This past week was a tough week. Another cop died. This wasn’t a cop in another state. He wasn’t in another county. He was in the city next to mine. I was working that horrible night and listened to him die on the radio. I was too far away to be of any help so I just sat there and stared at my radio.

Jim Kerstetter was a friend of mine. Not my best friend but someone that I considered a friend and respected a lot. I am not going to get into all of the details on what happened but it was horrible. Absolutely horrible.

Jim has three daughters 17, 14, and 8. My heart still breaks for them. At his viewing I found his daughters and hugged them. I told them that if I had a magic teleport button in my cruiser that I could only use once in my life, I would have used it that night. If I had that button, I would have been in front of Jim, emptying my gun. I don’t have a magic teleport button, so I just sat there and stared at my radio.

Death affects me weird. I just kind of go into a dark place. I don’t return calls. I don’t comment on all of the well wishes on Facebook. Not because I am rude, but because I just don’t want to. I don’t want to talk about it. He was buried on Saturday and I started coming out of wherever I was.

I have been thinking about him and his family a lot. I drive around and I see something and I think, “Man, Jim will never be able to see this.” I snuggle up with Ella on the couch and smell her hair and think “Jim can’t ever smell his girls again.” I look at the clock as it nears the time he was killed and think “9 days ago at this time, Jim never knew what was coming in 12 minutes.”

I have taken pictures of mourning bands on badges, police cars, memorial services, graves, and fire trucks draping American flags across the road. I didn’t want to do that again. As I was working tonight I came upon this and I thought about how fortunate I was that I could see this. I could be like Jim. I have no idea what is coming my way in 12 minutes. Tonight could be my night.

When I kiss my girls now, I savor it for just a little longer. When I talk to Staci on the phone, I don’t hurry to get off as a matter of routine. When I see something like this, I stop and look.

Soon the sting of death will lessen. I will start slipping back into the routine aspects of my life and ply ahead on auto-pilot. Soon the insignificant things will once again become insignificant. It’s just human nature. Soon I will drive past these deer without much of a second thought, but for tonight, I was so grateful to see them. 12 minutes from now, I could be gone. Never to see my girls again. Never to experience another sunset. Never to see Mother Nature looking back at me from on top of a hill.

For me, life is rarely sweeter than just after I am forced to contemplate my own death. For now, I live each minute like it is the first minute of my last 12.

http://www.odmp.org/officer/20349-patrolman-james-kerstetter