When we are young and healthy, and haven't yet encountered great disappointment or sorrow, it is easy to think that life will be happy and carefree. But, all of us will eventually have experiences that will have the potential to rock our world. You notice that our title is “When” Tragedy Strikes, not “If” Tragedy Strikes, because tragedy is a fact of life for everyone at some point. Life can be painful, and to be human is to suffer.

You see, from the beginning of time, mankind’s problems have all come from our attempts to be self-sufficient and in control of our own lives. Suffering has a way of putting us in situations over which we have no control. This is the main reason that tragedies evoke so much horror, because being out of control frightens us and makes us feel helpless.

Tragedy wears many faces:

Most of the time, when tragedy strikes, the first question we ask is “WHY?” We think if we can only answer the “why” question, we will be able to understand and make sense of what has happened, thereby guaranteeing that we can prevent it from happening again. The “why” question is really just an attempt to regain the control over our lives that we feel the tragedy has stolen from us.

The horror, which is really fear over what we see as loss of control, is usually what hits us first when tragedy strikes. Right behind the horror or fear is the second wave, which is hurt or grief. Sometimes it is almost impossible to tell the horror and the hurt apart, because most of us don’t realize that deep grief feels just like fear.

It is easy to believe that we are experiencing great fear, when what we are really feeling is tremendous grief. We grieve our losses: the loss of someone we love, the loss of our innocence, the loss of a dream, the loss of our sense of security, or the hope we had before the tragedy occurred.

Grieving is not a place, it is a process and to effectively deal with a traumatic experience, it must be a complete process. Grief is like a long, winding road through mountains and valleys. Around every bend is a new landscape. Some days you’ll be surprised by where you are in this process, and other days the scenery will look like it is never going to change.

You can’t map out sorrow, but there are some mile markers along the way you can look for. You may go slowly through one place and quickly through another. Or you may go back and forth between places you have already visited. Most of the time however, you won’t progress to the next mile marker until you have let yourself fully experience all that is there for you at your present location.

All different, yet all alike in the horror that immediately crashes over us like a tidal wave when a tragedy strikes.