People in public service professions tend to be “fixers,” Hamilton Fire Department Lt. Jason Callihan said Monday night. Unsolvable problems stick in their gears.
For Callihan, that problem was the Dec. 28, 2015 death of colleague Patrick Wolterman.
He rode in the procession carrying Wolterman’s remains three days later, looking out over crowds who had come to show their support for the fire department. He spent over a year walking by the empty gray locker.
The true shock of it still wouldn’t hit until 2017, when he and others at the station realized how tightly they were gripping their pain.
“I shoved it all down,” he said. “When we got out on runs, we see things. We know how to process that. … When it comes to somebody you know, there’s no disconnect from that.”
There were few tools for coping with it in a workplace full of people whose priorities revolved around a shared desire to find solutions and move on to the next run. Callahan knew real recovery couldn’t happen without outside help.