The other day in an effort to dissociate from the stress of the holidays, I was making brownies for my kids and I went to grab my hand mixer. I bought this cheap, reliable one back when I still was living in my bachelorette pad in Los Feliz about 10 years ago. I realized very quickly that I no longer had that trusty mixer.
It’s the same realization I had when I bought a new pair of loafers and needed a shoehorn. And when I needed a serving tray to bring chips and salsa out to our new patio. And when a recipe for chimichurri sauce called for a mortar and pestle.
I once had all these little items in my life — the things you buy once and use occasionally, but that somehow make your life much easier. I had amassed them over the 20 years I lived with roommates, and then on my own, and then with my husband, and now with my family. But on the night of Jan. 7, 2025, we left our house behind with all these items still in it, along with countless irreplaceable objects, thinking we would return. That next morning, however, like many of our friends and neighbors in Altadena, we lost our home to the Eaton fire. We also lost the mixer and the shoehorn, those serving trays and my mortar and pestle.
So now what? When you have to start from scratch there are so many new questions. When you replace your wardrobe, do you change how you dress? Who is Sona 2.0? Does she splurge on designer clothing? And should I start shopping now for the house we’re planning on rebuilding? And speaking of building a house, how exactly do you do that? How does insurance work? Do I have to save every receipt?
It’s exhausting and for the first few weeks I would walk around clothing stores in a daze, completely overwhelmed. My friend Erica had to come help me shop and held my hand as I tried to navigate the arduous process of replacing a wardrobe. I would try on jeans and while I lost focus on the task at hand by remembering how we lost the ceramic imprints of my boys’ infant hands and feet, I would hear Erica’s voice gently break my painful trance with a reassuring “they look good.” And more importantly, she was the one who found out so many stores were offering discounts to people who were impacted by the fires. But how do you bring that up organically?
“Did you find everything OK?” the cashier would ask.
“Yes I did, thanks,” I would reply.
Silence. Then, after too long, I would just blurt out, “Do you offer discounts for fire victims?”
The answer was often yes but sometimes no. Answers always were delivered with a slight head tilt — the one you do when you feel bad for someone, as if changing the perspective of how you look at them will make them feel less sad.
I’ve worked for Conan O’Brien for about 17 years — the first 12 as his assistant and the last seven as the cohost on his podcast “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” (with some overlap in between). I had this leather jacket I used to wear so often that the lining was falling apart and the material at the elbows had worn thin. But it fit me like a glove. It was one of the many things in Conan’s arsenal that he’d make fun of, joking that it was my only jacket since I wore it so often and that I looked like Dr. Zaius from “Planet of the Apes.”
When Conan found out that I’d lost that jacket in the fire, he insisted on buying me a replacement. I remember sending him a photo of me in the store wearing the new jacket, beaming like I had resurrected something from the dead. Conan, who was dangerously close to losing his own home in the Palisades fire, replied that seeing me in it again made him happy. He then immediately made another joke about how I looked like one of Janet Jackson’s backup dancers. It was a tiny step toward some kind of normalcy, even if the lining of the jacket was intact and the elbows felt stiff.
There are things I never will be able to replace, like my personalized signed photos from Kobe Bryant, or the painting I bought in Cuba when I traveled there to shoot one of Conan’s specials, or the vintage Disneyland Autopia poster I bought from a strange man in Long Beach, or the bee pin my grandma always wore. Or my wedding dress. Or my kids’ first Halloween costumes. Or the large bin filled with my childhood memories.
It’s been a year since the fire and life continues as it had before. My kids go to the same school in Pasadena that they went to before the fires. My husband and I still go to the same jobs. We see our same friends. We celebrate birthdays and travel. We take our dog on long walks around the neighborhood. We eat dinner as a family.
But we have an empty lot we still pay a mortgage on. We meet often with an architect to hash out the layout of our new home. We get bids from contractors. We talk to our insurance adjuster regularly. We think about money a lot more. I still cry sometimes.
The only smart thing I did on the evening of Jan. 7 was take a video of all the contents of my home. I remember going through every room, with my kids often in the background, unknowingly taking a video that would become a time capsule of our life before the fire. A year later we’re still rebuilding that life, replacing the items we lost with new versions, some better and some not. The discounts in the stores have ended and the national attention on our tragedy is largely gone, but those of us who went through all that loss still are going through it, like when we’re baking brownies and realize the hand mixer we had for years burned in a terrible fire.
But as I tell my kids, who always ask about the “old house,” home is where we’re all together, even if it’s still a work in progress.
Sona Movsesian is cohost of the podcast “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” and author of the New York Times bestseller “The World’s Worst Assistant.” Her second book “The World’s Worst Mom” comes out later this year
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