Making sense of the Ahmedabad air crash tragedy is not easy.
There is something about it that just doesn’t feel right. In this
case, the pain is magnified by the fact that so many young
medical student lost their lives in act of utter randomness.

There are deaths that we see coming. They appear on the
horizon long before they arrive, sending signals, softening the
ground. An illness that lingers, a body that gradually yields, a
life that begins to recede gently into its final chapter. However
painful, this kind of death follows a familiar arc—one that gives
us time to prepare, to come to terms, to say our goodbyes in
small instalments.

But then there are other kinds of endings. Those that arrive
unannounced, like a trapdoor giving way beneath our feet. An
air crash. A road accident. A fall in the bathroom. A man who
walks into a gym and never walks out. There is no script for this
kind of exit. No farewell, no deterioration, no ritual of waiting.
One minute, a person exists—sending messages, adjusting
their seatbelt, thinking about lunch, rehearsing excuses for the
spouse—and the next, they are gone.

Sudden death is not content with taking away a person. It also
takes away our sense of continuity. It violates the basic story
arc we believe life should follow. We think of ourselves as
narrative beings. We begin, we rise, we plateau, we slowly
decline, and then—only then—we make our way to the exit. But
when death skips ahead in the story, tearing the page mid-
sentence, it leaves not just loss but disorientation in its wake.

We expect life to end a certain way. Slowly. With signs. With
the body signalling its wear and tear, the mind slowing its loops,
a gradual unwinding of presence. Death, in this imagination, is
a coda—something that follows after the music has begun to
quieten. It is an event we may dread, but also one we feel
faintly prepared for, because it follows a script. Even when
cruel, this kind of death is comprehensible. It gives us a slope,
a shape, a gentle curve into oblivion.

For the people left behind, grief is knotted with unreality. There
are no hospital visits, no conversations that prepare one for the
inevitable, no final words spoken in dim light. There is no
chance to adjust to absence. Just the brutality of abrupt silence.
The suitcase still packed. The lunchbox still in the fridge. The
last message still says “Call when you land.”

But even those not directly affected feel the jolt. Because such
tragedies unnerve us all. They shake the illusion that life is a
stable platform on which we dance, sometimes carefully,
sometimes recklessly, but always believing there is more time.
That if we are good, or lucky, or healthy, we will get to see how
our story ends. That there will be space to mend what is
broken, to say what hasn’t been said, to take that trip, to make
that change.

It is strange how sudden death universalises us. Strange
because it is the exception, not the norm—and yet it brings us
closer to the truth of death than anything else. We may live with
known risks—poor diet, stress, the slow attrition of time—and
yet it is the improbable event, the random snap, that leaves us
most shaken. The lie we tell ourselves about life being broadly
predictable gets abruptly exposed. In that moment, we can
vividly imagine it happening to us, no matter how low the odds.
Giving up smoking might feel difficult even in the face of
statistical risk, but a freak accident halfway around the world
makes us clutch our loved ones harder. It is not probability that
terrifies us—it is the realisation that control was always an
illusion.

And what of those who vanish from our lives without
warning—not celebrities, not news stories, but people we love?

People who anchor us, who shape the texture of our daily lives,
who make the hours make sense? People who are such an
essential part of our lives in the most ordinary way possible?
How do we absorb the fact of their disappearance? It feels like
a rip in the fabric of the world. Not just loss, but a kind of theft.
We don’t just grieve them—we grieve the version of ourselves
that existed in their company. Their absence is not silence, it is
noise. A ringing emptiness that feels not just painful but
fundamentally undeserved. The world continues, but something
essential no longer does, and only a few seem to notice. The
person is gone, and with them, the laughter in a room, the
private language, the everyday sacred. How does one live with
love that has nowhere left to go?

And yet, in that silence, we sometimes hear the faint crackle of
our own illusions breaking. The belief that we are in control.
That we have time. That we will always get to finish our
sentences.

Perhaps that is why such moments disturb us so deeply. They
remind us that not every life ends with closure. Some end in
motion. In anticipation. In the middle of laughter or sleep or a
long journey. And while that truth is hard to accept, it is also
real. Sometimes stories end in mid.

END OF ARTICLE