EMILY PRATT SLATIN

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

Retired Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer, living in Vermont.

Where My Worlds Overlapped Only Once

May 26, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

Yesterday was Memorial Day, which meant that most of America had already begun its annual conversion of remembrance into entertainment, retail strategy, traffic, grilled meat, beer, flags, parades, mattress sales, and patriotic merchandising. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I drove to Queensbury, New York, to meet Maddie for dinner at Texas Roadhouse.

I drove through Lake George on the way there, past Six Flags Great Escape, and the whole day began folding in on itself. That happens more now, at midlife. Time is no longer something in front of me, unmarked and endless. It has shape, distance, and names attached to it.

For me, Memorial Day is not only about military death, though that is what it is meant to honor. It has become something wider, more private. It reminds me that once we reach midlife, we start facing the path of time, and it becomes clearer as we go on.

At twenty, death is an interruption somewhere far away. At fifty, it has addresses. t's a name written in black Sharpie sometime in the 90's on the wall of a camp building, or engraved in brass on a memorial wall in a museum. It has someone's laugh still intact in my memory while their physical self has been gone for decades.

Memorial Day used to make me angry for practical reasons. I hated it. I hated having to get up extra early, collect overtime the public would later complain about during budget meetings, put on my Class A dress uniform, go to work, and participate in a parade. I saw the whole thing as an enormous and unnecessary public expenditure with limited rewards beyond a moment of entertainment.

There we were, dressed up and displayed for the public, marching or standing beside apparatus as though emergency services were meant to be consumed visually by people holding little flags. Perhaps that show is so deeply ingrained in American society that we are willing to overlook the fact that we took a day of remembrance and turned it into a day of performance, entertainment, and commercialism.

The part nobody ever wanted to hear was that during those parades, there was always, without fail, a call for assistance either during the parade or immediately afterward. Always. Without fail. Every single year of my career, and it was a goddamn nightmare. Gridlocked traffic, crowds, blocked roads, barricades, families wandering around in the street, and no clean way to turn anything around. The public loved seeing emergency vehicles in a parade until those same vehicles actually needed to go somewhere.

Then I would inevitably end up on a call in my Class A uniform, reinforcing the public fantasy that this was what emergency work looked like. Crisp shirt, polished brass, formal presentation, literal white glove service—the whole respectable civic myth. Line officers with their white hats appeared almost godlike to the general public.

In reality, calls were sweat, diesel, blood, vomit, mud, piss, fear, broken glass, bad decisions, and body weight. I would ruin a dress shirt, then have to replace it. I would stain the uniform, then spend my day off cleaning work out of fabric never designed for actual work. The public saw the symbol. I paid for the shirt.

The parade version of emergency services is clean. The real version follows you home in your clothes.

I was raised in fire and EMS culture where the back of the ambulance was treated as sterile, almost like the cockpit of a commercial jetliner. Dispatch traffic, clinical language, equipment, protocols, and the expectation that the patient would sit or lie there inside that metal box and be processed. I changed that. Instead of making the patient listen to the radio dispatcher the entire time, I had a mixtape playing with current music, mostly nineties. I did my best work with music in the background.

I understood fear. I understood what it was like to hear a disembodied voice over the radio that carried with it the shadow of a cab drivers attitude. I understood that the back of an ambulance could either feel like rescue or like being a human hotbox shipment. Some patients needed oxygen, medication, immobilization, rapid transport, or an intervention that could be documented neatly. Some needed to be reminded that they were still human. Some needed one familiar song between their crisis and the hospital.

I remembered key details about patients I saw regularly, especially when it came to psych patients. Not only what mattered to them, but why it mattered. That distinction is everything. A person is not merely a musician because they play an instrument. They might be a musician because music is the only place where they have ever felt fully understood. A person is not merely an artist because they draw. They might be an artist because making something beautiful is the only proof they have that their inner world is not only pain. A person is not merely a writer because they keep notebooks. They might be a writer because language is the only place where the chaos arranges itself into something survivable.

Those were the things I remembered. Those were the things I wrote down in blue ink on handwritten prehospital care forms, only to have them transcribed later into hospital database systems and dismissed by a clinician on call who thought they knew better. I watched human beings become entries. I watched meaning, and the cause, and realities of being human become data. I watched the very details that helped people open up get flattened by systems that preferred categories to souls.

There were suicidal patients who came in when they needed help, and the help they needed was not always medicine. Sometimes what they needed was a reminder that their life still held purpose. Some were gifted musicians. Some were artists. Some were ordinary people who would have made prolific writers if anyone had ever bothered to tell them that their inner life mattered.

In the ambulance, when they told me their life was over, I would ask them about their passion. I would ask the musician about music, the artist about art, the person who wrote in secret about what they wanted to say. I watched people come back to themselves by inches. I watched them decide, sometimes right there under the ambulance lights and nineties music, that they were going to get help so that when they got out, they could chase that passion again.

Most of these people were not suicidal because they were fundamentally broken or defective. Most were victims of circumstances beyond their control who had become emotionally overwhelmed and could no longer see a way out. Some had spent years trapped inside abusive relationships, poverty, isolation, grief, rejection, addiction, humiliation, or lives that had slowly narrowed until every day felt smaller than the one before it.

The trauma was emotional, which made it easier for the world to dismiss because there were no visible wounds to reference. What I often saw were not people who wanted to die, but people who had lost the ability to imagine continuing to live the way they had been living.

But that kind of compassion does not get billed neatly.

There is no billing code for restoring someone's sense of self. There is no clean institutional field for the moment when a human being decides to live because someone remembered what made them feel alive. There is no reimbursement for knowing why the thing mattered.

That is my standard of patient care. Sadly, it was not the standard of patient care under the EMS systems in which I worked.

Some inter-facility psych transfer patients would ask staff if I could be present when it came time to transfer them. The request on rare occasions made it back to me, and I understood why. Most of them were not asking for me specifically so much as they were asking for the version of the ambulance where there was music instead of silence, conversation instead of interrogation, and at least one person who still spoke to them like they existed beyond the paperwork.

This is why it hurts so badly when someone dismisses my career. You can question my methods, my thought processes, and my decisions, but you will not question my dedication, my patient care, or the fact that I earned the rank of lieutenant. Rank was not valor. It was responsibility. It was liability. It was trust earned in environments where poor judgment could have consequences that became part of permanent public record.

When Angie said not only that I was unfaithful, but that I was never a lieutenant, I told her she was no longer welcome in our home. I meant it. She was not questioning a job title. She was attempting to erase a lived reality. She was attempting to dismiss the years, the calls, the patients, the crews, the dead, the ruined uniforms, the holidays worked, the decisions made under pressure, and the people who trusted me enough to follow my lead when trust was not theoretical. Neither accusation was true.

People can dislike me. They can disagree with me. They can criticize me. What they cannot do is rewrite the life I lived because it makes their version of me more convenient.

The people I worked with were often misfits themselves. Many had no real family, or no family that understood them, so we became each other's family. We saw each other outside of work. We were coworkers, roommates by assignment, friends by necessity, and sometimes lovers by proximity—the product of loneliness, adrenaline, bad judgment, longing, and the sheer fact of being human. There were workplace romances. People had sex. People broke each other's hearts, covered each other's shifts, cooked together, fought, made up, drank coffee at questionable hours, and shared jokes that would have horrified anyone outside the room.

At work, it felt like we were all hired roommates and friends brought together by the job. We sometimes said things at work that were completely acceptable to our bosses that could never be repeated in polite company or in the presence of the general public.

That is the part people outside emergency services often miss. They see departments, stations, agencies, uniforms, and apparatus. They do not see the small subculture. They do not see the intimacy of shared trauma, shared boredom, shared meals, shared bathrooms, shared sleep deprivation, and shared responsibility. Then suddenly, life takes everyone away.

Some died. Some moved on to better opportunities. Some married, divorced, transferred, retired, disappeared, or simply stopped being reachable in the way people do when time has done its quiet work. Not every loss arrives with a funeral. Some losses arrive as distance. Some arrive as silence. Some arrive as a number in your phone you no longer call because you are no longer sure who would answer.

Time itself is the corrosive that works its magic in tiny ways so imperceivable that when we look at them in the present, they seem far far away. It's how little ever changes when you view it from the sky. By midlife, entire worlds have ended behind us.

Yesterday, driving past Great Escape, I felt it. I remembered going there as a small child. I remembered the park as summer, noise, rides, heat, sticky hands from cotton candy, and the specific kind of joy children believe will always be available to them. I remembered being sent there years later by the summer camp where I worked as an extra day off because I had helped save the life of a camper. That was one of those strange moments where the child I had been and the rescuer I was becoming seemed to stand in the same place as if Lake George is where my worlds overlapped only once in my life.

Or at least, that is what I used to think. It was also where I think of Molly. I had been her counselor, and over the years we became summer friends. Summer friendships are their own strange category of love. Sometimes they are more vivid because they exist outside ordinary time. Camp compresses human connection. People arrive, become important, and vanish back into the rest of their lives until summer calls them back again.

The last summer I saw Molly, she hugged me goodbye and said that this goodbye was forever. I asked her what she meant. She was young. I wanted to know if everything was okay. She told me and Angie that she was living her life to the fullest because she did not have long. We were confused. Of course we were confused. Young people are not supposed to say things like that and mean them.

That was the last time I heard from her. She died in a car accident, hit by a random drunk driver. I still have no idea how she would have known months in advance. I have no explanation that satisfies reason. Maybe she knew something. Maybe she felt something. Maybe it was coincidence, and coincidence can sometimes wear the mask of prophecy so convincingly that no amount of logic can fully remove it. I only know what she said, and I know that I have carried the memory of that goodbye ever since.

Her name is now on the wall of the main building at camp.

There is a particular violence in seeing someone become a name on a wall. A name is preservation, but it is also reduction. The name on the wall states the person existed. It cannot say how they laughed. It cannot say what they sounded like when they were trying to be brave. It cannot tell you what it felt like to hug them before they somehow predicted and announced their own final absence in advance.

I understand memorial walls differently now. There was a time when they felt historical, almost abstract. Then I went to the FASNY Museum in Hudson, New York, and recognized names on the memorial wall. Not names from books. Not names from stories. Names I knew. People I knew. People who had stood in the same rooms with me, worked calls, told jokes, made mistakes, loved badly, loved well, and lived complicated human lives before becoming letters on a surface.

That is one of the thresholds of midlife. Memorials stop being public history and start becoming part of ones personal inventory.

Yesterday, passing Lake George, I felt the inventory. Molly. Arturo. The people from work. The people who became family because none of us fit comfortably anywhere else. The people who drifted away because life made better offers. The people whose futures stopped while, statistically unlikely, mine kept going. The part of survival nobody explains when you are young is that you do not simply live longer—you become a carrier of discontinued worlds.

Arturo died in a car accident. I was dispatched with my department. My parents never knew I was there.

Arturo had been driving a more modern Geo, emerald green with grey ABS plastic interior, instead of the white one with the five-alarm red interior that had finally been replaced. I think I only remember that detail because trauma loves objects. It attaches itself to colors, upholstery, headlights, shoes, weather, pavement, and the specific make of a car. The old white Geo with the red interior belonged to one chapter. The emerald green one belonged to the last.

The person who hit him was a teenager who was also a volunteer firefighter. He was responding to a nothing call and thought it would be well within his right to intentionally speed past a stop sign.

He was responding code three to a nothing call. The kind of call that should never have cost anyone their life. There is a particular fury reserved for preventable death, especially when you understand the system that produced it. Youth, adrenaline, responder mythology, entitlement, lights, speed, and the dangerous belief that the slightest urgency automatically equals importance. It does not. Discipline matters. Judgment matters. Stops signs still matter. Physics does not care about your pager.

I was called there with my crew. I never told my parents that part of the story.

I remember leaving Arturo at the hospital and telling work that I had to go get my father, and that I would explain later. Someone needed to call someone to cover the rest of my shift. I had to go. Even then, even in that moment, logistics continued. Coverage still had to be arranged. The ambulance still had to go back. The station still had to function. Catastrophe does not suspend staffing needs.

I literally raced back to the station with the ambulance, got in my car, threw the lights on, and raced to get my father. I ran into Mom's house, and Dad was sitting in the living room. I said, "Dad, get in the car right now. Shut the fuck up and let's go right now."

He knew something had happened.

People know. They may not know the details, but they know when language loses its usual softness. They know when the person in front of them is not asking, explaining, or negotiating. I was not being gentle because there was no gentle version available. I was carrying the truth ahead of him, and I needed him in the car before the truth had time to become words.

I took Dad to see Arturo at the emergency room, racing my father from the ambulance bay straight into the trauma room. It was against protocol, but the situation made it clear that this would need to be preemptively excused under the circumstances.

My father got to talk to Arturo as the staff was arranging for his transport to more specialized care. My father said he refused to leave his friends side, no matter what the cost, and that he did not care. He stated as such to the emergency room staff, proclaiming that the two of them had built the atom bomb, this was the least that they could do in return. It was the first and only time in my entire life that I saw my father cry.

My father abused me. He took away my childhood, but Arturo was his lifelong best friend, and while my father's abuse might have made me sad, it never made me a monster. I could hate what he did to me and still understand what Arturo meant to him. I could carry the damage he caused and still refuse to become someone who would deny him the right to grieve. People are rarely clean enough to satisfy our need for moral simplicity. My father harmed me, and he loved Arturo.

That day, I was a paramedic, a best friends daughter, a messenger, a witness, and the person who drove her abusive father toward the worst news of his life with lights flashing on her own car. That kind of memory does not leave. It changes shape, but it does not leave.

I am intolerant of people who treat emergency services like theater. I never had much patience for people who block apparatus, interfere with responders, or treat our urgency as optional because they themselves are not in a hurry. I remember an impossible old man living in one of the places where I worked. He would always intentionally get in front of responding fire trucks, ambulances, police vehicles, whatever happened to be coming, and act as though because he was not in a hurry, nobody else had the right to be.

When he died in his sleep, his wife found him deceased the following morning and complained that we did not get there fast enough.

I replied, "Ironic, considering for the past decade your husband blocked emergency vehicles, and you were riding passenger."

I do not regret saying that.

I know how it sounds. I also know what it means to be the person trying to reach someone while another person decides their own indifference is more important than someone else's emergency. Compassion without boundaries is not virtue. Sometimes it is just permission for dangerous people to keep being dangerous. I spent years caring deeply for people, but I never mistook care for submission to nonsense.

My compassion has never been softness without structure. I could sit in the back of an ambulance with a suicidal patient and help them remember why their music mattered, and I could also tell a hypocrite the truth when the truth had spent a decade earning the right to be spoken.

Yesterday, all of that moved through me while I was simply driving to meet Maddie for dinner.

That is what midlife does. It turns geography into memory. You cannot drive past a place and expect it to remain only a place. A restaurant, a firehouse, a hospital, a camp building, a museum wall, and an amusement park all begin carrying more versions of you than any map can show.

That is not healing in the simple way people like to claim that it is. It is not closure. I distrust closure as a concept. It sounds too much like making the dead convenient. What happened is that life continued, and because it continued, I returned to a place that held ghosts and allowed it to hold laughter too. Life is never simple.

Amelia and Maddie are the best friends of my lifetime. In nearly forty seven years, I have named three people as best friends, and I do not use that title casually.

I become deeply invested in my friends, especially those I have deemed best friends. When someone matters to me, I become deeply invested in their life, and remember not only what matters to them, but the reasons why. I remember what gives them purpose, what frightens them, what makes them soften, what makes them proud, what they hide, what they hope someone will notice without making them ask.

It is strange how someone can leave my life forever, or even die, and yet I still carry the feelings of our relationship in their memory because it is all I ever knew of love, trust, or acceptance. People vanish, but the version of myself that existed safely beside them does not vanish in the same way. A person can be gone, and still I remember how it felt to be accepted by them. I remember the atmosphere of the relationship. Most of all, I remember who I became in their presence.

Maybe that is why hearing from Makayla yesterday mattered. I decided I need to be in her life, even if it is just staying in touch. That decision came from the same place as all of this. By midlife, you stop assuming there will always be another summer, another call, another dinner, another message, another chance to say the thing plainly. People drift. People die. People get hit by drunk drivers. People abruptly transition from personhood to names on walls. People move into better lives and leave the old world behind. Sometimes goodbye announces itself. More often, it does not.

So when someone still alive reaches back, I pay attention.

Those from my past taught me that. The lost taught me that. The patients who nearly died taught me that. Molly taught me that when she said goodbye forever. Maddie and Amelia teach me that by remaining alive and real and precious in the present tense.

Yesterday, I met Maddie at Texas Roadhouse in Queensbury. There is something almost absurdly perfect about that, because the day carried all this weight, and yet the actual living part of it was dinner in a loud chain restaurant. Noise, food, people talking over each other, servers moving quickly, families at tables, ordinary hunger, ordinary conversation. That is life. Not the polished symbol. Not the parade. Not the wall. Not the database. Life is often a parking lot, a dinner plan, a familiar face, and the simple fact that someone you love is still reachable.

That is what national holidays are for me now. Not the parades, celebrations, department store sales, or television specials. For me, it is the private inventory of names, the path of time becoming visible, and the strange privilege of still being able to meet someone for dinner after so many others have become unreachable.

It is the knowledge that survival is not triumph. It is continuation. It is maintenance. It is also the recognition that I am now older than some people will ever be. Some people I knew are permanently young. Molly is still the age she was when she hugged me goodbye and said forever. Arturo is still driving that emerald green Geo in the part of memory that will never move forward. Some coworkers are still laughing in station kitchens, still flirting badly, still making coffee that will taste burnt, still complaining, still alive in the only place left for them to live.

Meanwhile I kept going. I became older. I moved to Vermont. I built a life. I drove to Queensbury. I had a nice dinner with Maddie. I heard from Makayla, and realized she still needs my presence in her life. I remembered Amelia and spoke highly of her. I carried the people who are gone, and I still made room for the people who are still here.

The people we lose do not only leave grief behind. Sometimes they leave behind our very ability to recognize love when it appears again.