I am sorry that you didn't make it home tonight.

Your skills and quick thinking managed to bring a falling medical helicopter to the edge of a busy Tucson street, in a populated urban neighborhood. Without harm to others. One house from here.

Across the alley, on the other side of a yard, lies the scorched ground and twisted aluminum; the naked scars, the afterimage of three lives that abruptly ended today. We look at it, a surreal reminder that we're alive, daily, and not because we're deserving. We're just lucky. Insanely lucky.

You and your EMS colleagues take risks daily that none of us think about until it becomes all too painfully real, while anonymously helping people every day that you might never meet.

But I'm sorry that I never knew you.

And I am sorry that you didn't make it home tonight.

-CK