My Lost Brothers

The picture above is one of the Granite Mountain Hotshots in Prescott, Arizona. It was taken two weeks before the Yarnell tragedy in which all the crew members, except Brendan McDonough, lost their lives. The picture was taken by Chris Mackenzie who  was also part of the crew and one of the 19 victims. 

Hello and welcome back to the blog! And if you are new welcome! Kick off your shoes, get some tea or coffee and enjoy the reading. I wanted to post my usual, deep and soul food posts but a lot has been happening lately and I just couldn't collect myself enough to write something that made sense when read in a normal voice and not the crazy one. So I thought I would write a book review because I have been doing a lot of reading lately and I have not really posted anything in a while. Today, I am bringing you a book I am really fond of, one that is a real tears jerker but so worth reading because of the beautiful story the author tells. This book is called My Lost Brothers and it is written by Brendan McDonough. It is a story about colleagues, turned into brothers and the terrible loss the author experienced when all the members of his crew perished fighting a wild fire in Yarnell, Arizona. All of them, except him. Now, even though I have been living in the US for close to a decade now and that I was here when the tragedy happened, I knew nothing about it until last year when the movie came out. I had gone to the movie one day and I was patiently waiting for my movie to start when, among the “coming out soon”, I saw the clip of a movie that would haunt me until the day it came out. The movie was titled Only The Brave and it was a motion picture based of this book I am bringing you today. This clip was a few seconds long at best, but long enough to make my heart tip over and break a little.  A few days later when the movie came out, I went to see it and left the theater looking like an emotional mess. So of course I bought the book because, although the job done with the movie was incredible, I wanted to know the whole story and see the big picture and know more about who those people were in real life. As soon as I started reading, I couldn’t put it down: on the train, at home, during lunch in the break room. There was something about that story that captivated my heart and wouldn’t let me stray away. It was heartwarming and beautiful until it turned dark and ugly. Yet, there was beauty in the brokenness, there was something to be gain in the loss: a new perspective on life, on the chances we’re given everyday, on the things we take for granted. When I finished this book, I was in shambles emotionally. Still gathering up myself, I looked up Brendan McDonough on Instagram. I took a look at his feed: my heart sank. Seeing pictures of him and some of his brothers who lost their lives in the Yarnell fire made what seemed so surreal to me, a reality that I could touch, see and feel. I finished this book about two months ago, started writing this review but I couldn't find any words that would do it justice. So I left this review in the back burner until recently where I thought about a story that kind of feels to this: the story of Job in the Bible. Now the Bible says that Job was a righteous man and that God had nothing to reproach him. One day when Satan came to God, God started talking highly of Job and Satan said "I bet if you took everything away from him he'll curse you to your face". God knew Job's heart so He gave satan permission to strip Job of anything that could make him a man of a certain rank/ posture however, satan had no authority to touch his life. So first Job lost his posterity, his richesses and then his good health. He even got to a point where his own friends turn against him saying that he needed to repent, his own wife telling him to curse God and die. He was between a rock and a hard place with no one to turn to.

And in a way the story of Brendan McDonough is similar. He was not a righteous man as in his story, he speaks about how he went from being a drug addict to doing a turn around in life because he wanted to do better for his daughter. Making that choice in life led him to the Mountain Granite Hotshot. The beginnings where hard but eventually he got to a better place in life with the help of his teammates and his supervisor who, according to the story, were respectively the closest thing to brothers and to a father figure he ever had. Now let's open a parenthesis here and introduce the first lesson I got only a few pages into this story: his choice to do better in life. It is not his fault that he did not grow up with a father but as a father himself, he made a choice to turn things around for his daughter and I salute that. we live in a world were not enough men are taught how to act like men and when they do they are not praised enough for that. It is true that it is what they are supposed to do but in a society where men take the easy way out, I wanted to take a minute to praise those men doing the best with what they can, where they are to make sure their children are safe, fed and have a father figure. He made a decision to do better, to do something different, to break a cycle that he grew up in. Our parents deeds and mistakes do not have to be our own, their story do not have to dictate ours: he knew it and he made acted on that truth.

Going back to what I was saying: Brendan McDonough was not a righteous man but he had engaged into a path that brought him closer to creating a better, cleaner life for him and his daughter. The part about his story which is similar to the one of Job is how he lost all of the people he had a bond with, the people who helped him get back on his feet, the people he spent all his time with, in just one day. I mean can you imagine that? All your team wiped out under unfortunate circumstances and you are the lone survivor of that tragedy. I know that I would lose my mind. I did not know them at a personal level but the way the author described his crew members, bringing here and there memories of the time spent with them created a sense of intimacy and feeling of familiarity that makes the loss be felt at a deeper level. And then how he goes on at explaining his battle with depression and suicide, processing the loss/ hurt, turning to God made a few things relevant. The first one is that there is no shame in asking for help. As someone who's sometimes on the forefront of battling depression, we often carry that false impression that we have to save face and that asking for help is admitting defeat, when really it's not. Depression is sometimes the result of not processing adequately emotions that instead of confronting and healing, we burry alive or even ignore thinking that it will make them go away. There is only so much we can do when it come to emotions and how to process them that asking for help in order to develop healthy coping mechanisms and skills is nothing we should be ashamed of. Another thing that was relevant about this book is how Brendan McDonough perspective about being alive shifted from guilt to carrying a legacy. God's ways are unknown and when things happen in a way that is incomprehensible to the human mind, we tend to ask ourselves a whole lot of questions and sometimes even think that God is unfair. Toward the end of the book, the author speaks about how he felt ashamed and guilty of being alive because at the light of how he lived his life in the past, he more than any other of his brothers, should have perished in the fire. He talked about how he was battling suicide and how by overcoming the guilt and learning to look at this grace of being alive, he find a new purpose: carrying the legacy of his lost brother. I can't imagine how hard it would be for anyone to be in a situation like this but I am a firm believer that even in the midst of the most difficult time, there is something in it that God has graced us with and that we can only see when we take our eyes off the situation and keep our eyes on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. And I  personally do believe that this shift in perspective had to do with his ability to build a faith based on a solid relationship with God. There are only so many things we can overcome as humans but a loss this great! A void this big can only be filled by the one we have been engineered and created to run on: God. A solid point to make as a christian and that I could not omit is that Brendan McDonough spoke highly of two of his brothers how had an unshakeable faith and assurance in God that they lived out loud everyday. And he goes on at some point talking about how he desired that too. As Christians how we live our life speaks volumes to people looking at us. It is true that we have to share the Gospel with people but ultimately, beyond the work of conviction that the Holy Spirit does in the heart of the people we introduce to Jesus, it is the testimony of the life we live that is the deciding factor in whether or not they decide to follow Jesus. It is a personal decision but it is greatly influenced by the model we have before our eyes.

A little bit of a long review but all in all, I would say that this book is one of my favorites for this year and should absolutely be on your must read list. Brendan McDonough did a great work at building the story, giving the facts and injecting love and compassion in a story clouded with sadness, overshadowed by grief, loss and heartbreak. It is the beautiful and moving story of a man whose life was turned around for the best. A story about how colleagues became friends and then family, a pledge to have each other’s back no matter what, a commitment to integrity, loyalty and sacrifice even if it means laying your life on the line of duty to save the people who had become your family. It is the story of the Yarnell wildfire told by the lone survivor of this tragedy, the story of a legacy that will be forever carried and remembered whenever the 19 hotshots of the Granite Mountain crew will be mentioned. This book gets an honorable mention hands down. I got my book from Barnes and Nobles in hardcover for about $19 but I am sure you can get it from anywhere and probably for less than that if you look it up.

I hope you enjoyed reading through this review and that you will be getting this book. May God help us all and bless the ones who selflessly put their life on the line of duty so that we can still have our own. May God bless you and keep you safe.

Until next time,
The Happiness Fairy 👸