DISCLAIMER - If you are reading this you need to be aware that there is a bit of soul baring in the attached chapter. The price for reading this soul baring is that you are going to be my friend for a very long time, and you owe me a single beer (it should be from Wibby Brewing). The only one who does not owe me a beer is Julie, after you read the entire chapter, it will become very apparent why she does not owe me a beer. Enjoy.
Ferrnando Martins de Bulhões (aka St Anthony) was born in Lisbon, Portugal. Saint Anthony is the patron saint of lost or stolen things. The practice of praying for St. Anthony's help in finding lost or stolen things began when he had a treasured book of psalms stolen from him.
Saint Anthony is invoked (and venerated) as the patron saint for the recovery of lost items and is credited with a ton of miracles involving lost people, lost things and the lost spiritual aspects of people.
If you are lucky, you find the great love in your life and you keep rediscovering those great loves all of your life. Firefighting was a great love in my life. It is a profession where the rewards and demands are high. You have the privilege of seeing a lot of everyday people do courageous and heroic things. Seeing people at their very best and very worst gives you a deep appreciation for all of the ordinary days that make up our amazing lives.
By the time of the call that early December morning, I was confident and established as a Firefighter on Engine 03. I trusted my training, my crew, tools, and had enough experience to be one of the go to firefighters on the engine.
Today, she is a teacher with two elementary aged children. She lived because of the brave firefighters who worked tirelessly to cut her out of the car that was trapped under a semi hauling steel. She lived because of the Air Life medics who provided her life saving care on the ground and in the air on the way to the hospital.
I was not the guy that saved her, I was the guy talking to her while amazing crews cut away parts of the car to pull her out. I was the guy that talked her through this.
This is one of those calls that did not end on that cold December day. I crawled out of that confined traumatic space a different person that when I crawled in. And even today, almost 20 years later that call has stayed with me. Time and distance take the edges off of calls like this but this one still remains in my head with a clarity that is still amazes me.
I was stunned to find myself spending a lot of nights in that hole I crawled in that December day.
I was offered counseling because of the circumstances and the extended time in a confined space with a trauma patient. I was convinced I did not need it, despite the sleepless nights and the progressive slide from being present in every single day.
It is with a great deal of love and respect that I say that Firefighters are prone to being idiots when it comes to this essential bit of self-care.
So, while I was being a tough guy our engine was dispatched on a couple of other high profile calls in the 2 weeks following this incident.
I fully expected to find a pet trapped behind a closed door in the middle of the chaos. The second door I opened I found a young girl who appeared to have died from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. The jarring thing was how close this young woman was to my own daughter. The trauma in the room was daunting even for an experienced firefighter. It was clear due to the extent of the injuries that there was no way to provide any kind of advanced life support. I called the paramedics back to confirm and they quietly closed the door and called the ER doctor for a field pronouncement.
I still have a very vivid memory of the trophies and smiling pictures of what must have been family and friends.
With the end of my Fire Service career in sight, my heart got heavier, and I felt increasingly isolated. I did not tell anyone that I was going to quit or what I was considering. To everyone I was in the same place. I encouraged people to depend on me, I enjoyed the position of being the go-to guy. The more I was the go-to guy, the more I slipped away from everyone.
It was a long drop from invincible to broken.
I had traveled to the small adobe church in Chimayo, New Mexico a couple of times with my grandparents. The church (El Santuario) was a a place where people came to ask for divine intercession, for healing, and to ask for a needed miracle. The church is built of adobe and is a whooping 60 x 24 feet in size with 3-foot-wide adobe walls. Built in 1815, it still has the basic interior that it had back when it was built.
The Redhead at the YMCA
My respite from everything was my Fire Department paid membership to the YMCA. Working out hard was the one thing that took the edge off of everything.
One of the other guys saw her first when we were sitting in the sauna after a workout. A great looking, long legged red head who swam harder than anyone else in the pool. While her great looks caught your eye, it was her exhausting workouts that held your attention. We never walked to the sauna without looking for her in the pool. She was and is still just as amazing as when we first met.
It was on a day that I was working out as hard and feeling like I could not do anymore, the redhead started talking to me out of the blue. It was small talk, always centered around workouts but it was so genuine, sincere, and positive that it struck me down to my core. I cannot say (even today) why it made such a big impact on me then, but the impact was huge.
Friendly but self-contained and her workout ethic was infectious. I started working out harder to keep up with her. At a time in my life when everything and everybody was drifting away from me, I found myself clinging to her quiet, confident, grace. It was in her that I felt connected, and, in her connection, I was able to reconcile those tough calls enough to surface out of the place that I could not find my way out of.
Three months turned into six months, and I felt like I had stepped out of a dark room. At nine months I sat in the sauna with the redhead, who was now Julie and I realized with a shock that she had given me my life back. I threw myself into everything in my life with a renewed enthusiasm to make up for lost time. It was like walking into a bakery and absorbing all of the sights and smells instead of standing across the street looking at the bakery window.
The old adobe church in Chimayo turned out to be a place where prayers were answered, and miracles happened. My miracle was a 5'10, confident, redheaded, beautiful soul that could swim twice the distance I could in one hour (she still can).
When I get asked if I need to find God or Jesus, I smile and tell people "No". When I get the follow-on question of "why?", the answer is easy. Neither are lost, they both stay at 15 Santuario Drive, in Chimayo New Mexico in a very old adobe house.
Saying thank you to Julie was overwhelming to me and I did not know how to approach the subject or bring it up. Every day I worked out with her I felt stronger, and I just did not want to mess that up trying to say a thank you on that large of a scale that I will still struggling to understand myself. She was the answer to a prayer. If I ever heard anyone tell a story like this one, I would run from the room or tell them they were watching a really bad movie.
So, I used our 20-minute windows to get stronger and figure out how to say thank you. We became friends, we talked about our kids, life, and working out. She was (and still is) an accomplished swimmer and athlete. We never talked about any of the calls that I had been on.
And then life happened. Stronger, renewed, and needing the catch up on the year that passed me by, I drifted away from the early morning workouts and stopped going to the YMCA.
Even today, I am not sure how no one noticed or caught on how broken things were for me then. I had reached a crossroad in my life, a defining moment in my life and not a soul knew about it. I had fallen in a hole I never expected to climb out of or be taken out of. No one except me knew about the existence of the hole. Every day that passed made the story more impossible to tell. It was the secret that I would keep from everyone. The one person I needed to tell, had drifted out of my life and I was sure that was a sign that the story would remain only with me.
This was the year that I wrote my first Overdue Thank You Note to Julie. I have written a new one every year. For even a reason I do not understand, I keep copies of the overdue thank you note that I write to her every December. All of the brand new Overdue Thank You's sound remarkably the same.
Every year, I write the note from scratch. I always believe that each year in my career gives me a new perspective and appreciation for what being a firefighter is. Every year since that year, I do a rough calculation of the lives my crew has touched since then.
I want her to understand how much she did for me and how it made such a difference in so many lives. I also realize that this is a note I will never get to send her, a note that she will probably never read. All of my thank you notes start the same way.
"I really never did thank you for what you did for me."
Same opening line every year and I for the life of me I cannot think of another way to start off. It is the only thing that I can say that does not sound scary or just plain crazy. There had to be a better way to say thank you than my letter writing each December.
White Envelope
I was faced with a huge debt; how do you thank someone for your life that is no longer in your life? Worse how do you thank that person, when they do not even realize that has been done? The simple act of her reaching out to me without an expectation, changed my life.
In the absence of a person, place, or a thing to thank, I did two things. I fundamentally changed the way that I talked and dealt with people outside my immediate circle. Every time I talked to a person that I would have normally been short with or dismissed altogether, I paused to listen more and ask a question or two. I did not then (or now) possess any insight or particular set of skills that would help a person climb out of the kind of hole that I was in. I just listened more, and I began to learn every moment was not about me.
That was the year I started the While Envelope group. A group of friends would get together to and find a family in need. The people that needed help were the people who fell outside of the normal outreach efforts. A person in the group would reach out to the families and ask for the needs/wants for the Christmas season. White Envelope is over 20 years old.
White Envelope is another set of chapters. There was the terminal cancer patient who was not able to get up when we delivered Christmas gifts to his family. Every requested gift on the wish list was delivered. When we stopped in to meet him, his wife whispered that it took him over 3 hours to get dressed because he insisted on a suit. He died two days after Christmas. I have seen a 5-year girl enthusiastically hug a box of Fruit Loops and a purple coat, without wanting to let either one go. The 8-year-old boy who held a rotisserie chicken while he opened his Christmas gifts. The crying mother recovering from breast cancer because instead of having to set low expectations for things she could not afford, the kitchen and living room were full of Christmas.
Our group retained is anonymity, no names were exchanged, and we were not affiliated with any group. I was always the last one to speak to the mom or dad. I simply said that a dear friend of mine saved a firefighter's life and we were trying to say thank you to her. I told them to pay it forward when they got into a better place. There were many times when we were leaving, we watched neighbors come to the White Envelope houses and leave with bags of groceries and toys. Some people did not wait to pay it forward.
The Flood
My new workout routine was outside on the trails around Longmont. I was riding my bike, running, and walking the trails.
On September 11, 2013, my workout routine changed due to the 100-year flood that hit Colorado and Boulder County. My trails were completely gone.
On September 17, 2013, I was having a beer at Old Chicago with my brother Chuck. Chuck wanted another beer, and I gave him every reason I could think of to end what was a nice evening with him. He ended up appealing to me to stop at Chubburger, an Oscar Blues brewery for just "one more" beer.
We sat down in a crowded bar and ordered a couple of beers. When Chuck left to use the bathroom, Julie sat down at the table and took a sip of my beer. My heart fell out of my chest. We picked up at the same place we did all those years ago at the YMCA.
As I watched her talk, I thought my prayers had been answered. Over a beer, in a place like this seemed like the perfect place. I got lost in the catch up, I wanted to hear everything that she had to say. I wanted to have her back in my life. I wanted to tell her that I never stopped trying to pay her forward, never stopped trying to find her.
And like a lot of other times (then and now), I got lost in what she said, who she was, the things she was passionate about. The lights blinked twice, and last call was announced. When she talked, you forgot how beautiful she actually was.
I felt like I had changed so much, and it looked like she hadn't changed all. She had the same strong presence and that quiet confident grace. The years were exceptionally good to her, she was more beautiful now then she was when she saved me. And the effect of her words, when she spoke, you could forget how beautiful she was by listening to what she had to say.
The lights went up and I asked her to walk out to car she caught a ride in. I ran out of time again, I told her I hoped I would see her again to catch up and in an epic bit of bad timing, held her face with both hands and kissed her on the cheek.
She didn't run away when she saw me next. We picked right back up where we left off. She would attend spin class and was always there early, warming up. One early October morning I caught her in the room alone.
I walked over and she smiled the very same way she had since I had first seen her at the YMCA. She looked up at me and I finally said it.
"I really never did thank you for what you did for me" I said, and those green eyes looked all the way through my soul.
"Open my wallet and pull out that piece of paper" I tell her and as she reaches for my wallet.
"Thank you" she says, and those beautiful green eyes are filling with tears.
"That one is yours" I tell her, and I my tough guy eyes are also filling with tears.
I started doing the Good Friday walk from Sante Fe to Chimayo the year after she give me my life back. I would depart Santa Fe on foot, Thursday night for the pilgrimage walk to the church in Chimayo. I would depart about 10-11 PM for the 20-25 mile walk through the night to join 60,000 other people who make the walk on Good Friday.
Today, I get to show her the path that I have taken for years.
Today, for the first time in my life, I will travel to that sacred old adobe church and instead of asking for something, I will bring something back. I will bring back my miracle and have it sit in the same place that I asked for it all those years ago.
Damn
I asked her to walk in the church alone when we arrived. When I stood in the doorway on that early Saturday and saw her red hair framed in the light coming through the window, sitting in the same pew I sat in, I could not stop the tears from flowing.
Saint Anthony is invoked (and venerated) as the patron saint for the recovery of lost items and is credited with a ton of miracles involving lost people, lost things and the lost spiritual aspects of people.
Today in Chimayo, is the day that St Anthony got his permanent place looking outside, the view is the beautiful high desert in Chimayo, New Mexico. He will never be pointed to the wall again.
EPILOG
Third: Tell God that you need him, his wisdom, strength, guidance, forgiveness, love, and healing in your life. Put all of your prayers, wishes, and hopes in his hands. Ask that your heart and mind be open for him to show you the gifts he is going to give you in your life. Ask for the courage and understanding to fully live the life he has given you.
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