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On the first day of this month a Learjet 60 crossing Florida on its way to the Bahamas suffered a catastrophic loss of control and plunged in a matter of seconds from over thirty thousand feet directly into the ground, killing all nine people aboard. By the most amazing turn of luck, despite the crash taking place in the city of West Palm Beach, Florida, and on its streets during the day, apparently no one on the ground was killed in the accident. The horrific event was, in part, captured on video from a driver’s dashboard camera with one frame showing a heavily motion-blurred image of the doomed aircraft nose down just above the street where it crashed. That image, the barely discernible outline of the sleek jet frozen in its final moment before impact, haunts my mind.

The seven passengers and two crew of the aircraft occupy my thoughts and my imagination. It is all too easy, so easy in fact that the process spontaneously occurs, for me to envision the terror that they suffered in their final moments alive. The fright as the jet encountered thunderstorm-generated turbulence, the screams as it not just fell but dove from high above Florida, the g-forces that pushed and pulled on them, all this comes easily to my mind and fills my heart with deep, deep sorrow.

There are people, vile, petty, and heartless, who have already seized on the gender of the crew, using this tragedy for their small-minded political purposes. I pity these poor, damaged specimens of humanity that appear to lack the basic empathy to have any consideration for others or anything beyond their own narrow objectives.

I do not know, nor do I pretend to know, what caused this terrible event. That is for the experts to determine, and that process is not a quick or easy endeavor. What I know is how I feel about the people, the family aboard, their friends traveling with them to a sunny beach, the nanny working her job, and the absolute and all-consuming fear that defined the end of their lives. I feel this because my mind, my riotous imagination, refuses to let the pictures of what may have transpired in their doomed cabin leave my thoughts. This happens very often with these very public tragedies and the too-frequent scenes of mass murder that take place in our deeply damaged nation. It is these visualizations that can disrupt my sleep, bringing about sorrow and depression.

But it is not without its blessing.

The same unrequested talent that envisions what it may be like to be caught up in such terrible events is the same process that brings to me characters, settings, and concepts that I explore in fiction. The pain I feel when I think about what reality has visited upon real persons I can transfer to the people who only exist in my mind. When I write about characters in danger of losing their lives, this empathy and ability to put myself so completely in another’s point of view becomes an asset and not just something to endure. This empathic viewpoint extends far beyond just fear and pain: it allows me to walk in the shoes of a woman in love with her man, of a gay man seeing the joy in discovering another who reflects his attraction, and to feel the thrill of skydiving, though that is a hobby I am far from engaging in. The benefits extend far beyond the artistic: when issues of political policy come to the fore, it is far easier to imagine what something might do to lives that are not my own.

I would not trade away that imagination that allows me to create whole worlds and peoples for the poor peace of being soulless and unfeeling in the face of tragedies. Nothing good comes for free, and the price of the best and worst things in life is very rarely in cash; it is in what they do to you as a person.

I desperately hope that something can be learned from this terrible crash in Florida that makes the world a little safer for flight, and I will continue to bear the emotional weight of this cursed and blessed mind.