Written by Suzz Sandalwood | Seeking Veritas Columnist | | Sankarsingh-Gonsalves Productions
“How do you carry grief that isn’t yours? How do you mourn someone else’s devastation, again and again, without letting it poison your own life?”
The note I read in the audio file above is an example of what hidden grief can be like. Not in therapy rooms but in a scribbled notepad, from the hood of a cruiser, after telling a woman her husband is dead.
The family was shattered and James at the time in active addiction, stood quietly in the aftermath trying to decide what to feel. Or if he was still allowed to feel anything at all.
When I saw the date of this note, I remembered what was going on for him then because I heard the story. He had recently pulled a dead teenager from a lake. That call broke something open that he didn’t have the tools to carry. Because how do you carry grief that isn’t yours? How do you mourn someone else’s devastation, again and again, without letting it poison your own life?
You don’t. Not without help. Not without naming it.
But first responders don’t often get that chance. The calls don’t come with permission to grieve. They come with procedures and protocols and then another call, and another another.
What we don’t call grief still hurts
“He was taking a witness statement, when really, he was the one who needed to be witnessed.”
He never said he was grieving. He said he hated dispatch. He said he locked his keys in the car. He said he was going to drink that night. That’s the thing about hidden grief. It leaks out in the margins. In irritation. In detachment. In that quiet moment when someone says “Daddy is dead” and you feel…nothing.
We often call this a trauma response but as I mentioned in my previous article From PTSD to Grief: What Are We Still Not Getting About First Responder Treatment? you cannot experience something that overwhelms your capacity to cope, something that dismantles your beliefs about safety, control, or fairness, without also experiencing grief.
He watched a mother fall apart in fast, animal-like movements. He saw her hands shake and tried not to think about how much they reminded him of his own. He saw the jacket she clung to like a lifeline and he just wrote it all down, like he was taking a witness statement, when really, he was the one who needed to be witnessed.
Addiction as a grief response
“The note didn’t say I’m broken. It said, I’m going to drink tonight.”
We don’t talk enough about the link between trauma, grief, and substance use in first responders. James didn’t start out an addict. He started out like many trying to help people . It was his childhood dream. But the pain can add up the longer you are on the job. The stories accumulate when you don’t have a place to put them and if your biopsychosocial spiritual make up makes you more prone to maladaptive coping, you can numb. You forget. You drink. You survive the only way your nervous system knows how.
The note didn’t say “I’m broken.” It said, “I’m going to drink tonight.”
I think that was his way of saying “I can’t hold this anymore.”
The struggle to be human in this work
He described a mother frozen at the top of the stairs, unable to move toward her kids. He told her gently, “Go downstairs, your children need you.” She couldn’t. He had to say it again. And again. And finally, she did.
But who said that to him? Who told him to go back to his own life after seeing the wreckage of someone else’s? Who reminded him to feel, to process, to stay human? I tried but did not succeed because in the culture of emergency services, you cannot compete with a profession that is so tied to an identity that in that era said it was not okay. It said you don’t fall apart. You certainly don’t grieve someone else’s loss as if it were your own and you certainly don’t say you can’t handle it.
But the grief became his. The moment he pulled that teen from the lake and tried to forget it all in a bottle while he continued to show up as a death investigator and paramedic, grief became his. He was praised for the amazing work and his determination to solve that lake case but when he started to come apart after, no one asked if he was okay.
Grief demands to be witnessed
We owe first responders more than critical incident debriefs and EAP pamphlets. We owe them real conversations. Real grief literacy. Real room to be human. We need to stop asking first responders to be witnesses without also giving them space to be witnessed. We need to stop framing grief as just trauma exposure in this work. It’s not.
If you’re a spouse, a supervisor, a colleague, ask different questions. Ask what stays with them. What doesn’t leave. What they dream about. What they had to pretend didn’t hurt. Because grief that isn’t named becomes other things: addiction, burnout, apathy, rage, suicide.
“I am going to drink tonight.”
He didn’t say he was grieving but he was.
Next Week in 911 COMMUNITY
I want to pause here a little longer in this small corner of my column and give a bit more space to the topic of grief because it matters. Next week we’ll look at what happens when grief hits the 911 community directly by way of colleague loss. I will introduce you to Darcy, a 911 communications operator and talk about how she navigated the grief she experienced after a friend she worked with died.
As mentioned in this article, grief can be hard to identify. It can look like just someone showing up to shift, answering calls, trying to hold it together. Darcy, wasn’t able to though. It was evident she was grieving but in our grief illiterate world, she didn’t have the time to grieve. More about her story next week.
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About the Author: Suzz Sandalwood is an RSW/MSW Therapist, Advanced Certified Clinical Trauma and Addiction Specialist and a Certified Grief Counsellor. She has extensive professional and lived experience in first responder, addiction, and grief communities. | Connect with the author: https://suzzsandalwood.com
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