A Fire Chief’s Perspective on Grief and Mourning & Tips for Supporting First Responders’ Grief
As a grief and loss coach, I meet with people dealing with a range of grief and loss. When I met Rick Davis and heard his story of leadership as a fire department battalion chief, I wanted to learn more about grief and mourning in the firefighting and first responder culture. Rick is going to share his story in this post. Rick is a leader, former firefighter, and author and has a lot of wisdom to share from his grief and loss experience.
When we talked about this blog post, we discussed the differences and similarities between mourning and grieving. While there is still much to be discussed on this topic, simply put, grieving is the personal and internal thoughts, feelings, and emotions that each individual goes through when they lose someone or something. This response to loss is unique to them and their own personal grief experience, and yet, there are universal themes regarding grief. It is something that is not linear and can impact individuals from their social relationships to their physical, spiritual, and mental health. Mourning can be the griever’s response to grief, which allows the griever to process and express grief. Mourning is also a shared grieving experience within a community of support, and is often acknowledged at funerals, through meal trains, and much more, and it is a community response to an individual’s grief. Especially in the firefighting culture, there is a sense of community, which provides an opportunity for purposeful and meaningful mourning. And yet, there is still much shame around needing to mourn and/or grieve individually. While the fire service utilizes symbolism and memories as a form of mourning, too little attention is paid to the necessary and meaningful grief experiences of each individual within the community. As we share Rick’s story, our hope is that we bring more awareness to the need to support those who are grieving as well as awareness to the personal experiences each individual is grappling with as they grieve a loss.
Rick’s Story as Told by Rick
I invested thirty-seven years of my life as a firefighter. My first exposure to the fire service happened during a Memorial Day parade when I rode on a fire engine. The following year, my dad gave me his badge from his time serving as a volunteer firefighter in New Jersey.
When I was in grade school, my dad suffered his first heart attack. That was followed by three more heart attacks and numerous severe bouts of angina, all of which hospitalized him for weeks at a time.
March 9th dawned sunny and clear. Running home after school, I stopped by the fire house, and looking through the glass, I admired the large shiny fire engines. My next stop was home and opening the kitchen door I found my dad lying dead on the floor.
I ran next door to get my neighbor and then dialed zero for the operator, as we did not yet have 9-1-1. Our community did not have an ambulance, but one finally arrived from the volunteer fire department in a neighboring town. As they loaded my dad into the back of the ambulance, I vowed that I would become a firefighter. My dad was forty-one years old when he died, and I was fourteen.
After that, the firehouse became my hangout. When I turned eighteen, I joined the Cedarville Fire Department and entered the U.S. Air Force delayed enlistment program. From there my firefighting career extended to the Air Force as both a military and civilian firefighter, the Marine Corps as a firefighter, and eventually to the Loveland Fire Rescue Authority, Colorado where I served for thirty years, retiring as a battalion chief in May of 2020.
In 1972 when my dad died, the men in my life were military veterans of World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Consequently, there was no opportunity to express my grief because all of them had pushed their combat grief deep down into the recesses of their lives, and I was expected to do the same.
For example, as the ambulance pulled away from our driveway on March 9th, my brother and I began crying. Our neighbor Art said, “None of that. You’re men now.” Looking at me directly in the eyes, his matter-of-fact statement was, “You’re the man of the house now.” That was a weighty statement and it contributed to me pushing the grief down as far as I could.
Over the following years, I tried to cope with the meaning of my dad’s death but could never arrive at a satisfactory answer. It wasn’t until I was with Loveland Fire Rescue that the grief chickens came home to roost. Why then and why so long? The answer lies in the fact that prior to my service with Loveland Fire, I did not respond to emergency medical calls in Cedarville or with the military. But now I was an EMT-B and responded to patients with chest pains and cardiac arrests.
The years of pushing down the grief of my dad’s death shot to the surface between September 1994 and January 1995 when I responded to twelve cardiac arrests. All but one was in the same age range as my dad. I struggled with this, and it became worse after the department chaplain delivered a class on critical incident stress.
My mother-in-law worked at Hospice, and she suggested to my wife that I speak with a grief counselor that was on staff. I was adamantly opposed to this because military veterans and firefighters weren’t supposed to do that sort of thing. Eventually I gave in, but I wanted my wife to go with me.
The grief counselor’s name was Nancy and in three short sessions she took me through steps where I dealt with my grief, and it all revolved around writing a letter to my dad. In the letter I told him what it was like to find him on the floor, what my teen years were like, how I had served in the Air Force and Marine Corps, that I was married and had two girls, and how I was serving as a paid firefighter in Loveland.
During my last visit with Nancy, she had me take one simple step that had an enormous impact on my life. She had me read the letter aloud and the tears flowed down my cheeks. When I finished, Nancy sat a trash can in front of me and said, “Now Rick, I want you to tear up the letter.” It is difficult to explain the sense of satisfying relief of having the weight of grief lifted by that one simple act.
Prior to my visits with Nancy, I cringed every time we were dispatched to a cardiac arrest. I always wondered if it was going to be another male in his early forties and what emotions were going to be dredged up in my life. After my counseling sessions with Nancy, I never again experienced those same feelings. That’s not to say that I didn’t have sympathy for the patient’s family. I am saying that I didn’t experience the same dreaded experiences of grief related to my dad’s death.
Those of us involved in fire, law enforcement, and EMS see and deal with things the public has no idea about. We see physical and emotional injuries, we see death, we see lives forever changed. We see comrades who have taken their own lives and we see fellow servants who have died in the line of duty or from a disease contracted because of the profession. All of that can and does take a toll on us physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
Grief is real, and grief can and should be addressed. Don’t go years carrying the heavy weight of grief on your shoulders. Seek support that can help you and in turn help your family and those around you.
A Sampling of Tips and Resources for Mourning and Grieving for First Responders
Mourning as a community - supporting first responders as a community
Show up by…
Ask them how they are doing today and how they were yesterday. Provide space by listening and allowing for silence. Do not expect an answer that you planned on hearing; rather, let the individual show up as themselves and who they are in the moment.
Let them respond how they need to with you. You may know little about the difficulty they may be facing regarding grief on the job and in their personal lives. The amount of grief in their professional lives may be compounded, so it is okay if they need to process other losses.
While rituals may often be helpful in processing loss, recognize that whatever rituals may be in place in your unit for grief and loss may or may not be helpful for an individual. The grieving individual does not need to grieve in any way that does not work for them.
Advocate for workplace policies that hold space for meaningful mourning. Utilize surveys to understand how best to support each individual through grief. Utilize compassionate leadership strategies to implement the results of the surveys.
Compassionate and progressive grief and loss workplace policies are critical to helping everyone within an organization move forward in authentic and meaningful ways.
Ensure workplace policies provide flexible mourning and grief support.
Grieving as a first responder - “Grief is the process that must take place for that wound to heal.”
Create movement to process your grief such as: talking, writing a letter, creating latitude for emotional expression; moving your body; and/or trying a modality for expressing yourself.
1) Talk it out with someone you trust and continue to create space for yourself to process aloud.
2) As Rick mentioned in his story, writing a letter to the deceased or harmed, reading it aloud, and tearing up the letter may be a strategy for dealing with your grief.
3) As you are often experiencing high stress and possibly life and death situations that people in other professions may not be experiencing, you may have a lot of grief to process and move through day-to-day and year-to-year, so make movement your goal. What I mean by movement is to create space for buoyancy by knowing what makes you most resilient while also dealing with complicated feelings and even contradictory feelings that come up with grief and loss, tending to these thoughts and feelings overtime. Resiliency is not ignoring grief; rather, it is about taking the time you need to grieve while also utilizing tools and strategies that may be helpful to you, acknowledging and not neglecting the difficult emotions.
4) Possibly work out or get your body moving. Gentle workouts may be a good starting place for some, and others may desire more rigorous workouts. Some individuals may like restorative yoga while others may lift heavy weights.
5) In day-to-day situations it may be difficult to find words to describe events or to describe how we are feeling in the moment. It can be hard to tap into the full nuance of how we are doing, feeling, and responding to things around us as well as what is going on inside of us. We sometimes just do not have the vocabulary. We often need more words, language, art, music, and more to express what it is we are feeling, so possibly try various modalities of expression such as art, comedy, journaling, or playing music.
Recognize your strengths and how you can leverage those to heal. Take time to explore them and utilize them in your day-to-day life to move toward healing and a renewed purpose in life.
Be informed about grief. For example, grief can cause fatigue and mental fog. Knowing what one may expect while grieving may help better cope with loss.
Learning about grief and how you grieve is an ongoing process with no clear answers or timeline, so be kind to yourself as you continue to evolve.
Seek outside help - whether you use the staff social worker or therapist or seek out other grief support help, know what your workplace policies and financial benefits are for utilizing these types of support.
Know how you best emotionally respond to difficult workdays. Does it help you to find closure about rescues you have been a part of or do you prefer to move on after a difficult rescue situation? What helps you move through difficult work days?
Check out this additional resource specific to EMS and First Responders:
Firehouse Magazine Article - EMS: Death and Dying | Firehouse
Conclusion
We have much gratitude for the work of first responders and all that you do to provide care to so many. We do not know how we will grieve until we grieve (Bozoma Saint John), so give yourself time to explore your grief and mourning while accessing the support that you want and need. For many, part of one’s life journey is dealing with grief in many forms from many areas of their lives, including professionally, sociologically, and relationally for example. How you grieved one loss does not mean that you will grieve another loss the same. How you show up for one friend or colleague may be different than what you need to do to show up for another friend or colleague. That is what is so challenging about grief and mourning–there is not much clarity in what to do or say; and yet, there is a level of clarity deep within the soul that provides meaningful connection with one and other. That is what we all should be tapping into when we meet others on their grief and mourning journey.
