Hi Mate,
Each week I share one tool for people in frontline and emergency work, and the families alongside them. Practical, direct, and nothing you'd find on a workplace wellness session or poster.
TL;DR (What this email is about)
Losing a colleague on the job is one of the most significant things that can happen in our world. The grief is real, it's complex, and it rarely gets the space it deserves.
This week’s idea
There's a kind of grief in this job that most people outside it will never fully understand.
When you lose a workmate on the job or on ops, it isn't just personal loss. It's layered in a way that's hard to explain to someone who hasn't lived it.
You grieve the person. The one you worked alongside, shared meals with, had personal jokes with, and trusted with your life in situations most people will never find themselves in. The one whose habits you knew, whose voice you can still hear, whose absence on shift feels wrong in a way that doesn't go away quickly.
But it's more than that.
You grieve in a workplace. Surrounded by the same equipment, the same routines, the same role that was part of how they died. You're expected to keep showing up to the place where the loss lives. To do the same work. To keep going.
And most services don't give you much time before that's expected of you.
There's also something that doesn't get talked about enough. The questions that come afterwards. Whether you could have done something differently. Whether the outcome would have changed if circumstances had been slightly other than they were. Those questions don't always have answers and they don't stop coming just because the funeral is over.
Grief after losing someone on the job doesn't follow a clean timeline. It can sit quietly for months and then surface without warning. An anniversary. A similar job. Someone new starting who reminds you of them. A piece of equipment that brings it back without asking permission.
And because the culture in most services pushes toward operational continuity, toward getting back to work and holding it together, the grief often goes sideways. It comes out as anger, as withdrawal, as a heaviness that people around you can't quite name.
You're not broken. You're carrying something enormous in an environment that wasn't built to hold it.
One tool to try this week
Give it a name and a place
If you've lost a mate on the job or on ops and haven't had a proper space to grieve it, this week do one small thing to acknowledge it.
It doesn't have to be significant. It doesn't have to involve anyone else.
Write their name down. One thing you remember about them. One thing the work hasn't been the same without since they left.
You're not reopening something that was closed. For most people who've lost a colleague this way, it was never fully closed. You're just giving it a moment of acknowledgement that the system probably didn't give you enough of at the time.
If it brings something up that feels bigger than you can manage alone, that's worth paying attention to. Talking to someone you trust, a peer, a chaplain, a counsellor who understands this work, is not weakness. It's the right move.
Why this matters
Grief after losing someone on the job is one of the most undertreated experiences in emergency and frontline services. The focus after a critical incident is usually operational. What went wrong. What can be improved. The human cost to the people left behind often gets less attention than it deserves.
Unprocessed grief doesn't disappear. It shifts. It shows up years later in ways that are hard to connect back to the original loss. Giving it a name and a place, even privately, even years after the fact, is not dwelling. It's the beginning of carrying it differently.
That’s it for this week.
Quick question — does your service have anything real in place for when this happens, or is it mostly left to you as the individual to figure out?
Hit reply and let me know. I read every response.
Take care out there,
Rick
www.codeonesupport.com
Code One Support
