Unintentional injury is the number one risk to the health and wellbeing of young men in North America. Barth (2001) has referred to young men between 15 and 25 as the “dangerous demographic” because of the elevated mortality in this group, as a result of injury due to car accidents, reckless behaviours and violence (Statistics Canada, 2005). While a majority of deaths occurring among young men are sudden and accidental, there is a paucity of research exploring the impact of these deaths on their male peers. Our study findings address this knowledge gap by making available an array of reactions and masculine identities that emerge in and around the tragic losses that so often occur among young men. Evident were young men’s vulnerabilities that flowed from their profound unexpected losses and accompanying participant’s words were a collage of highly revealing photographs. Within the men’s grief processes were the influence of masculine ideals that guided how they might reasonably grieve in public when the events were fresh in participant’s minds. Stoicism and anger can all be explained away as masculine ideals to which the men could legitimately align. We do not intend to argue that embodying these masculine ideas was either positive or negative for the health of participants. On the contrary, outpouring of emotion do not necessarily foster a ‘better’ experience of grief, and given the young age of the participants e relying on the aforementioned masculine ideals may have afforded some familiar performativity terrain to ease the sense of profound loss.