A friend's death at the 2022 World Cup, and what grief can teach us

From the book LEGS HEARTS MINDS: Loss and Its Remedies by Chris Jones. Copyright © 2026 by Chris Jones. Published by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Chris Jones covered the 2022 World Cup in Qatar for CBC and was there when famed American soccer writer Grant Wahl died. In his new memoir, Legs Hearts Minds: Loss and Its Remedies, Jones reflects on the loss of his friend.

The day after Grant died, I headed to the last of the World Cup quarterfinals: England versus France at Al Bayt, the make-believe Bedouin tent in the desert. I sat on the bus and watched the dunes streak by in a thin purple light. Pat, my editor at CBC, had told me to take the day off, but I didn’t want to sit alone in my apartment. I wanted to watch some soccer.

I took my seat. Just to my left, there was a framed photograph of Grant and a bouquet of white flowers where he was supposed to sit: Desk 305, Seat A. I looked at it for a long time. The game began, and I tried to get drawn into it. I didn’t get all the way there. It was a good game, but it was filled with football’s version of heartbreak — Harry Kane missed a penalty that will haunt him forever, and England lost again, 2­-1 — and I couldn’t keep my eyes from wandering to my left, or my mind from wandering with them.

I know Grant’s death was not about me. It was about him and the loss of him, and the people who loved him whom he left behind, his wife, Céline, especially. But I was rocked by his departure, unlike any other I had experienced. I won’t pretend we were best friends, but he was my friend; more than that, I thought of him as an ally. When I’d covered my first World Cup in South Africa in 2010, I was nervous and overwhelmed. Even