~ Coming Out of It Alive ~

My Captain came home today from his Hurricane Sandy deployment with Maryland Task Force One’s Urban Search and Rescue Team!

They helped many.  They experienced much.  They slept not at all.

And we missed him awfully.

We sat around the dinner table tonight for the first time in too long, and listened to the stories of his adventures….

….and his misadventures.

This little doozy happened last Wednesday, apparently.  “Merely a flesh wound!” was his explanation.   Sheepishly he told the tale of a slight miscalculation, broken auto-glass, and a resulting new scar.  Oh, and something about most likely being teased for the remainder of his career.

Because the fireservice, if nothing else, is compassionate and forgiving.

Look at Varmint’s and Critter’s faces as My Captain talks about his deployment.   These children have never known the kind of hardship he is describing having witnessed.   I hope they never do.

During the media blitzkrieg of Hurricane Sandy, one thing has been bothering me.   I’ve seen stories about destruction, about heartbreak, and about misery.   But what I haven’t seen covered in the media is that fact that this storm….the most enormous storm in history….resulted in relatively few deaths.  Even compared to Hurricane Katrina, which was by all accounts a much smaller meteorological phenomena.  Yes, the structural devastation was incomprehensible, but what was destroyed was exactly that….WHATs.  Not near as many WHOs.   Lives were saved.  Incredibly in one of the most densely populated areas in our country…we did not experience thousands of deaths.

Why aren’t we talking about that as well?

There are a ton of negative aspects of this storm, yes.  Lives were lost…horribly, tragically. But by far most everyone came out of this thing ALIVE.

Why aren’t we focusing on that, too?

I look around the table at the loves of my life and I ask myself, “If we lost everything, but still had each other, would it be enough?”

My husband, my children, my mother…..

YES.