Dear all:

Sometimes you listen to something and are astounded at how someone else can articulate something your brain has been chewing on, but you cannot quite articulate clearly yourself.  So, I apologize that I do not think I am doing justice to a half listened to radio program.  When I have a break, I intend to listen to it more fully myself.

Over the weekend, I was dusting and sweeping while NPR's "Speaking of Faith" show was on and I started to pay attention when there was a tidbit about a game warden who was pumping.  The show was about a minister in Maine who works with game wardens.  She works with game wardens and families when they go out on "search and rescue" missions.  My brother is a firefighter paramedic who also does "dive rescue".  He basically says "dive rescue" is a euphemism for body recovery.  And so it seems to be the case with these game wardens that they do not always have the possibility of being the hero that rescues the lost person, but often enough are the one who recovers the body.  This minister was struck by the fact that these game wardens continue to do their work despite the fact that they cannot always "fix" the situation.  Sometimes they can only show the families that someone cared enough to do the search despite the fact that there was no "fix".  Sometimes, they only find the body. The minister was particularly impressed with one of the game wardens who had her "bag" for the forensic work she does in her "search and recovery" which sometimes means "body recovery" and also took along her breast pump to make sure that she had milk for her baby.  

At the same time the minister also mentioned how she would often think about how difficult it would be to go on after you lost a child, particularly in some of the ways in which children end up in the woods when the game wardens have not been able to save them  --- and yet in these most unimaginably tragic circumstances, the parents would often reach towards those who went to enormous efforts to try to find their child (however unsuccessful that attempt to find their child had been) rather than towards the evil that ended the life of that child.  

I want to listen to the whole entire piece because the few moments I listened to captured so wonderfully the empathy towards those whose children had been threatened and harmed as well as those who work tirelessly when they often have a low probability to actually save those children.

The few moments I overheard captured much more powerfully what I had tried to convey about all of us fearing for and wanting to protect our children as a universal across all cultures, religions, and ethnicities and yet sometimes realizing that we cannot always do so.  

Best, Susan Burger

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