Years of the Navy ignoring warning signs led to this tragedy, leaving a legacy of pain for each survivor — spouse, child or fellow aircrewman. Unlike one of the other widows, my husband was rescued right away, so at least I didn’t have to hold on to hope for six days that because a body had not been recovered he could still be alive. Unlike that woman, I didn’t have to watch as my four children were told that their father was eventually found in the wreckage, but the remains were “not suitable for viewing.” At least I didn’t have to live my life wondering who our children would have been and what my husband would have been like as a father, as the third widow does. And unlike the two men who survived the crash, I at least don’t have to live with chronic physical and mental wounds, racked by post-traumatic stress disorder. I got to hold my husband as he died, to kiss him goodbye. At least there’s that.

Wes reached the hospital still conscious, but hypothermia is persistent and cruel. By the time I was finally able to argue my way through hospital bureaucracy to get to him, his wide eyes were the same piercing blue-green hue, yet they were empty, lifeless. There he was — my husband, my best friend — succumbing to an inevitable, fatal reality. With my head on his chest, I pleaded: “Come back to me, J Wesley. Don’t leave, not now.” A nurse gently placed her hands on my shoulders and moved me to the back of the room. The sense of impending, inevitable anguish was crippling. I felt as if I was standing in the background of my own life — an idle observer of somebody else’s nightmare. I watched as my worst fear, magnified and amplified, cascaded past as if on an old movie reel. The reel came to an abrupt end: “Time of death, 4:35 p.m.” I became a widow, and Wes became a “was.” My world stopped. Then the questions started.

I’ve lost track of how many times people asked: “Do you need help? How can I help?” At some point, necessity taught me how to block them out. This question aggravated my already overwhelmed state of being and increased my sense of isolated otherness. While I appreciated the underlying desire to lessen the burden of grief, I thought the answer to the first question was glaringly obvious. Of course I was not O.K.; would you be?

Being asked how to help was equally jarring. In those first few months after Wes died, it rang so small-minded, so fortunately naïve. Expecting me to identify and communicate my needs was so painfully backward. Help or don’t help, I didn’t care. But did no one understand that I had to repeatedly remind myself to breathe? To remember that the brake pedal is on the left? That the boys need to eat, again? Please, please do not ask me to see through this haze of nothingness that shades my entire existence. Please do not require me to spend my precious energy on something so small. It is all being consumed by a monstrous void already.