The Calls We Carry
My son is a wildland firefighter. It is some of the hardest work in the fire service. It is backbreaking at times and dangerous all of the time. Digging line for hours, breathing smoke, sleeping on the ground, working in places where one wrong shift in the wind can change everything. Wildland firefighters spend days and weeks on the fire line, isolated from much of the world except the crew around them and the mission in front of them.
But despite the danger they face, there is often very little EMS work in that environment. The fire itself is the enemy.
The other day, he did a ride-along with a structure department. For him, it was a completely different experience. Different rhythm. Different chaos. Different type of emergency.
That day, he performed CPR on a real person for the first time.
And, as with so many CPR calls, the outcome was not favorable.
It was his first death to process.
I remember those moments from my own early years in the fire service. Back then, the culture was simple, brutal, and deeply flawed. The attitude was “suck it up.” If you could not handle it, then maybe this is not the profession for you. Nobody asked how you were doing after a bad call. Nobody talked about trauma. Nobody talked about grief. You returned to service and waited for the next dispatch.
The problem is that trauma does not disappear because you ignore it.
It waits.
It follows you home. It sits quietly in the background during dinner. It shows up at 2 AM when you cannot sleep. It builds over years of calls, faces, smells, sounds, and memories until one day you realize the weight you are carrying is heavier than you ever admitted.
But something happened with my son that reminded me that the culture is changing for the better.
He talked to me about the call. Not in some dramatic way, just honestly. He told me how he was processing it. He reached out to some of the guys on his wildland crew as well. And what struck me was this: nobody told him to suck it up. Nobody mocked him. Nobody told him to bury it and move on.
They listened.
They let him process what he experienced.
It is a different world today than when I started, and honestly, we are better off because of it.
The old culture produced many broken people who suffered in silence. We confused emotional suppression with strength. We acted like carrying trauma alone was somehow proof you belonged in the profession. It was not strength, it was survival, and for far too many responders, survival eventually failed them.
And the statistics tell a heartbreaking story.
Firefighters in the United States are more likely to die by suicide than in the line of duty. Estimates suggest between 100 and 200 firefighters die by suicide each year. Research indicates that male firefighters experience suicide rates significantly higher than the general population. Studies have also shown that nearly half of firefighters report suicidal ideation at some point in their careers.
Emergency managers are facing similar struggles. Research presented through IAEM indicates emergency managers may experience suicidal ideation at rates nearly five times higher than the general public. These are professionals who absorb disaster after disaster, often carrying the emotional burden of entire communities while operating inside systems that rarely pause long enough for recovery.
What makes this even harder is the silence.
In emergency services, we are good at taking care of everyone except ourselves.
We check each other’s gear. We watch each other’s backs on scenes. We train endlessly for catastrophic incidents. But culturally, many still struggle to ask a simple question:
“Are you okay?”
Mental health injuries are still too often treated like weakness instead of what they truly are, injuries sustained in service to others.
Repeated exposure to trauma changes people. Long shifts change people. Sleep deprivation changes people. Watching death, destruction, violence, grief, and human suffering year after year changes people. That is not failure. That is being human.
The encouraging part is that the profession is slowly changing. Younger firefighters, paramedics, dispatchers, law enforcement officers, and emergency managers are speaking more openly about behavioral health. Peer support programs are becoming more common. Departments are beginning to recognize that resilience is not pretending that nothing hurts. Resilience is learning to process pain without letting it destroy you.
One of the most important findings in recent emergency management research was simple but powerful: people who believed they had access to support reported significantly lower levels of suicidal ideation. Sometimes just knowing help exists matters.
That means leadership matters.
Culture matters.
The conversations we create inside our organizations matter.
My son experienced something that thousands of responders experience every single day. His first death. His first reminder that, despite all the training, despite all the effort, despite all the skill, sometimes you still lose people.
That reality never fully goes away.
But neither should the support.
To every firefighter, medic, dispatcher, law enforcement officer, emergency manager, and public safety professional reading this: you are allowed to process what you have seen. You are allowed to talk about it. You are allowed to ask for help.
That does not make you weak.
It makes you human.
If you or someone you know is struggling, help is available through the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988. You do not have to carry the weight alone.
