First Responder Families

Being a first responder (military personnel, law enforcement officers, firefighters, paramedics, emergency medical technicians, and emergency room doctors and nurses) is a noble calling. First responders are rightly celebrated and commended for their bravery and selflessness. Their jobs—or, better, their calling—often require them to see humanity at its worst, and they are expected urgently to address and fix the many terrible and ugly things that people can do to each other or themselves. Society expects those first responders to carry the heavy burden of virtue.

Society’s expectations can come at terrible and, generally, unspoken costs to first responders, as statistics quickly and readily reveal. Between 9/11 and May 2021, approximately 30,177 active-duty personnel and veterans of the post-9/11 wars died by suicide. That obscene and tragic number is more than four times the number of military personnel killed in military operations, including training accidents. In 2019, more law enforcement officers died by suicide than by felonious killings or accidental deaths in the line of duty. In 2018, firefighters died at higher suicide rates than police officers—and firefighter suicides exceeded the rate of on-duty deaths by approximately 30%.

Healthcare first responders aren’t spared from these gruesome statistics. Even leaving aside the devastating effects of the Covid pandemic, emergency room doctors and nurses, and emergency medical technicians, face significantly higher suicide risks than members of the general population.

Finally, those who die by suicide leave behind loved ones whose lives are often shattered. A suicide victim’s family is thereafter at a higher risk of suicide themselves. Even setting aside that drastic and doubly tragic outcome, it’s common for a suicide victim’s family to feel overwhelmingly sad and that life is pointless. Feelings of shame, guilt, anger toward the suicide victim, and hopelessness are common. These feelings can persist for years. The emotional pain never goes away; the best that can happen is that one can grow around it. Days that used to be joyful—the suicide victim’s birthday, for example—become, instead, sources of pain. Certain events, like the anniversary of the death, can trigger sadness; but it can also come out of nowhere.

In short, in a death by suicide, more than the suicide victim is lost. Each member of the family forever loses some part of themselves, too. That’s Mitch’s mom, Kathleen, with Mitch’s ashes and the flag that the United States Marine Corps presented to us on the day that we interred Mitch at Arlington.