Nobility of Suffering

When people talk of nobility, it is often those extraordinary physical talents that are put to the test and examined under a lens of moral scrutiny. Public safety professionals are put to that test many times over, whether they are pulling someone from a burning building, confronting a gunman, or removing a battered child from a home.

I often recall a scene from the 1991 film City Slickers and, ultimately, its premise. Mitch asks Curly what the secret to life is. Curly holds up his index finger and says, “One thing.” “What’s that supposed to mean”? Mitch retorts. Curly replies, “You’re the one that’s got to figure it out.” Confused (and a bit amused) by Curly’s anecdote, the concept never crystallized for Mitch until later in the film when he and his gang, now on a cattle drive, cross a river. A calf lagging behind the herd is washed downstream during a heavy rain shower. With limited visibility and understanding of the terrain, Mitch charges into the rapid waters, nearly losing his own life, eventually pulling the calf to shore. Exhausted and out of breath, Mitch lies on the ground while the calf licks him. He shakes his head in affirmation while managing a small laugh. Perhaps he experienced that one thing.

For law enforcement officers, it’s not always about saving a life but saving a soul—to create a safe haven of order and peace out of chaos with faith, compassion, and understanding. I recall a personal story from my rookie year as a cop:

It was a summer’s evening after 8pm and I was dispatched to a vehicle accident some nine miles away from where I needed to be at that moment. As a sheriff’s deputy covering nearly 800 square miles often by myself or with another officer, I always hated injury accidents. Between the accident itself, a passer-by showing up and calling for help, the translation and dispatch of the message, and the actual response by emergency personnel, time was never on their side.

With the crunching of the gravel billowing from beneath my tires and dust from the road clouding the skies, I slid to a stop just above the ditch where the vehicle was overturned. With my driver’s side door still swinging open, I jumped out and ran down to the ditch. A woman was lying underneath her car, pinned on her back and just above her knees. Several farmers were standing by her, all speaking at once while trying to tell me what had happened (many times it is the bystanders who are the most frantic and in need of calming). Paramedics and fire personnel were still on the way during this moment of chaos and confusion. I had not turned off my siren when I left my vehicle so it was still roaring from above while this woman was writhing in pain underneath the ravaged metal and broken windows of her car.

It was only minutes earlier that the silence and tranquility of this countryside was broken. Avoiding a skunk, she had lost control on the gravel road, overcorrected, and struck a concrete bridge rail before flipping over into the ditch. She was half-thrown from the vehicle like a rag doll before being pinned.

As the sun was setting, paramedics were working to secure her upper body with a spine board while firefighters, with hydraulic rescue tools, attempted to separate her and the car. Sparks were visible in the dusk and the deep sound of men’s voices working among the calamity suddenly faded away from me like a song coming to an end. I remember everything moving in slow motion as I felt my hand being grabbed. Having been on my knees helping the paramedics with their equipment, this woman had reached over to me. She moved in and out of consciousness as the firemen worked to free her. She was weeping and I remember seeing a wet stream of tears, visible from the sparks, rolling back across the side of her cheeks and ears.

Think about how often we express our entire lives and conditions to strangers in the course of a few minutes. Filled with half-truths, we often feed our pride, ego, or victim mindset as we complain, while sitting in the barber shop chair, about the mechanic who overcharged us. Later, while standing in a grocery store check-out line, we complain to the cashier about the price of food. Some listeners will shake their heads in agreement while others will disagree and we move on to find someone who does.

In times of great despair, however, words and ego are non-existent. All one needs to do is look into a person’s eyes to see her authentic life—a life of disappointments, failures, successes, and celebrations. A life that is worth living for as long as she is here to do so.

I caught this woman’s name only as “Helen.” With a few uncomfortable grunts, she managed to tell me that she had grown up in the area, but was living in Georgia with her teenage daughter. She was so proud of her daughter and proceeded to tell me of her accomplishments. She was also concerned with her daughter’s new boyfriend and whether or not he was good for her.

Taking short breaths, Helen changed the subject quickly and explained that she was visiting her mother and had just left a friend’s house to meet her in town when the accident happened. Our conversation was disconnected, often, as she moved in and out of consciousness or as she kept telling me, over and over, “Please promise to call my daughter—tell her what’s happened—please promise to call her.”

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Given her physical position, the paramedics were anxious to get her lower body onto the spine board and up to the ambulance as they held the I-V bag above her head. Just moments before the firefighters pulled back the last piece of metal to free her, I felt Helen grip my hand hard. Her breathing became labored and shallow and tears began to flow down the tearful trail from earlier. She said her chest hurt and I noticed her wiggling her upper body as the paramedics tried to keep her head and torso still.

She looked over at me, this time with concerned eyes that had previously been so sure and focused. I touched her forehead and softly told her that they were almost done—that she was going to be okay. As a 21-year old rookie, however, I knew little about blunt force chest trauma from car accidents. Helen was dying.

Moments later, they whisked her into the ambulance while the rest of us remained to process the accident scene. About an hour later, I arrived at the emergency room to complete some paperwork and visit with her family. The doctors had advised me that Helen was stable and had no broken bones or major injuries. In fact, they were looking to release her in the next few hours. I left my card with Helen’s mother and asked to follow up the next day in order to complete my paperwork and check on her.

It was around 2:30 am before I got home. I was so exhausted that I dropped into bed and fell asleep. At 3:42 a.m. my telephone rang. The on-duty dispatcher called to tell me that Helen had died and that I would need to modify my report from an injury accident to a fatality when I returned to work. Groggy and confused, it took me a second to comprehend what he had just said. She died? The nurse indicated that she had gone into cardiac arrest from a slow, aortic bleed. It had been so slow that it went undetected—even by the emergency room physicians.

When I hung up the phone I continued sitting for a second before falling back on my pillow. As I lay there, I felt tears roll down the sides of my own cheeks and ears, much as I remembered hers. I was confused and mad. It dawned on me that she was gone and it was only hours earlier that she was so full of life. Did I say the right thing to her? Did I do all I could?

Since then I often ponder my own death. Are we afraid to die or only to die alone? Can a stranger, kneeling by your side, holding your hand and looking at you with compassion and hope offer your soul the love and comfort to transcend your mortal life in a meaningful way?

This sense of knowing is not something we are trained or prepared for in law enforcement, let alone in our own life. Much like a drafted young man during Vietnam, he faced his own mortality with similar questions and doubts—ill-prepared for what he was about to experience. What if I die? Will someone be with me? What if my buddy dies? Will I be with him? If I live, can I live with myself?

“Knowing” is only an extension of our humanity that we are forced to handle at the moment of truth—our truth or another’s. Officers, firefighters, and soldiers who have made the ultimate sacrifice have fulfilled their heroic destiny and are indeed finally at peace. But for those of us who are chosen to escape our own peril in fulfillment of our service to others; we’re only destined to bear a lifetime of suffering—an inescapable paradox. Not yet knowing peace ourselves, we encumber a suffering for others so that they may know peace.

Collective noble instincts—often left unspoken and demonstrated by deed—are statements of symbolic immortality that provide light and hope during dark times. N. S. Shaler expressed at the turn of the 20th Century, “Heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death.” We admire those who have the courage to face death and those who die receive our valor and admiration. It moves us because we have doubts about how brave we would be—to face our own death—or experience another’s.

Psychologist Ernest Becker explained that we are sorry creatures because we have made death conscious. “As an organism we are fated to perpetuate ourselves and identify evil as a threat to that perpetuation.” We see evil in anything that hurts us then...even a rolled-over car in the ditch. Preoccupied with danger and evil (even in the absence of an immediate threat of death), our lives are still a meditation on it. The only planned venture for controlling or eliminating those threats is left with those who appear larger than life--and so we have faith and believe in them.

We have called our heroes “saviors” in both literal and symbolic senses. They deliver us from evil and the termination of our souls’ higher existence. Noble instincts arising out of this cultural hero system allow us to believe we can transcend death by participating in something of lasting worth!

Copyright © by Brian A. Kinnaird

References and Recommended Reading:

Campbell, J. (1968). The hero with a thousand faces, 2ed. Princeton University Press: Princeton, N.J.

Shaler, N.S. (1901). The individual: A study of life and death. Appleton: New York.