I remember walking, tourist-like, through an old cemetery in
Savanah, Georgia on a weekend road trip while at FLETC. I just like old cemeteries.
One of the saddest benevolent lies is found there: “Gone but not forgotten”. As
I scanned the ancient headstones, I notice that there seemed to be one that had
garnered special attention. I moved closer and began to read that this was the
resting place of the remains of one Button Gwinnet, one of the original signers
of the Declaration of Independence. I inhaled with whispered “Wow” and suddenly
felt that I was on an especially sacred patch of ground.
There is hardly a culture where remembrance is not a part. As
the son of a WWII soldier part of my DNA is saluting the flag, wearing the
poppy pin, and standing at attention at somber ceremonies remembering the
fallen. We are compelled to remember our heroes. Even our collective American
guilt over our treatment of our Vietnam soldiers blossomed into yellow ribbons
for our Iraq war veterans and we finally invited those Vietnam conflict era
veterans to the party.
When a police officer dies, we offer a final parade more
massive than any Presidential motorcade. Their name is engraved in our nation’s
capital and perhaps in state and local monuments. Even in the current era of
hostility toward law enforcement, local communities find an outpouring of
support when a police officer is killed. Flowers, cards, and teddy bears cover
the places where the blood was spilled.
And that is as it should be. Never forget. Never forget.
Then we look around at those memorials and see in the crowd
the wheelchair bound former police officer whose career was derailed by a line
of duty injury. We see those with the slight, tell-tale limp of a prosthetic. We
see one with the stoic expression well practiced to mask the pulsing winces of
chronic pain. We don’t see the ones still in their hospital beds attached to
tubes and monitors. We don’t see the ones at the rehab center learning how to
walk again. We don’t see the ones whose injuries were once described in the
newspaper as “non-life threatening” sitting in the darkness trying to talk
their own brain out of a panic.
It’s not a competition between those survivors of a line of
duty death of a loved one and those who are called into a life of caring for a
living survivor. Children left without a mother or father, and children whose
lives have also been changed and now must adjust to a mother or father who
simply cannot be who they once were, have their own grief and loss to bear. It
isn’t fair to measure the feeling of abandonment by the family of a line of
duty death when the thin blue line breaks with the passage of time against the feeling
of abandonment when an officer’s injury makes them of no use to their agency
and they become unemployed and uninsured.
But for the catastrophically injured to be forgotten during
a time declared by Presidential proclamation to be devoted to both the dead and
wounded is for us to fail in our remembrance of the totality of heroism and
sacrifice.
To forget those law enforcement veterans robs our culture, both as a
profession and as a nation, of the completeness of our honor to those who have
served with utmost devotion.
If we forget the hurting of any hero, we may
forget the fullness of our own willingness to give all. For behind every dead
and wounded police officer stands the living, serving, able ones ready to make
that same journey out of safety and into danger. We see it every day. Only by
honoring all of those who have given much can we stand resolute to carry on.
*Police week honors the fallen. Let us also honor and help
those who fell and are still working to rise up again.
