Yes, I think it's possible. Empathy can be an intellectual identification with what someone else is feeling, not necessarily feeling & expressing the same emotion as them at that moment.
I can empathize with someone by grasping the basic experience they are going through. In the OP's scenario, that would be "loss". I may not have lost a child, but I grasp "pain from loss".
It does seem related to type to find empathic thinking more natural than others. That Dario Nardi experiment (not a valid scientific "study", I know) suggests xNFPs use this thinking the most. I experience it as grasping the essence of someone intuitively, without knowing all their details or having experienced what they have, and simulating that within myself to identify how they would feel in their situation or how an emotion is experienced for them, as opposed to how I would feel or how I experience an emotion. This makes my personal experience less important than the ability to understand who they are & how they feel. Because even if I have experienced something similar, my feeling & emotional reaction might be quite different. It's like every person is a different internal context for experience, and empathizing is grasping that context as much as the experience & resulting emotions in themselves.
I DO notice that people who are very literal can struggle with empathy when it's not something they're personally familiar with though. I think deeper empathy definitely has to be learned for many.