Josh Fischel teaches high school English outside Boston. His work has appeared in The Believer and The New York Times. He is currently at work on a book about the propeller salvaged from the 1969 Mount Washington plane crash. 

In defiance of the infinite, loss is, in fact, calculable.

On Nov. 29, 1969, a plane that took off from Portland bound for Burlington crashed into Mount Washington, killing three Mainers: the pilot and his two passengers, skydivers dressed as Santa Claus, on their way to jump over shopping centers to ring in the start of the Christmas season.

We know the lengths, in years, of their brief lives: 19. 25. 27. All at once, 18 people lost a sibling; each skydiver had been one of 10. Six parents lost a child. One woman lost her husband, an infant his father. Three more women lost loves. Falling Stars, a recreational skydiving club back when recreational skydiving belonged chiefly to military veterans who were looking to relive their service, lost two of its members.

Other parts of grief, meanwhile, are harder to quantify.

Do you weigh a shoebox of letters sent by the pilot back home to Monmouth during a spiraling year spent at the University of Florida? “I never could do anything right except love you,” he wrote desperately to his high school girlfriend, “and that’s all I have right now.”

When you think about raising seven children with a husband you never loved as much as the person you loved most fiercely, do you measure it in the number of heartbeats you devoted to someone else? The pilot’s college girlfriend had expected a proposal from him.

Instead, she told me, “I got married for all the wrong reasons. I was just chasing things, and I never really found. I look at a lot of other people, and they found their niche in life — and I still bounce. Fifty-some-odd years later, and I’m still bouncing.”

Perhaps it is in cycles interrupted, days shifted from the ordinary to the indelible. Another woman never married; she’d had a crush on one of the skydivers since the eighth grade. They’d dated for six years, driving around the square at Houlton’s center and parking alongside other couples before retiring to the Borderland Drive-In, where he would indulge in a strawberry milkshake.

At the time of the crash, she said, “We weren’t together, but I hadn’t put him in the past. For a long time, I was always aware — a deep, searing, heart-rending awareness — of the 29th of the month, every month.” She was a teacher, of shorthand and typing, and then worked at a bank — a life of transcribing and accounting.

Of course, loss goes beyond units, too. 

The frantic calls between and among authorities and loved ones. They’re overdue. Have you heard anything? The hollow, pressing weight in the stomach. A chill crawling up over the shoulders.

The silence of a son calling his mother, waiting by her phone on Indian Island, unable to tell her that they’d both lost someone, and everything, but in that undefinable space, communicating exactly that. 

The sob that escaped one old girlfriend, over a half-century later, as she showed me pictures, possibilities. “It still hurts,” she said, composing herself. Who cares how much? 

The morning after the wreckage was found, the pilot’s flight instructor flew his parents over the spot where they’d lost the only person who would ever call them Mom and Dad. The father’s hair was black one day and snowy white the next, a childhood friend recalled. 

In this season of gratitude and gathering, we are reminded to count our blessings. Don’t.

There is no need for a ledger that determines how much you have or lack in comparison with anyone else. We should live in amounts, not numbers. But don’t discount your blessings, either.

Mourning can be a gift, a way to create space to welcome the people who can’t be at your table. They can show up in words and thoughts, in single tears and swamping waves alike. Allow yourself and others to celebrate them, even if it doesn’t look much like celebration. It all adds up to life.