You might think a house is just a house, and the stuff inside is just stuff — but you’d think differently if it were yours and it vanished in an instant, as happened to so many in Pacific Palisades and Altadena in the January wildfires. All of those material possessions are a part of who you are; you shape your home and your home shapes you. Underneath the urgent considerations about safety and money and logistics, people who lose their homes are often struggling with a deeper, nagging question: Who am I now? Laurie and Laura, two Palisades residents who spoke with me in January and February, agreed to share their stories with The Times on the condition that their last names not be used. — Robert Karron
Laurie
We lived on Las Casas for 30 years. My daughters Madeline and Hannah were born and raised there. They went to the local schools. Their dad, John, died unexpectedly 12 years ago. He was an art director, a creator. All of John’s artwork, all his creations — his cards, letters, sketchbooks — were in our home. And all of our creations to him, and with him. His leather jacket, his Craftsman tool chest that became my daughter’s art bin.… What was special to him was sacred to us. We’ve lost the things that were his history, his essence, things we honored and cherished. It’s heartbreaking for my daughters. They were only 12 and 14 when he died.
On the day of the fires, I was on my way to work and got a call about the smoke and ash in the area, and at that point I knew I had to drive back to get our dog, Isaac. There was so much gridlock. It took me two hours. I saw everyone trying to leave. People running from schools, holding hands with their kids, walking down Sunset with suitcases. Our street was dark, windy, deserted. I ran inside, got Isaac, and I scooped up maybe five things — a painting of my daughter’s, a few other sentimental things. I left so much behind. I had my hand on the photo albums, but I told myself, No, nothing will happen. So I left them. I had my hand on so many things, but I put them back down. I didn’t think our house was going to burn. I took our dog and I ran to the car. It was gridlock again. I considered leaving my car on Sunset and walking down the hill, but there were no flames — it was just ash, smoke and wind, so I waited. I watched as the fire engines sat with everyone else, because they couldn’t get through, either.
At first, I went to a friend’s, in Santa Monica. Then she had to evacuate, so I went to a hotel that’d take our dog. Throughout the night my daughters kept calling, asking if our house was OK. I told them I’d just cut the trees — it would be fine. It was the morning of the second day of the Palisades fire, Jan. 8, when I found out our home was gone. On our street text chain, someone posted a video driving down our street. I watched as I saw house after house demolished, and, as the camera made its way to our home, I saw our neighbors’ house as rubble and held my breath. Then I saw the magnolia tree that sits on the hill that is our front yard … with just sky behind it. My first thought was, “How do I tell my kids?” It was the panic I felt when I had to tell them their dad died.
Eventually, we rented a house in Hermosa Beach — where a lot of people have gone, actually. There were thousands of families looking for places. I had two friends helping me look. It took us three days, 24 hours a day, to find something we could call home base. That’s what I call our rental — not our home but our home base.
I’ve been to our rubble many times. The first time, before residents were allowed and before the rains, I snuck in. I had an unrelenting need to get there. A portion of John’s ashes had gone down with our home. It was incomprehensible. I had this need to stay, for hours. Eventually, we went back to dig; I’ve been there three times now. After much digging, we found my engagement ring, and John’s wedding band — in the drawer of a corroded file cabinet. And — this is crazy — our menorah was right there on the front porch; it was the first thing you saw when you walked up our red brick stairs. There was also our Buddha statue in the backyard. Miraculously, Christmas ornaments that my daughters had made every year with their dad survived. We were digging, like archeologists, trying to find anything. And when you’re digging there’s no color — everything’s gray. But then I saw this red color, and eventually we found 15 of those Christmas ornaments. So we’ve got three religions covered.
I keep saying to people that this is an emotion I have no words for. I haven’t come up with the right way to describe it. We lived grief in our house. We know grief. This feeling, of having your home burn down … to me, this is a different feeling. It’s not just “stuff.” It’s the essence of you, and it doesn’t exist now. It vanished, overnight. People say: “It’s just photo albums — but you have those memories, that’s what’s important.” But, what I’m coming to understand is that — even if you don’t think about it, when you leave your house in the morning, and you glance at some items, just at your books, there, on your bookshelf — that’s you. You’ve created and lived in a place that’s you, your history, your world. That’s your essence. The visuals in our house were remarkable. We were a house of art and music. My daughter’s an artist; we had her paintings in every room. I miss those colors.
I know every house has its own story. And my heart goes out to all those living with their loss.
We’re in a rental now, and it’s someone else’s furniture, and someone else’s bookshelves. I walk around and I think, where are we in this house? I’ve printed out a photo of our refrigerator (now melted down, unrecognizable), which was covered with magnets that held photos. I put it on the refrigerator of the rental house. I’m trying to print out photos of the inside of our home — our shelves, bulletin boards, my daughters’ artwork — so I can put them in the rental. To remind us of us. To get some of the essence of our family back.
No, we have no plan. We have no idea what we’re going to do. We were there for 30 years. Our street is called the loop. We’ve walked our loop thousands of times. We love that town. It’s a small town in a big city. It was the first house John and I bought. (Yes, we’re considerably underinsured. That’s a whole other story.…) When we got there, it was a surf town. You’d walk into the Village and you’d know everyone. It was a community. People raised their kids, then their grandkids, there. So, how do you rebuild that? It’s not like just a few houses burned down. It’s block after block after block. My sister’s house, so many friends’ houses.
I’ve been back many times now, and it’s shocking each time. To rebuild the library, the schools, the markets — to rebuild all that? The loss is enormous. I don’t know how people are making decisions now. I think people are walking around in collective trauma. The thing is, when you’re in shock, you don’t realize you’re in it. You think: I’m getting things done! I got my Social Security card! I talked to the debris removal people! What I do know is there are many who have stepped in, helped us. It’s what I’ve tried to teach my kids — show up for people when they’ve been hit. Don’t ask what you can do, just show up. We’re grateful, and we try to pay it forward. What I also know is that we’re resilient. My daughters and I did it before. We’ll do it again.
John didn’t know he was going to die at 49. But a year before he died, he bought one of those books that you find in the stationery store — “All About My Dad,” and he filled it out. Things like: this is what I thought about in grade school, these were my best friends, this is what happened when your mom and I met, this is what happened when you were born, this is my bucket list for the future, this is what I hope for my daughters. All in his own handwriting. We kept that book on what we called the Daddy Shelf, right when you walked in. It was next to a picture of the four of us.
And when I went back to get our dog, I grabbed that book. My daughter says those two are our most valuable possessions. She’s right.
Laura
I grew up on Via De La Paz. When I was 7, my family moved from the 600 block down the street to the last house overlooking the ocean. I loved playing on the bluffs. I lived with my parents again after college, and again the summer before law school, but I never thought I’d move to the neighborhood as an adult. But eventually, I was back. My parents were still in their house, and my sister was a few blocks away, with her two kids. It was too tempting, the chance to raise my kids in the neighborhood, with so much family around. In 2004, my husband and I, and our 3-year-old son, moved into our house on Toyopa, a block from the fire station. One of the things I loved about our house is that it was on the July 4 parade route. Our second child was born our first July there.
I work at a nonprofit immigration law firm downtown. Jan. 7 was my first day back, after winter break. Before work, I walked the dogs with my husband. We were crossing Sunset at about 7 a.m. When it’s that early, there’s no traffic, and your eye is instinctively drawn toward the mountains. We literally said to each other, out loud, “It’s so beautiful.” By 8 a.m., I was on the road. I had an intake that day — meeting a new client from Guatemala. All my clients are unaccompanied children, and we talk about the worst things that have ever happened to them — why they’re in the U.S. and cannot go home. This young woman was 17. So, of course, I was focusing on her. I’d turned my phone off. Two and a half hours go by in a flash. I finish the interview and I look at my phone, and I see all the texts from family, saying things like “are Grandma and Papa evacuated?” That was the first I’d heard of the fire. My husband and son had been working from home. They saw the smoke and decided to leave, to beat the traffic. We’d evacuated a few years ago, so they knew that once there’s an evacuation order, Chautauqua and Temescal would be backed up. They didn’t take anything besides our dogs and their laptops, because they didn’t think they’d be gone for more than a day.
I stayed at work until 5. My parents, sister, husband and son went to my niece’s one-bedroom apartment in Santa Monica. When we realized we weren’t going home right away, we scattered to friends’ and relatives’ homes for the night.
That night was not good. By 9 p.m., I got a call from a friend I’d known since kindergarten who lived in the Alphabet streets saying that her house was gone. We started watching footage from our Ring camera — and we saw flames. We heard that the park was on fire — and our house was close to the park. I went to sleep that night listening to the wind, and I was pretty sure that our house would be gone by morning. We woke up, and I read a text from my mother saying that my parents’ house was gone. And another text that our whole block was gone. By the next day, we’d learned that my sister’s house was gone, too.
We didn’t want my parents to be on their own. It just seemed obvious that we needed to stay together. At first we thought we might all go to our cousin’s, in Ventura. We were getting in our cars when we heard that there was another fire, off the 101 Freeway — so we didn’t want to risk driving that way. My friend in San Clemente had offered us her house. The day before, that seemed too far, but with all the fires and ash, now it seemed just far away enough. So we drove there, and she said to take all the time we needed. We were going to play it day to day. I didn’t want to start looking for a rental house while we were dealing with insurance and FEMA and my parents’ health. We didn’t have the bandwidth for the feeding frenzy, and we figured we would find a rental house later, down the road.
But my niece thought that my parents needed to be settled, and she resolved to find us a house. She’s 28. She used to work at a talent agency. She knows what it’s like to field impossible demands and then to fulfill them. She reached out to everyone she knew and connected with a kid she grew up with, a Realtor, and they went looking at houses all over L.A. Her younger sister, who lives in New York, was also searching online for places for us. In just a few days, they’d found us a house — single level, for my parents, and with enough rooms for everyone to be together. We could have moved in that Sunday, Jan. 19 — but my husband had one request: It was his birthday, and his beloved Eagles were playing for a spot in the Super Bowl. He said: “I would like to have one normal day.” Which made a lot of sense to me. We delayed the move by one day. And when we walked inside — I’m going to cry thinking about this — my niece had printed, from her phone, family photos, which she’d put in frames and had placed on all the bookshelves. And in our closets she’d put all these clothes that she and her sister and their friends had collected for us. (My wardrobe has vastly improved.)
The shock is starting to wear off. Some days I wake up sad. Other days I wake up with intense adrenaline that I then try to manage. It’s hard to process the grief because there’s so much to do — so many decisions to make. You go to the Palisades to meet the demo people in what used to be your town, in what used to be your house. It hurts.
For insurance, you have to inventory everything you owned, which is infuriating. After all these years of taking our insurance payments, they should pay the limit and move on. So you gather photos (on your phone), which show some objects in the background.… You have to list all the things that are sitting on that shelf.… You spend your days dealing with things like that, and you end up thinking: How is this my life? You wake up in a random bed, and you think: I want to go home. We are lucky to have a rental house, and to be safe. But there’s so much stress; the little things push me over the edge. Like: The garage door at our rental place doesn’t open every time. One day, when it took a particularly long time, and I was rushing to CVS to get some medicine, when I finally got out of the driveway, I screamed so loud that I hurt myself. Which actually felt good, to be exhausted by that. To be marked.
Robert Karron teaches English at Santa Monica College. Instagram: @robertkarron
The post Contributor: When you lose your home to fire, you wonder: Who am I now? appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
