Returning the Favor: Emergency Departments Let Windsor Man Know They Care

By Maggie Cassidy
Valley News Staff Writer

Sunday, January 18, 2015
(Published in print: Sunday, January 18, 2015) 

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Windsor — Lying back in a bed last week at a hospital rehabilitation center, where he is recovering from a recent brain hemorrhage, Frank Silfies reflected on how he got to forming a statewide coalition of dozens of volunteers trained to help the people who often have the hardest time acknowledging they need help.

It was the early 1990s. He was splitting his time between working as a crisis counselor and a volunteer firefighter — and he recognized a gap in services. Firefighters, police officers, EMTs and other emergency responders are the first on the scene at emotionally draining tragedies day after day, but they’re accustomed to helping others, not the other way around.

They’re some of the most “mental health averse people” you’ll find, said Silfies, 71. But, he added, the traditional notion that “if you can’t tough it out, you can’t cut it” is nonsense.

“They’re human too,” Silfies said, while his wife, SallyAnn, 68, held his hand as she sat in a chair next to him.

Since Silfies co-founded Green Mountain Critical Incident Stress Management in 1992, its volunteers have traveled throughout the state and beyond, assisting countless first responders after they have been through difficult calls.

Lew Gage, the former chief of the Windsor Fire Department, said Silfies had a special connection to the people he was helping.

“Those of us who are in emergency response don’t normally talk about those incidents with people on the outside, and Frank was an insider,” Gage said. “He understood what we were going through.”

So it was perhaps little surprise a few weeks ago that so many emergency response departments came on board, and so quickly, when the call went out: Silfies, who was diagnosed with terminal cancer four years ago, appeared to be taking a bad turn. Some area residents wanted to make sure he knew how much the community appreciated his emergency service work, especially with the stress management team and the Ascutney Volunteer Fire Department, which he joined in 1972.

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Maggie Cassidy can be reached at mcassidy@vnews.com.