- My family had contacted me,
and asked if I'd seen my brother.
I said yeah, I just saw him a few hours ago.
Didn't think anything of it, drove home and I noticed
that there were fresh footprints in the snow,
that weren't there when I left,
leading out to my parents woods, so I was like, that's odd,
maybe he went out there for somethin'.
And so I followed the foot, footprints out to the woods,
and got maybe half a mile back, and turned a corner,
and I saw him hanging from a tree.
So called 911, my dad, also being on the fire department,
heard the pager go off, and came runnin' out
and brought a ladder and a knife.
Cut him down from the tree, and he said, okay we need
to start CPR, you need to do this, you need to do this,
and it just instantly relaxed me.
I was like, yup you're right, we gotta do this,
and I did one compression,
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and looked at my brother,
and realized, with all the training that I'd had,
and as many runs as we'd been on and everything,
nobody, no medical professional, or no EMT, no medic,
whatever, would have started CPR on his body at this point.
And my dad was just adamant and I could tell at that point
that he was gone.
The death itself was difficult,
but the most difficult part was having to convince my dad
that his son was dead and there was nothing
he could do about it.
Family came in town for the funeral and everything,
and one night my dad broke down, he pulled me aside,
away from everybody and he broke down and told me
that he blamed the death on himself and I,
because we didn't act fast enough.
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And as a first responder,
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even though I know he was speaking
from emotion, it was very difficult
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to think that you could've made a difference
in saving your brother.
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- Well it all started about three years ago.
I had just gotten out of a relationship,
and I had two grandparents that weren't doing very well.
They were in hospice, probably wasn't long for this world,
and I found myself in a bit of legal trouble.
I remember my most common thought was just,
I'm gonna lose my job.
Which is a pretty scary thing when you've been out here
and that's kinda what your whole career has been,
is working on the base,
not to mention my parents pretty much wanted to kill me.
And obviously, I had just gotten out
of a long term relationship, so I didn't have that support.
So it was kind of a lot to handle.
'Cause I was kinda like the lowest I'd ever been,
and it's not really somethin' that you can just go
and talk to anyone about.
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- I guess the thing is you
think you're doing all the right things
and you get a phone call one day.
And this is how my situation happened,
I get a phone call from my boss that says hey,
we just had a member take his own life.
And, you know, what do you say at that point in time,
there's nothin' you can say on the phone,
and there's nothin' that your boss can say to you,
and that whole time you kind of reflect back,
and you remember all those times you spent
with that member, or the friend, or coworker,
and you just try to reflect and ask yourself,
what'd you miss.
- You know, I remember when I got the call,
I was in the basement and I hung up the phone,
and I'm just like standin' there.
And I'm like, I had a relative way back
that committed suicide and I was younger, and I you know,
my parents helped me through it, but I didn't really know.
I was an adult now, and this was close to home,
this was my coworker and friend.
But I was lost, I was like,
I didn't know what to do that day.
I'm sittin' there in the basement,
and just kind of like kind of wonderin',
how do I process this?
Within the first three months of 2018 I found out
that my dad had cancer,
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my mom had cancer,
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and my wife's cancer was back.
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My wife lost her battle to cancer in July,
and the day that she passed away was
also my mom's very first chemo treatment.
Within a week after losing my wife,
my mom who had the chemo treatment ended up
in the intensive care unit with a reaction to her chemo.
I hadn't even got back to work yet, from recovering
from losing my wife, and here's my,
and I feel like I'm losing my mom also.
Unfortunately my mom ending up passing away five months
after my wife did.
And right now my dad is kind of on the decline,
so absolutely 2018 was a true test to my resiliency
and it's still going.
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- We moved up here as a senior airman, paycheck to paycheck.
She wasn't employed yet, got an apartment
then ended up gettin' a house.
During that time as a young airman,
my sister committed suicide.
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I was the last person to talk to her, that I know of,
so that weighs on me,
and what could I have said differently?
I still to this day have pretty bad nightmares,
and then I went a year as a pretty young person,
not talkin' to anybody.
But bein' up here I had a lot a little things in my house,
breaking and malfunctioning that I didn't know how to fix,
I was pretty young.
So there's all these little things
just kept pilin' on at once, on top of
being the year anniversary of my sister's death.
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- I would say my story begins in high school.
I'd long suffered from self-esteem issues, self-confidence,
never thought I was pretty enough,
smart enough, interesting enough.
Around my junior year I started dating.
Started getting interested in guys and the attentions
that they were giving me.
And what I found was, in those relationships,
the attention that they were giving me, was almost filling
that void in myself, that self-esteem didn't seem so strong,
than when I was in that relationship.
I had several failed relationships.
I would say in two years time,
what felt like back to back failed relationships.
I felt rejected,
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I felt in each case, they were all my fault.
So I blamed myself for each of those failed relationships.
And each time I failed in a relationship, it was harder
and harder to rebound, bounce back from it.
It wasn't long before I found myself in a relationship
with someone at work.
I was very nervous about trying to start a relationship,
knowing my history with relationships.
So we took it slow, we really just had fun.
We did things together, we went places together,
and it was very casual.
Over the course of several months it started
to get more serious, talks about marriage.
I met his parents, it seemed like okay, this is the one.
I finally found the one, been through all the frogs.
He had a change of plans, he changed his mind,
he didn't want to pursue the relationship.
I remember asking lots of questions, is it someone else,
what did I do, did I say something wrong,
did I do something wrong, what can I do
to fix it, I'll fix it.
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I just felt like I needed that closure
and by gosh I was gonna get that closure, so I kept calling.
I'd come to work, I'd call his duty section all the time.
I would try to get him to talk to me, tell me,
I need you to tell me what it is I did wrong.
But they wouldn't respond, they wouldn't talk to me.
- After something like that happens, for like a week,
it's like your life stops.
You don't have to go to work, you don't go to school.
People bring you food and everything so you don't even have
to worry about cooking,
you just have a week to yourself, to grieve.
Then it felt like after that week, the world just wanted you
to be fine again.
And after somethin' like that, you're not fine after a week.
It takes a lot longer.
I couldn't sleep, I had dreams where I'd come back
from a run and I'd pull the ambulance into the station,
and people that I knew were hanging from the station,
and I couldn't get to them in time.
And that kept me up for a long time,
about a year, actually.
So, my way of coping with that was I just,
I made myself as busy as possible.
If you didn't sleep, you didn't have nightmares,
you didn't have nightmares, you didn't think
about all of the issues that you had.
For a year or so it felt great, until I deployed
with the 180th here, and believe it or not,
my life slowed down a lot, when I was deployed.
Because of how busy I'd made myself here.
And when my life slowed down, I realized I had a lot
of things that I hadn't dealt with.
And being in the deployed environment, and not having any
of my normal coping mechanisms around, made it a lot harder
to having to start to heal.
And it was over a year ago, but I hadn't started
that healing process.
- My relationship had ended, grandparents were dying,
I already was running on little sleep and a lot of stress.
I mean it pretty much disturbed everything in my life.
Sleeping, worrying, stressing out,
wondering what am I gonna do if I lose my job,
'cause at the time I didn't have any college done,
so a lot of stress, a lot of emotions.
It was kind of like drowning, and you're just trying
to keep your head above water,
but you're just gettin' really tired of treading that water.
- After he passed, I started getting angry.
At like, dude you were our friend,
and we could have helped you.
That's the hard part for me, you know,
between Tucson, and Nellis, and Iraq, we can sit there,
and we can count so many memories of this young kid,
in such a short period of time, but then even talking
about it that's when I get a little mad, I'm like,
why couldn't I have just told you
about the fun times you had in the three,
four years you were with us?
Could that have made a difference?
When I really started thinkin' about Max,
the unanswered question is the hardest thing to deal with.
Why did it happen, and it's hard to handle,
'cause we all want answers.
And that's the one,
one of probably the most unanswered questions.
- I was stressed, and I didn't know what to do about it,
I do my 48 hours, and I go home, for four days off,
with no family up here and I think about it.
I didn't know who to turn to,
so I just kind of bottled it up.
And didn't really express, nobody,
you know everybody sent their condolences
and were very kind, but it was goin'
on the year anniversary, so it was a full year where,
I just kind of kept it bottled up.
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- Eventually I stopped eating, I stopped drinking.
I lost interest in everything completely.
I wouldn't talk to my mom or my dad,
my brother or my sister.
I completely shut myself off from them.
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Then I decided, well, I feel better when I'm sleeping.
I don't feel this pain, so I'm just gonna try to sleep more.
If the TV's distracting me, I'll turn it off,
turn it down lower.
I'm just gonna sleep more, that'll solve things.
So I decided to try medicines that helped, sleep,
sleep aids, Tylenol PM, I believe is the first one I tried.
And it did, it helped, I slept longer.
I was really trying to figure out how many pills do I need
to take so that I'll just feel better,
you know it'll make me sleep long enough,
maybe when I wake up I'll feel better.
And I remember I was just shaking those pills
and takin' 'em, I'd wake up, I'd shake some more pills,
and I'd take 'em.
I kept waking up, and I kept not feeling better.
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Eventually I took enough pills
that I wasn't going to wake up.
And the next thing I know, I'm waking up
in an emergency room, and I learned that my stomach
had been pumped, and that they had used charcoal,
to try to absorb the poison that I was putting into my body,
over the course of weeks.
My mother happened to come home early one day,
I don't know why, I probably didn't answer the phone.
Maybe she had an intuition something was going on.
She never came home early.
And I was, she had found me in just enough time.
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Had she come home when she was supposed to,
she would have found her daughter dead.
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It wasn't long after that, my mom came up to see me.
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She walked through those doors, I'll never forget,
and she was so scared, and I was so mad at her.
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How could you, wake me up from that, help me,
how could you help me.
I'll forever be haunted by the way I spoke to her that day.
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But I was mad, I had finally did it.
I'd finally stopped the pain.
Someone woke me up from it, and I was just mad at the world.
Two weeks later, I ended up in the same place.
Back in the ICU, stomach gettin' pumped,
charcoal shoved down my throat.
Because I was taking care of this myself.
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Was not receptive to being helped.
- I didn't want to drag everything back home.
I thought, I just kept thinking,
no I don't want people at the 180th to find out about this.
I don't want them to know
that I'm still struggling with this.
'Cause everybody in my shop thought that I was good,
thought everything was goin' fine.
'Cause there's always that stigma, you know,
in the military, and I didn't want to bring that here.
After I came home, I was pretty honest with people about it.
Because I went to Al Udeid, supposed to be a great base,
and it is, it is a great base,
but everybody just expected I had this amazing time
while I was deployed, and I said, to be honest with you,
it kind of sucked, and after I explained why,
I had to tell 'em, I'm still really strugglin' with this,
and I expected people to kind of react with,
why are you still struggling with this?
This was a year and a half ago, and you seemed fine,
why are you even bringing this up?
But that, it was totally the opposite.
It was, overwhelming support from people.
And asking if I needed anything, if I wanted time off drill.
And I guess I was surprised by how,
how accepting everybody was.
I mean people that I barely even knew, were reaching out,
and offering their support.
- I really relied on Alina the Director
of Psychological Health on base.
The first thing I did was, I called my leadership,
and my second phone call was to Alina.
Kinda told her about the situation, what had happened,
and asked for her advice on how to proceed.
My leadership definitely had my back and fought pretty hard
to keep me, and Alina took care
of all the administrative paperwork part.
She kind of told me where I needed to go,
what forms needed to be signed, and she kinda guided me
through the whole process of the steps that needed
to be taken in order to try and make sure
that I kept my job at the end of everything.
By the time we got to the end of everything,
it was like I could finally take my first deep breath
that I'd taken in about six months.
I'm not someone who has a lot of close friends
outside of work, so I kinda relied on the relationships I
have through work and through the base
to kinda help guide me through the process.
- He was 21 years old, he didn't really live
that much of life, but we were able to spend a whole night,
talkin' about all the different times we spent with him.
The times that we remembered that were near and dear to us.
I think the group was awesome, it was what helped,
kept me going through the whole process.
- You know as far as dealing with it, if we didn't,
if we weren't such a tight-knit group,
and if we weren't so close,
I don't know how the outcomes would have been different.
You needed that bond, you know, you really did.
And it meant a lot to me, and I know for a fact,
in our friendships, and the friendships we have back there,
they would all sit here and say the same thing,
that nobody woulda wanted to go through that on their own.
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- We, together had six kids, and 11 grandkids,
so I absolutely had a lot of family to lean on.
And not only family, the friends
that we have are incredible too.
It was just incredible how much they were there for me also.
Not to mention my work family too.
I was never made to feel guilty for the time
that I had to take away from work.
My work family, they were just there and supportive,
and absolutely, I couldn't have done as well as I did
if I had also been worrying about, oh my gosh,
what's going on at work?
I feel like I should be the strong person,
be there for everyone else person kind of person,
but luckily how close my work family was at that point,
it didn't take much for them to understand,
and fully realize how I work, how I think,
and they were able to make me feel comfortable,
and get me to the point that, it was okay to come to work
and show my weakness, and talk to them
about what's going on, and they were nothing
but supportive for me.
One of the main people that I relied on,
she had actually lost her significant other to cancer.
So it was incredible, the lessons
that she helped me get through,
that I probably would have made a lot of bad decisions.
So between family, friends, and my work family,
that's what got me through the hardship.
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- I ended up bein' out on the flight line,
in one of the vehicles, with a wingman, J. Weir,
and he said he noticed some things had been botherin' me,
and if I wanted to talk about it.
Nobody had asked, up until that point,
so we were on the line, and knew that we were
gonna be there a while, so I did, I opened up.
That was a Thursday/Friday shift
and rolling right into a Saturday of drill weekend,
and that night after the Saturday drill,
there was a knock on my door,
it was my Master Sergeant Herm Schwebes,
and our entire B shift, and they had a couple pizzas
and a case of beer, and they came in
and fixed all those little things in my house
that I didn't know how to do.
And we sat around and talked about my sister,
and about the events and what had happened,
and they were there for me.
And they showed up.
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- This time I wasn't allowed to go home.
They basically sent me up to the next floor,
and I had to stay there, I had to work through it this time.
And I was resistant to it, I was so resistant to it,
that first couple days.
I just didn't want to open up to anybody.
I didn't care anymore.
But I eventually did.
I didn't have any pills at my disposal to sleep,
I had to reckon with, what I was feeling,
and what I was going through.
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I realized that I was trying to cope with something
that I just didn't have the tools to cope with.
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I wish I would have recognized that earlier.
I caused a lot of people pain, I caused myself pain.
That was not my last struggle with depression.
But that was the last time I felt
that ending my life,
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was the only way to end my pain.
What I did differently when I struggled
with depression afterwards, was I recognized it.
I knew when it was getting to be too much,
I knew that feeling, I knew it very well, now.
And I reached out, I called people, talk to me, please.
I'd wake up in the middle of the night,
and I'd bother people in the middle of the night.
'Cause I knew, I needed someone to either talk to me,
or be with me, or stay with me.
I didn't want to go back there,
that was a horrible place to be.
Wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy.
There was no way I was gettin' back there.
But it didn't stop, the fact that, I had depression.
And that sometimes, I need help.
I now know that, I now recognize it.
- Everybody thinks that they know better,
than what they're being told,
so when I was in that position,
I'm like, no I'm different that's not how I grieve,
that's not how I wanna do this.
So yeah, I should've reached out,
I should've gave myself time to grieve,
I should've just been doing all the things
that we're told to do all the time, but it's just,
in the moment, you feel like the world wants you
to move on faster than you're ready to.
And that couldn't be farther from the truth.
At least in my experience, I mean, everybody was willing
to take the time for me to heal, and grieve,
and do whatever I needed to do,
and they were there to help me.
But in my mind, I just felt like I just had to be,
I had to be operational as quick as possible,
and that's not the truth.
- A lot of people can't understand in a civilian world,
it's like, the military is just a whole different beast.
So somethin' in the civilian world
that might not be a big deal,
can be huge on the military side.
So having people that understand that,
and understand like you know, we have our core values,
we have somethin', excellence in all we do.
We have a certain standard that we're expected to uphold,
and so obviously any time you fall short of that,
it's disappointing, disappointing in general,
disappointment in yourself.
So I think it's important to have people
that can understand, like, why it's such a big deal,
when people in the civilian world might not.
And then I think it's important, you know,
you're surrounded by 'em.
You come to work, you see 'em, they're there,
like I said, for me, holidays, weekends,
I see them more than I see my family sometimes.
So having at least one wingman,
someone that you can talk to,
someone that can understand your daily life when it comes
to work and just the expectations that are put upon you,
I think it's really important.
- Whether you were still talkin' about bein' angry
about the why, or you were just talkin' about things
that happened, you have to be able
to share that experience with someone.
- One thing, this kinda stuck with me from a while back,
is this one colonel told me,
on our uniform we wear two last names,
we got the last name we're born with,
and we got a last name that we choose,
and they're both our families.
And in that situation we needed our air force family.
- So much like, if someone in our family passed,
or whatever the case may be, or somethin's goin' on,
birthday, you name it, anything,
you come together, and that's what we do.
- As you're talkin' in a group,
with everybody around you may not talk as close
and near as dear to your heart as you may sitting
in the setting with maybe just the three of us.
And that's okay, it's whatever means you need,
to be able to voice your heart,
how your heart feels in that point in time.
- There's no cookie cutter to grief
and how a person handles it.
There's no from A to Z, you could be at step A,
and skip on to step Z, but yet you're gonna go back
and circle through all the steps.
You can hope that it would just be,
it starts here it ends there,
but no, it's all kinds of squiggles.
And it's okay, it's okay to go back, to retract,
and end up taking steps backwards because you need that.
Because of the fact you never know when you're going
to need others, makin' sure you have,
relationships established, don't be a loner,
because, bottom line, you just never know
when you're gonna need others,
or when others are gonna need you.
So make yourself available, and know,
that others will be available for you, also.
- Connectivity out here is the biggest resource,
I think, this base provides.
Out here we rely on one another, we put our lives
in each other's hands overseas, but if we can't open up,
and be vulnerable to one another, in a time of crisis
at home, I think we're missin' a big part of the mission.
I went a year without talking, and that's doing a disservice
to my wingmen, by not lettin' know that somethin's goin' on.
Somethin's wrong, or there's a crisis in my life
that needs to be addressed and by not discussing it,
I'm lacking in the wingman concept,
because it is a two way street.
It's not just goin' out and askin' everybody
if everything's okay, if you have somethin' goin'
on you need to communicate it to one of your wingmen,
it's a two way street.
- The biggest piece of advice is to not shut down
and close yourself off from people, and resources,
and try to deal with it yourself.
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Talk to people, talk to anybody, please don't ever believe
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that you're alone in that fight,
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and that no one wants to hear it,
or they don't understand you.
They may not fully understand what you're going through,
but they can probably help you, find someone to help you,
to be with you sometimes,
just having someone with you is what it takes.
- I used to think in terms of the things
that I can accomplish.
What can I do, what do I have the power to do?
My strength how can I do this.
And very kinda in a way self-centered,
and that may be fighter pilot, or it might just be the male
in our society sort of thing.
But I learned through Sonny's accident how everybody's sort
of connected, and you need that connection,
you cannot do things by yourself, you've got to have
that connection, you gotta use those connections.
I think, now I tell folks, that it's your relationships
that move ya through life.
It's not about this, the reason you're here on the planet,
I honestly believe, is your relationships.
Family and the people around ya,
the people that ya care about.
This all kinda came to a head for me,
the most painful phone call I've ever had
to make in my life.
This happened the day after the accident,
we've got just the smallest number of details,
but I've gotta make that phone call
to Sonny's family back home.
To his mom and dad, Jean and Marv, back at the farmhouse,
out in Henry County.
And you know, it's late at night, because I'm trying
to make the time change work, so that I'm calling them
at a reasonable hour, I'm all alone in my room,
and I'm pickin' up that phone,
and I'm just dreading this phone call,
it's just gonna be a horrible,
painful, traumatic phone call.
So I tried to be really organized, and give them,
just like you'd think, here's the details that I know,
I'll pass on all the information that I have available,
and here's the sequence of things, and we're in the process
now of getting Sonny ready to travel back home to you,
and then we've got an airplane scheduled tomorrow,
it's gonna be at this time,
it's gonna arrive at these locations.
And Jean, Sonny's mom, interrupted me in the middle
of this kind of dissertation on all these things
that we're doin', and she only wanted to know one thing.
She only wanted to know, is Sonny gonna be alone?
And I just stopped, and I instantly recognized
what she was saying, she was still worried about her son.
She was still worried about him being alone
in this long journey.
I mean the most difficult journey of all, she's worried
that Sonny, is gonna be alone, during that journey.
I immediately jumped in and said absolutely not,
the escort stays with him all the time.
He will never be alone, that entire time
that he's on that airplane, he arrives at Dover,
he will never be alone, I promise you that.
And that's all she wanted to know.
That's all she needed to hear,
was that Sonny was being taken care of.
That somebody was gonna be with him.
And it occurred to me that, that was because Jean knew,
that it was that connection, that was a relationship
with other people that was what was really important here.
That was the, she knew in a fundamental level that,
she just needed to have her son with somebody.
There had to be some closeness, personal relationship,
right there, and not break that, don't be alone.
And from that, I learned
that the most important single moment, that's the thought
that came forward, and I thought, well, that's it,
that's clearly the answer, that is our relationships,
it is our closeness with each other, that is the thing
that we cannot do without.
Jean knew it instinctively and I learned that,
from that conversation.
That relationship with each other,
that's where you get the comfort and strength,
that's what allows ya to have strength,
and then to be resilient.
Didn't know it until that time.
I always thought about it in terms of myself,
and I learned from Jean on that phone call, no it's not
about you, it's about our relationships,
it's about being with each other.
And don't be alone, when you need, when you're hurt,
don't be alone, duh, it struck me right then.
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