Lucy Hone never imagined her life's work would become her lifeline.
As a resilience researcher, she had devoted years to understanding how people endure and overcome life's most devastating challenges.
She worked alongside some of the brightest minds in the field, including those tasked with training American soldiers to be as mentally strong as they were physically.
It was her passion—taking the complex findings of academia and bringing them into everyday lives.
When earthquakes shook her hometown of Christchurch, New Zealand, Lucy threw herself into the community, teaching resilience strategies to help people rebuild.
It felt like her calling.
Then, on Queen’s Birthday weekend in 2014, everything changed.
It was meant to be a family getaway.
Lucy, her husband, and their children, along with two other families, were heading to Lake Ohau for a weekend of biking and togetherness.
At the last minute, Lucy’s 12-year-old daughter Abby decided to ride with her best friend Ella and Ella’s mother, Sally—a close family friend.
It was a carefree moment, the kind you don’t think twice about.
On the way down, on Thompson’s Track, another car sped through a stop sign.
In an instant, Abby, Ella, and Sally were gone.
The call came, and Lucy’s world shattered.
The woman who had spent her career teaching others how to rise from adversity now found herself on the other side of the equation.
No longer the expert, she was the grieving mother.
Waking up felt unbearable.
Each morning brought the same unthinkable reality—Abby was gone, her world irreparably altered.
And the advice? It didn’t help.
Lucy was handed leaflets about the five stages of grief.
Well-meaning professionals told her family they were now at high risk for divorce, estrangement, and mental illness.
One support worker advised her to “write off the next five years.”
These warnings were meant to prepare her, but all they did was make her feel powerless.
It was as though her life had been reduced to a statistic, a prewritten script of sorrow and loss.
What Lucy needed most was hope.
She couldn’t find it in the pamphlets or predictions.
So, Lucy decided to turn inward—to conduct what she called a "self-experiment."
Could the strategies she had spent her career teaching others truly work for her?
She didn’t know.
Parental bereavement is widely regarded as the hardest loss to endure.
But she was determined to find out if resilience could help her navigate this mountain of grief.
It wasn’t easy.
There were no shortcuts, no quick fixes.
Drawing on her knowledge, she focused on three key strategies:
1. Accepting that Suffering is Part of Life
She acknowledged that adversity doesn't discriminate and that suffering is a universal human experience.
This understanding helped her avoid feeling isolated in her grief.
2. Choosing Where to Direct Her Attention
Despite the pain, she made a conscious effort to focus on gratitude.
She found solace in the support of family and friends and the presence of her two sons who still needed her.
3. Asking Herself Whether Her Actions Were Helping or Harming Her
She regularly questioned whether her thoughts and behaviors were aiding her healing or exacerbating her pain.
This guided her decisions, like choosing not to attend the trial of the driver involved in the accident and recognizing when to step away from activities that intensified her grief.
For Lucy, resilience didn’t remove the pain of losing Abby.
But it taught her how to live with it.
Five years later, she stood before an audience to share her story—not as a researcher cloaked in academic theory, but as a mother who had faced the worst and found a way to keep going.
Her message was simple but powerful:
Adversity doesn’t discriminate.
Suffering is part of being human.
And while we can’t choose the tragedies that befall us, we can choose how we respond.
Lucy Hone will always carry the weight of Abby’s loss.
But in the depths of her grief, she found something extraordinary—the ability to rise, to live, and to hold onto hope.
This post was inspired by Lucy Hone's Ted Talk, The Three Secrets of Resilient People.