By Peter Preble
The firehouse kitchen table doesn’t look like a traditional wellness program, and nobody calls it a debriefing. But this is where firefighters have been making sense of what they have seen long before the fire service had a formal vocabulary for behavioral health.
Fortunately, that vocabulary has grown over the years. We now talk about post-traumatic stress, burnout, compassion fatigue, secondary traumatic stress and, increasingly, moral injury. We have come a long way from the days when the expected response to a difficult call was simply to suck it up and get back on the rig. But there may still be something missing from our vocabulary — the words to describe grief.
| READ MORE: Coping with grief in the fire service: Moving forward after loss
Giving context to grief
Grief may seem an unusual word in an occupational wellness conversation. We usually associate it with the death of someone we love. But a death does not have to involve a long relationship to leave a mark. Its weight can come from identification, meaning or circumstance.
For example, firefighters have identified child deaths among the most distressing events of their careers. In one study, 34% of firefighters who identified a single worst work-related event named the death of a child. More recent research found greater post-traumatic stress symptoms among firefighters who were parents following an incident involving the death of a child, suggesting that personal identification with a victim may shape how an incident is experienced.
Part of the problem may be that the fire service already has several words for what the job can do to us. They are important words, but they do not all describe the same thing:
- Post-traumatic stress concerns a continuing response to trauma.
- Burnout grows from chronic occupational stress.
- Secondary traumatic stress can follow exposure to others’ trauma.
- Moral injury can follow experiences that violate deeply held moral expectations.
Grief asks a different question: What have I lost?
The answers can overlap. A firefighter can be traumatized by a fatal fire and grieve the person who died. The death of a fellow firefighter can be both traumatic exposure and bereavement. A firefighter can experience moral injury after believing leadership failed the crew and also mourn the trust that disappeared with it.
Naming grief does not replace these other concepts; it adds another lens.
Furthermore, not everything that hurts is pathology. Grief is not an illness. It is a human response to losing something that matters. If part of what a firefighter is experiencing is grief, the first question may not be, “What is wrong with you?” It may be, “What happened that mattered to you?”
The losses add up
Firefighters encounter death repeatedly over a career: the child from 15 years ago whose face occasionally returns; the person trapped in a vehicle the crew could not save; the family across the street watching everything they own disappear into smoke; the firefighter who died in the line of duty; the colleague who died by suicide; the calls that ended badly despite everyone doing everything right.
Then there are losses that have nothing to do with death. Firefighting can become deeply connected with identity, belonging and purpose. A 2026 study of retired firefighters found that leaving the service could bring a profound loss of meaning and identity; some participants compared retirement to bereavement or divorce.
A transfer can separate someone from a crew. A station can close. An injury can end operational duty. Organizational conflict or perceived betrayal can damage trust in a department to which someone has given decades.
Professional grief is not a clinical diagnosis, nor should it become another label applied to every difficult experience in the fire service. It is a way of recognizing that the work itself contains losses and that those losses can accumulate.
You’re already doing the work
On scene, a firefighter may need to put emotion somewhere temporarily because somebody still needs to stretch a line, perform CPR or speak to a family. Compartmentalization can be an operational skill. The question is whether the compartment ever gets opened again — and, if not, why?
Firefighters report stigma, confidentiality concerns and fear of appearing weak as barriers to seeking help. They also place high value on clinicians who understand firefighter culture. But toughness itself is not the enemy. After all, fire service culture offers its own ways of dealing with difficult experiences.
Long before the fire service had behavioral health programs, it had the kitchen table. Crews ate together, replayed calls, told stories, complained, laughed and occasionally allowed somebody to say, “That one bothered me.” One study of airport firefighters even called it the “kitchen table phenomenon” — the station table as a place for informal conversation, mutual trust and support after difficult calls.
Other researchers, after observations and interviews across 37 fire stations, found that dark humor — like that often found at the station table — can create cohesion and even open a path to discussing emotions. They also found that when humor suddenly disappeared after certain incidents, its absence could signal that the crew needed closer attention.
The firehouse can therefore be both a place where grief is processed and a place where grief is postponed. Firefighters may already be doing more grief work than they realize. They simply may not have been given a name for it.
Making room for grief
Adding grief to the wellness conversation does not require another mandatory program. It does require trust. Firefighters place considerable value on support from people who understand the culture and the realities of the job.
Company officers matter. Peer supporters matter. Culturally competent clinicians matter. Chaplains can be part of that network. So can the firefighter across the table who knows someone well enough to notice when they are not quite themselves. The goal is not to turn the kitchen table into group therapy. It is to make room for another question.
After a difficult call, we routinely ask whether everyone is OK. It may also help to ask what made this call different. Was there something about the patient that hit close to home? Is there a moment you cannot quite put down? Why is this one staying with you?
Departments can also acknowledge losses before they become invisible. Retirement is not merely the end of employment after decades of service. Injury can mean more than physical limitation. The death of a colleague, separation from a crew, or a rupture of organizational trust can affect identity, belonging and purpose. Not every one of those experiences requires counseling, but they are no less real because nobody calls them grief.
Carrying it together
The fire service knows how to mourn when one of its own dies. Bells sound. Apparatus is draped. Honor guards stand watch. Pipes play. Firefighters travel hundreds of miles to stand shoulder to shoulder with people they may never have met because the fire service understands instinctively that some things should never be carried alone.
Perhaps that wisdom has something to teach us about quieter forms of grief.
We do not need to medicalize grief or convince firefighters that every difficult call has secretly wounded them. We simply need to leave room for one more possibility.
What a firefighter is carrying may not be a disorder to diagnose, a weakness to overcome or a problem to fix. It may simply be grief. And firefighters already know one of the most important things about grief: Heavy things are easier to carry when somebody takes hold of the other side.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rev. Peter Preble is a fire chaplain, grief coach and end-of-life doula. He serves as chaplain of the Hull Fire Department and assistant chief chaplain of the Massachusetts Corps of Fire Chaplains. An Army veteran and United Church of Christ minister, Preble writes and teaches on grief, loss and the emotional burdens carried by first responders.
