Which isn’t important, that I didn’t know him. I decided a long time ago that funerals are important. I don’t just randomly show up to to funerals, but if there is one happening and I have some degree of connection with them, I will go. That is what I decided I would do in this case.
So the funeral last week was for a guy I hadn’t met, but for all intents and purposes I should have. He was formerly the platoon sergeant in charge of my platoon, before I got there. He was a paramedic for a fire department I had applied to, and of course he had been working in EMS for longer than that. There were all these near misses for chance encounters. All these opportunities that I could have gotten to know him, if I had just known who he was and how nearby he was (socially as well as geographically), or just started working someplace a few months earlier.
When we, the soldiers in my platoon, heard that he had passed, it was no small event. It wasn’t his time, it wasn’t a fair death (when is death ever fair?). He was shot in his own house, by someone who wasn’t supposed to be there, or so his father said.
Nobody was prepared for this. Nobody that knew him thought that he would go like this or that this would be his time.
When it came time for his funeral, nearly a third of the chapel was filled by people in uniform. Army uniforms, fire department uniforms, uniforms of his former EMS agency, even two dispatchers from my agency, where this guy had never worked.
There were officers and enlisted, supervisors and those who rode the streets, all of us standing shoulder to shoulder, turned out to see off a man who everyone admired.
But it wasn’t all rosy. I said before that he had been shot in his own house. His father spoke frankly about his son’s PTSD, the internal scars that his son bore from multiple deployments, and from the acts of valor that earned him a bronze star. This man treated everyone as family. Which is great and highly treasured by the people he worked with, but proved problematic when he saw himself in homeless veterans and took them into his house. If one were to read between the lines, it seems like it was one of the people who he was sheltering in his home, who had been carrying the bullet that killed him.
All of this is important to understand the man (it’s important especially to me, who never met him while he was among the living), but in the end the papers just wrote about a fire medic who was a troubled vet, and got shot by someone (someone probably on drugs) in his own house.
It’s probably not surprising to you, dear reader, that nobody in that chapel for the funeral thought the paper did the man justice.
When I listened to the stories told by his family and friends and his funeral, all I can think is that the Darkness got him.
I’m not one to go on about the dangers of demons and the Adversary, but I do believe that there is evil in this world. There is something that obscures the light, obscures the shine of what is good, true, and beautiful, and that kind of Darkness can take you with it, whether or not you have your wits about you.
It was this that took the sergeant who I never met. He fought his demons valiantly and he lost.
And why did this happen? Why were his demons successful in their efforts to drag him down?
Who am I to know? I’m just some guy who went to a funeral to say prayers for a guy he should have met, but somehow didn’t. It’s important to light a candle for the dead, maybe to share some light, maybe just to remember who they were and what they did.
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