A Wisconsin friend called to tell me that a firefighter in the neighboring town had died. Choked up, she said she thought the story of how a small town comes together when a firefighter dies might make a good article for our magazine.

It was the first time my friend Maureen had encountered a firefighter fatality close to home. The assistant chief of the fire department, 43, was responding to a boat fire last Sunday when he had a heart attack. He had three children.

Maureen said that the firefighters had organized an honor guard that stayed with the firefighter's body 24 hours a day since he died. Funeral arrangements were underway. The kids in her classroom that day were upset because in a small town, everyone knows everyone else.

It was hard to explain to Maureen how the same situation occurs about 100 times every year. Tonight, Saturday and Sunday, the 107 firefighters who died last year will be remembered in services at the National Fallen Firefighters Memorial Weekend in Emmitsburg, Md. Each one of those firefighters came from a family, a neighborhood, a hometown. The sad news had to be broken to close family and funeral arrangements had to be made for each one. Hundreds of lives pause when a firefighter dies -- for that matter, when anyone dies -- but there's a special awe about firefighters, cops and soldiers. Dying while trying to help another is somehow poignant.


As I was going through security for a flight back from Salt Lake City recently, I was standing in line with a woman who was well-dressed, save for being wrapped in a child's quilt. Next to her were three sullen teens. As she turned and stepped forward, I saw a young man in a sand-colored uniform with a buzz haircut. The TSA agent checking boarding passes asked the young man if he was headed back to Iraq. The young man nodded.

"God bless you," said the TSA agent. The soldier's mother tightened the quilt around her shoulders.

This was the closest I had come to one of our soldiers heading to Iraq. I wanted to buy him breakfast or say something to him. I wanted to say something to his family as they turned to leave him at the security point. They seemed emotionally shattered as they left the airport terminal. I could imagine how the uncertainty of his return weighed on them. Life in the airport that Sunday morning was busy, loud and annoying as usual, yet as I watched the soldier's family disappear out the exit, I felt like the world stopped for a moment.

I thought of that soldier and his family when I spoke with my friend about the assistant chief in Wisconsin who died. For Maureen, the world paused that day. Memories flooded in, and she realized how one person's life could touch so many people on so many different levels.

After I hung up with her, I wondered if I sounded callous when I told her that we hear about firefighters dying every week. Have we come to accept that a percentage will die? After all, it is a small percentage compared to the more than 1 million firefighters out there every day. Actually, I experience two kinds of frustration whenever I hear of a firefighter's death. If the death is in the line of duty, my response is "Oh, no! What went wrong?" If it's a preventable line-of-duty death -- the result of not using a seatbelt or other simple safety measure or neglect for one's own health -- my frustration and grief are tinged by disappointment.

A new category called "non-traumatic fatalities" has been posted at www.firefighterclosecalls.com. Every loss of a firefighter is traumatic, but no structure collapse, flashover or vehicle crash caused these deaths. Silent, stealthy health and safety "bombs" kill firefighters in this category with as much tragic regularity as the car bombs that are killing our soldiers in Iraq. The focus on what went wrong and how future deaths can be prevented is the inheritance of those left behind.


God bless our first responders and soldiers -- at home and overseas.

Janet Wilmoth, Editor