It is early 2024 and I will be turning 70 later this year. I can't help but think back to the situations I have been a part of during those years and much of it has been shared in my Biography which was just published. I know that very few of my acquaintances will read that book, simply because most of us have more pressing matters to deal with in our everyday lives. So once again, I am going to share in detail, some events that are either glossed over in the book or not even mentioned.
I was communicating with a few public school friends and neighbours the other day and it reminded me of the first truly traumatic event in my life. In fact, it had an impact on my life from about the age of 6 right into my teen years. That might sound overly dramatic but let me explain. We lived at 185 Glen Park Avenue in Toronto and as with many young children, I had a tricycle . We had no sidewalks on our street and back then, ditches were commonplace so we rode our bikes on the street. That would be unheard of today. On a summer day I was just a few doors down from my home, riding on the street with one of my neighbours. Across the street, an older gentleman was backing up his green VW Beetle. Separating his house from the neighbour was a high hedge which blocked his view of traffic travelling west.
For whatever reason, I was looking at his car as it entered the street and at that very moment a car hit his, causing his vehicle to start spinning. The problem was, that it was spinning toward me on my tricycle. Fortunately it landed in the ditch about 20 feet from me. I still remember looking at our neighbour as he sat in his car, obviously dazed and clearly bleeding from a head wound. I don't remember anything after that.
As I mentioned, this had a long-lasting affect on me that I never told anyone about, partially because I didn't understand that this event was the cause of my ongoing nightmares from that day on. The dreams were very similar each time and it involved the accident that I had witnessed. In my dream however, I was the one who was injured. In the dream I suffered a cut on my neck, much like a slit throat. I would always wake up from my dream at this point, which is probably why I remember them.
In today's society we call things like that and the subsequent aftermath in a person's life, PTSD. Back then and as a child, I had no idea what label to put on it so I told nobody what I was experiencing...for years. Even as I write this, I get the chills so many years later.
Fast forward some 35 years and I was being asked to support friends who were facing the worst day of their lives. For me it started at 11:00pm when I received a phone call from a good mutual friend, police officer and my church elder. I was a pastor at the time and being called when members needed help was part of the job description but this would be something different.
A couple who had recently left our church when they moved north of Toronto had contacted our mutual friend, asking him to phone me. They had two children, the youngest being around 6 months old. Their dad was a cabinet maker and had his workshop in their basement up in Keswick. He was downstairs getting some last minute work done before going to bed and was unaware that his wife had brought the six month old downstairs where he was crawling on the floor. Dad meanwhile had piled 1000 lbs. of partical board on a dolly and as he was maneuvering it around a workbench it caught on a corner and collapsed onto the floor and onto his infant son.
The child was airlifted to Toronto's Sick Kids Hospital and then the phone call to me was made. I was asked to make my way downtown and arrived in a waiting room filled with grand parents, aunts and uncles and two very distraught parents. The mom was in a wheelchair with her legs all bandaged. She had tried to stop the boards from landing on her child but was unsuccessful. As I walked in, I felt all the eyes focus on me, asking without saying anything: help this little boy to live.
The next couple of hours were the most difficult I had faced in my life. We talked and we prayed and all the time trying to reassure a father that this was not his fault and not his wife's fault. Police detectives showed up which only added to the stress because it seemed as if they were going to accuse the parents of something. They went into surgery but we found out that nothing could have been done to save the child's life. By now it was well after midnight and the parents were asked if they wanted to spend an hour with their deceased son. At Sick Kids they wash the baby and wrap them in a nice white blanket for the parents to hold in a small private room. I was the only one they invited in to sit with them.
Wow...even as I write this, tears are welling up in my eyes. It was a private room but it had windows and as the parents sat stoically and no doubt in shock, family members could be seen pacing the hallway, weeping as they did. I kept trying to remind myself that I needed to be strong for the parents but they were the strong ones. After the hour was up, they handed over the child to the nurse and it was time to leave.
As I drove the half hour home, I put on Christian music and basically cried (probably sobbed) the entire way. The reason was simple: I had a daughter almost the same age and I considered what if...it had been her that died that night. I would later become a police chaplain and quickly understood why the toughest calls for most cops were those involving the deaths of children.
Anne and I counselled the couple for almost a year and the time included a regional police helicopter flying over a forested area, looking for the father who they thought might have been suicidal. It caused marriage problems as can be imagined but eventually they found outlets on how to heal. They trusted the Lord.
I should add, that the new pastor of this couple had also lost his own child to a sudden death but when he tried to help by saying "he understood what they were going through", the couple reached out to my wife and I. They didn't want to hear the words, "I know what you are feeling".
As a Police Chaplain with plenty of training in the area of PTSD (PTSI is actually the proper term), I often heard the term "vicarious PTSD". The first two experiences I shared were events I was directly involved in. Then there are the things we hear from first responders who have experienced trauma and usually I heard about it because it either had the potential of causing an Operational Stress Injury or it was already evident. I did go to the scene of a "jumper" but other than every bone in their legs being shattered, the person survived. I went to scenes with deceased bodies. Believe it or not, I handled each of these and other situations fairly well.
There were however other events and discussions that left me struggling just a little more. A good friend who had been an officer for many years, shared how he was first on the scene of a fellow officer who had just been stabbed. He was a Sergeant assigned to a neighbouring division when the call went out that an undercover cop had been injured. Unfortunately, the plaza was incorrectly identified but since he was already on the way, he crossed into the other division and was first on the scene. The officer died literally in his arms.
This was happening in the very early morning hours and my friend ended up both putting up the yellow tape guarding the crime scene and also stood watch to make sure the right people were allowed in. By the time they were finished, several hours had passed.
What happens in cases like this, is that all the officers involved are brought in the next day for debriefs as they deal with a critical incident. The fact it was a colleague that had died, it was all the more important for the officers to share their experiences. It becomes a mental health matter which police services around the world are slowly getting better at addressing.
The only problem for my friend was that he was overlooked because he was in another division. The support team missed the fact that not only was he there but that he was the first one there, witnessing a fellow officer taking his last breaths. It was a terrible oversight and showed that back in the 1990's Toronto Police still had a long way to go in the area of addressing the mental health of their members.
This is where I come into play. I was out on a ride-along with my friend in late 2002, 7 years after the incident I just described. As we sat for dinner in a Swiss Chalet, he begins to share the story and how he had been affected by the events of that evening. It was winter so we were both dressed in heavy winter police coats. When he began to cry, I knew this was something that had troubled him for all these years. He gave me details of exactly where he found the officer on the ground beside his vehicle. This was his debrief, 7 years too late. My friend is a tough guy and yet it had to have affected him all these years. He had also been the colleague of an officer who was murdered in the early 1980's while on duty. It was an event that touched many lives over the years, including a suicide of the supervising officer who couldn't live with the decisions he had made on that day, many years earlier.
In my book I shared the stories of my involvement after the Yonge Street van attack in 2018 where 11 people were killed. I saw and heard every imaginable emotion during the debriefs of the officers first on scene the day after. I remember going to a second division to do the third debrief and having to cross Yonge Street to get there. The street cleaners were busy removing the blood from the sidewalks where the people had been intentionally run over. It was a difficult day for me but imagine how those standing over the dead bodies must have been feeling.
Vicarious PTSD was starting to make more sense to me but I was convinced that I did not have it because I slept well at night. Then there was the murder of a Toronto cop in a Tim Hortons where I was the only chaplain on scene. I got there with a colleague of the murdered cop and we arrived before the forensics unit did. That meant I saw Const. Hong through the window of the Tim Hortons, lying on his back with blood coming out his mouth. Once again, I thought to myself, I am the chaplain and I have to be strong for his colleagues as they looked at his dead body. The only thing I could think of was to put my large body between them and the view they had of their friend. It actually worked but I could not unsee what I saw.
The next day I was at Traffic Services in my capacity as chaplain, being available to anyone that would want to talk. I was even interviewed by Sun Media and remember ending the interview by pointing out, "the hardest thing is that dad is not coming home". A few days later I was at the funeral and once again spending an hour talking to cops from various services but particularly Peel cops, who were first on the scene of the murder.
I write this and my book, partly because it is therapeutic. At least that is what they tell me and what I tell those who share their stories of trauma. I have no idea why God chose me to be involved in all these situations, even as a child. I hope it has made me stronger but at the time it certainly didn't feel that way and in hindsight, it probably did cause some vicarious PTSD. But I am OK!
