In my life, I’ve experienced some pretty crazy incidents. Like all of us, many of those stressful events and emergency incidents don’t always occur on the fireground. We all have plenty of personal stress and trauma in our lives. Many years ago, it hit me all in one month. I had 2 significant emotional events take place… and one minor one. But the cummulative effect was significant. The first was the Dude Fire, which if you’re a regular listener, you’ve heard me talk about. 6 brave firefighters were killed on that fire. The next event was a near tragedy involving my children. And as a parent, anytime your kids are at risk due to your own negligence… well that fear and guilt and worry just piled on to my personal emotional trauma from the Dude. The last event was really minor in nature, but it figures significantly into the story.
But the question is; how do we take care of ourselves? And how do we take care of each other. Today’s story is just about the crew of firefighters I worked with and how they reacted to the stress I was experiencing.
As always, thanks for listening and even though we’re on track to have 400,000 story downloads by the end of 2021, I still appreciate comments and suggestions for the stories. Be safe out there.
BobbieOnFire 
Loved this story as difficult as it must have been to talk about. Tragedies in my life have happened in threes. My Catholic past thinks maybe it’s a trinity thing… but mostly I think it’s a karmaic, universe thing. LOL. We can’t beat ourselves up when shit happens. We do the best we can in all situations. I do believe everything happens for a reason. And I do believe in signs. I wrote this as a theme in Alaska Spark when it happened to me on and off fire. Signs: We look for meaning. Coincidence? Maybe. I think not. I think it’s a part destiny/part happenstance thing, like Forrest Gump’s feather. It took strength for you to get through these things, but look at all the people in those occurences that depended on you for strength and leadership! There’s a reason for everything…my two cents.
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I don’t believe in coincidence either. Gr Anthony DeMello wrote that if you believe in coincidences, when you make the sign of the cross, you should say… In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Coincidence.
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