different approach, that their feelings are wrong, or mistaken.

There is no proper way to grieve. What we can do to help is just be there. Offer hugs, if hugs are wanted. Listen to a grieving friend without trying to solve a problem for them. Just listen. Give them a safe place to open their hearts and work through their grief.

It’s easy to understand the emptiness someone feels when they lose a friend, a fiancé, or a spouse. It’s perhaps more difficult to realize the many faces their grief takes on. The young nurse who lost her love already knows that the future they planned is gone. It no longer exists. She grieves for their lost years. Perhaps they talked of children. They too are gone, before they were born, along with all the family holidays and vacations, birthday parties, visits to grandparents, sports outings—everything that might have been is different now. It has changed and cannot be recovered. Each of those burst dreams compounds her feelings of grief.

What this newly bereaved nurse can benefit from are friends who listen as she rails against the universe and cries for her fiancé, and as she bemoans those babes who will never be born, as she lets go of the future they once dreamed together. She needs friends who wrap her in love and compassion and offer hugs to ease heavy arms that ache to hold her soulmate and those babes. She needs friends who travel the path with her as she lets go of a future that has evaporated in a fraction of a second, and give her permission to grieve in a way that works for her, never pushing her to be done with it, but recognizing that her journey is her own.

There is no right or wrong way to travel that road. The upheaval will grow easier with time, but the journey never ends. And each survivor’s path is unique.