Trauma Code #1

Trauma Code 1 and 2 are the very first images I ever created. They are based on a call I attended early in my career where a young man in his early twenties died tragically. What stuck with me from this call wasn't that he died in the back of the ambulance; rather, it was what he was saying as he died.

When I finished these pieces, I kept them to myself for a long time and had no plans to share them. The process of creating them was therapeutic and cathartic for me. I was able to purge the associated emotions from this memory from my head and trap them in these two-dimensional images. I feared what my fellow first responders would think if I showed a vulnerable side to our profession. It was months before anyone else saw them.

To my pleasant surprise, the opposite of what I feared happened. Many of our peers looked at these images and attached their own experiences to them and were also able to heal from them in some way. Many of my pieces are dark and tragic, but they are all authentic and healing for me. They are all – tragically optimistic.

TheTraumaCodeAll photos by Daniel Sundahl