Fire Lessons Learned

Hi Folks –

I hope you (or a loved one) don’t need this advice, but if you do, it could be very helpful…

If you’re currently living through these horrific fires in Southern California (or somewhere else in the future), are evacuated or could be, and facing and/or fearing, your home burning down, I’m hoping my hard-won advice from my home burning down six years ago can be helpful to you. My heart is with you…and yes, there is really good life even after this much loss…

Here are two lists, one more practical and one more psychological/spiritual. Neither includes safety advice like having an evacuation plan or staying away from glass windows and doors (yes, these fires are fierce enough to shatter, explode and melt everything)…

12 Practical Things:

1. Sign up for emergency systems in your area – they work

2. Make sure your pets are well in hand for a quick getaway – for some of us, animal family being left behind is unsurmountable; stuff loss we can get over

3. Don’t assume you will have cell phone coverage in a burning area (the towers may have burned down). Charge them up while you still have electricity; it can go out anytime. Buy a car phone charger right now if you don’t already have one. You’ll obviously need your phone for imperative information like emergency alerts, instructions, and for your loved ones to know where and how you are

4. If your getaway car is in a garage or behind an electric gate, make sure you can get them open even if the electricity goes out. I could have met my demise because of this one. I was packed up and ready to back out of the 8’ gate behind my carport. I clicked the opener and nothing happened. I jumped out to see if I could slide it open myself. Turned out the manual override mechanism required a lug wrench to access. If it had not been for my having my mother’s emergency-minded toolbox close at hand, and the great good fortune and ability of a lanky, agile neighbor who happened to walk by despite my quickly evacuating neighborhood to climb the wall and help, my loaded car, and more importantly, my dog and I would have been seriously endangered

5. Bares repeating: Keep tools and masks accessible – a tool (as well as that very kind neighbor who happened to walk by) saved me.

6. Be patient and kind with your exodus; everyone is scared, everyone wants to escape and survive; many will be confused and dissociated; some will be assholes. Help who you can – some will be on foot. If you have room in your car, take them in, maybe even insist – breathing that smoke is no joke, particularly with the fire fever stuff.

7. You might need to break a traffic rule (like driving on the wrong side of the road) or even off-roading it to get to safety. There won’t always be authorities available and present to tell you what to do. But as you are following your (or someone else’s) instincts, don’t be one of the assholes. And make sure you don’t block access to emergency vehicles who will be coming in while you’re trying to get out.

8. Duh, but back-up your computer regularly (I can be one of those neglectful dummies). If you don’t use iCloud, make sure you either take your external HD if not your desktop computer. Mine was huge so I only managed to take my laptop so a lot of my files burned with my iMAC – yup, I wasn’t completely synced. Or if you’re really fancy and organized, leave a recently updated external drive with a friend who hopefully doesn’t live in as risky a region.

9. Video your interiors from time to time to document what you have – even open your closets and drawers and snap some pics. If they ever burn, you will be SO grateful (as well as sad) to see, and prove, what you had for insurance reimbursements (more on helpful advice for dealing with insurance claims to follow)

10. If you hear that your home has burned, have it corroborated – the online lists, or hearsay, even an “eye witness’” account is not always true. In my case it was.

11. If your house has burned down, start jotting down items you can remember as you remember them (sometimes this is likely to be in the middle of sleeplessness). Breathe and resource as best you can – this will be upsetting, sometimes excruciating. But unless you have photos of your home and belongings, you will forget a lot of what you owned (more on this, too)

12. If you feel like blaming firefighters for not being there to protect YOUR house (i.e. you’re going for the ever-popular anger default rather than doing your personal grief and trauma work), consider a call I made to my local fire department…A captain happened to pick up the phone. I respectfully asked him what had happened, were the rumors true that there had not been engines anywhere near my neighborhood? Though he stayed calm and collected, he was clearly emotional when he said, “In the 30 years I have been a firefighter, I have never seen anything like this blaze. It was so hot and moving so fast – a football field a minute – that I could do nothing but get my guys out of there.” The gravity of the overwhelming reality and helplessness came over both of us. Yeah, I had spectacular rugs and irreplaceable art I and this planet will never see the likes of again – but not even those beautiful things are worth risking a firefighter’s life.

16 Things About Possessions and Processing Loss:

1. Jot and keep access to a list of your belongings that are most precious to you – in an evacuation, you probably won’t be thinking straight when you have only minutes to choose. Unless you have a responder banging on your door to get you out immediately, you’ll have to gauge how many minutes/hours you will have to add more to your take-away’s before the danger becomes too great. Err towards less is more – the more being your life. I had a lot of rare, valuable antiquities, as well as precious personal treasures that will never grace this planet again. That is the bitter, the sweet, the tragic, the Zen of it – or what my mother used to say, “part of the pity of it all.” It’s a terrible, terrible pity – particularly if you’re someone who really likes beautiful, quality things like I do. We gain, and we lose, and we will gain again

2. If you think something is more likely to break in transit than be burned, take it anyway. Better to have to repair it then never see it in existence again

3. Try to trust that what you did take, and what you did leave behind, has some intrinsic wisdom. If I had kept grabbing and running back and forth to my car, I would have gotten stuck – or so overwhelmed I would have ran in circles and left with almost nothing. Be grateful for what you did manage to take, if only your life

4. It is worth digging through the ashes – but suit up (the shit that has burned can be super toxic and you don’t want it in your lungs, brain, body)! I went back in full hazmat garb five times and kept digging and patiently sifting. My mom had died only months earlier, so doggedly searching for heirlooms felt like I was digging through the ashes of my parent’s bones to find any tangible vestige of them at all. Sometimes I would just stop and sob into my goggles. But I found a tiny but gobsmacking array of mighty items that survived, and are still precious to me, albeit altered – and so weirdly random like a small ceramic rooster that was my grandmother’s (and I never liked or respected until I found it rising up from these ashes). Sometimes even fragments of something can be meaningful to keep – or for some people, could be more sad and traumatizing. But at least you will have the choice. To this day, I wear two gold bangles my mother gave me on my high school and college graduations, respectively. They were completely black circles buried in the desert of white ash. It took months of wearing them for life to gently polish the charred black back to its gold. It was a needed reminder that life was doing the same to me.

I also excavated many other things, mostly fragments, or distortions of what they had been that would take too much effort – physical and emotional gymnastics – to restore to more than a sad reminder of loss. There is much to be said for broken, twisted shards of tangible memories to help us linger in the meditations of the ephemeral nature of matter, and mattering, but at some point, such a fire can really teach us to just let go and move on…

5. AND be as gentle with yourself as possible for not grabbing this or that. There are still a dozen things or so that can haunt me. It would have taken only seconds, only a small space in my quickly filling car. I still have to re-new my acceptance – or accept my unacceptance – that there are some things I just never get to see, be with, have again. They died like a person, and I can still mourn for those few things.

6. So some things you lost will haunt you for years to come; in my experience with a lesser and lesser frequency. You may even forget ever having had those things – and then they will emerge in memory at some seemingly random time. Repeat #7 as needed as those images and reminders sporadically arise.

7. Be as gentle with yourself as possible as you deal with visitations of grief, loss, and regret. Get some professional grief counseling if you need it – and may I say, who doesn’t? No shortage of death and loss on Planet Earth.

8. You will find new things to love; they will become treasures, too – just with less, or newer imbuements, of your own personal history

9. Don’t shop for replacements too quickly. Take your time! It’s a great opportunity to be more selective. I felt such a void, and a compulsion to fill it, that I rushed in to buy a whole new wardrobe. It’s a surprisingly big thing to lose a wardrobe, from hats to socks, some of us have amassed over decades, in minutes. To this day, there are many pieces I sped-bought that I still have never worn because they just weren’t, and aren’t, quite right for me. On the other hand, watch for any PTSD expressing itself in your fear of not wanting to buy anything ever again lest it gets ripped away from you, too.

10. Being a hoarder (as I am somewhat) has its advantages – if you have a storage unit of things you couldn’t fit into your home that burned, you have back-up stuff that is personal and familiar to you. Hopefully, it will now come in handy and you’ll enjoy still owning it (and maybe can get rid of that storage unit now:)

11. Many of us have way too much stuff. Truth told, some of it was a relief to be forever gone (did I mention I’m something of a hoarder) – like all those old lists of to-do’s, and broken dishes to glue or clothes that I will never fit into again. Fires can Marie Kondo the shit out of your life (hey, have to find the silver linings wherever we can)

12. Accept help even if it’s unfamiliar, embarrassing or scary. Your life just completely changed in ways you may not even understand for the months and years you’re about to live your way into a new one. Your peeps may be bad at giving you what you need; you may be bad at knowing what you need or asking for it if you do. Befriend your humility and ask for what would help, if you know. Take the weird casseroles or soothing massages or hand me downs or a hug you can cry into. Minutes after I got the call telling me my home was gone, I pulled my car over, walked into a park and started sobbing. Too lovely young women I will never meet again, came over and put their arms around me and just let me finish. Lots of people in your area know what you are suffering about. Most will likely be generously kind. Some will surprise you, some will disappoint you. Some people, afraid of bothering you, will leave you too alone. And then some will not be kind, even those you have been closest to which may, or may not, change along with so many things this experience will require you to contend with

13. Having your home burn down is a hard experience – obviously. It is the death of many things. It is also an opportunity for a re-birth. Whether you choose, if you are the homeowner to re-build a newer, more improved home on the same site or decide to move on and find a new spot of earth to support your next phase in life, it is radical, harsh, painful, deeply disorienting, exasperating, and potentially very, very expensive in a variety of ways. It’s up to every one of us to find the silver linings to the hard, shitty stuff life slams into us. For me, it shoe-horned me out of a place and life design I loved but that wasn’t particularly good for me. I wouldn’t have left Malibu voluntarily for a long time, in hindsight, to my detriment. Sometimes what life does knows better than we do. As awful as it was, I’ve been so enriched by that fire lighting up the exit sign. My new home (and its had particular challenges, too) suits me far, far better. And if you are fortunate to have insurance, robust incomes and/or savings, you will get to surround yourself with a new environment, and new things, that you may just discover suit you far, far better now, too

14. You may also discover, as I did, that you’re stronger than you thought. Many of us fear this could happen to us (particularly if you live in fire areas) but I doubt that any of us actually think that it will happen to us. You will discover new reserves, and new resources, internally and externally – because you will have to. And I highly recommend getting some professional (ideally body-based) therapy if you can afford it or find some free support groups if you can’t. This is a capital T trauma. Our body-beings and psyches will experience shock, rage, regret, self-blame, existential crisis, terror, even shame. A trauma therapist, and several wise friends, helped me get through all of that. Because I’m sorry to tell you, if you don’t know already – losing your home is one trauma; dealing with insurance claims can be another comparable one. Even if your insurance adjuster is reasonable and kind (mine was), it will likely take months of painstaking documentation, negotiations, delays that you may not be able to afford while you are dealing with all the other uncertainties, logistical to spiritual, in your life (more on this to follow)

15. This will all take time. If you can afford to work less while you deal with it all (unless you are someone who metabolizes and/or escapes through working), work less. Resource more: exercise, nature, good community, good conversations, good food, good sex…

16. Dig deep and open wide to your new world on the way of becoming – because it is, whether you like it or not! If you are thinking of relocating, it’s unlikely you will now not seriously consider climate change. It was a huge factor in where I chose. But every place, like every person, and every thing on Planet Earth has its pro’s and con’s. Life, ouff, not for the faint of heart…Phoenixes got it right.