What is Lost, and What Remains
One week after the Palisades Fire, for a three-generation family.
I had a “Go bag” in the front closet of my house, a small black duffel bag I could barely zip closed, full of journals I had saved for so many years it seems pointless now, my inner life from childhood through young motherhood. I can see the bag clearly, a little dusty, on the left side on a shelf. A window in the closet let in light to see the persistently-returning spider webs, and the long jackets that are my one fashion flair. The orange one that was too tight but I kept it anyway because it was pretty, and the giraffe-print fuzzy fabric Betsy Johnson jacket I’d had to convince myself I could gift myself for my birthday 20-ish years ago. Just now I realize that I wore it in December, to the Sklaar Brothers show in Silverlake (another story of kindness of strangers, those guys). I’m glad the jacket got one last fling.
The thing is, I wasn’t at home when the fire started. When I left for work that day, one of the 2–3 days I spent downtown in lawyer mode, the day was lovely. Christopher and I walked our dogs down Toyopa to Drummond, toward Sunset and the Alphabet Streets. Our dogs had led us where they’d wanted to go, and as we stood at the corner of Sunset and Drummond, waiting for the light to change to green, giving the dogs a treat for their patience, we did what we always did: looked toward the hills toward our left and said, God, this place is so beautiful.
I felt refreshed from a winter break spent at home, the office having closed for the holidays. I’d brought my office plants home in a big box, to make sure they’d survive and get plenty of water, and I had decided to bring most of them back on Thursday. I had one small plant in my car when I left my home the last time, 8am on Tuesday January 7. It was my 2-year anniversary as a staff attorney at Immigration Center for Women and Children, and I was meeting a new client that morning, an unaccompanied immigrant child, and interviewing her about her worst day, the reason she’d had to flee home.
After our meeting, around 12:30pm, I saw my family group texts. My son and husband had seen dark smoke and heard sirens, and left home before any evacuation order, thinking they’d be back by evening. They’d left with our dogs, their laptops, and my son’s clothes to play basketball and then cover UCLA basketball.
By the time I saw the texts, they were at my niece’s apartment in Santa Monica.
A mile away from them, in my childhood home, my parents were gathering medicine and leaving, too. Soon after, my sister would flee her home midway between ours, after taking photos of the encroaching flames from her balcony, the townhouse between our elementary school and our high school.
By afternoon, we realized no one was going home that night. We called a friend in Larchmont who welcomed us, fed us, gave us beds for two nights, and was packing his own go-bags by the second night, as fires spread and ash rained down.
Around 9pm on Tuesday, my friend since kindergarten, texted our tight-knit writing group of six that her house was gone. Disbelief, sorrow, foreboding.
I heard the wind still gusting, saw the orange light of flames by a neighbor’s house through our Ring-dupe camera, until the image went black. I went to bed knowing, fearing, still hoping. Most of all, I hoped that my parents’ house would be spared.
My parents’ house was a magical place for our family. Nearly 100 years old, and they lived there for half of its existence. It held forth at the top of the bluffs — Pacific’s palisades, a wild place I roamed as a kid with my best friend Roberta from across the street, building forts and collecting snails. It was a normal home in the sense that it hosted all our birthday parties, sleepovers, Sweet Sixteens, high school musical cast parties, extended family Thanksgivings, and my sister’s and my Bat Mitzvahs and weddings. And it was a special house, a place that always welcomed us. When their first grandchild was born, they bought a crib for sleepovers, and each of their four grandchildren slept in it. We all had either our own keychains, or knew where the hidden key hiding place was and the alarm code and the password if you screwed it up. I could tell you now because it wouldn’t matter, but I won’t.
It was also an unusual home in that they also welcomed masses of people, as the site of political fundraisers. It is the place many people met candidates for President, Senate, Congress, and mayor, with an expansive gorgeous view of the Pacific.
I awoke Wednesday morning to my mother’s text. Their home was gone.
As texts among family and friends and neighbors flew, everyone trying to get information about their house, we read that every home from Chautauqua and Sunset to the village was gone.
Our home was gone, too.
We prayed my sister’s home might still be okay. Some reports were that it was still there. Some of the homes on the block were still there. But the winds were still blowing. By Wednesday morning, the fire had caught up to them. My sister’s home had been destroyed, too.
I keep trying to feel everything and I cannot. If I had only lost my home, all my journals, and my grandmother’s photo albums that cannot be replaced, her pieces of jewelry I loved to put on just to feel her wearing them, I might be able to feel more sorrow for myself. If I had only lost my home, I would have been able to find physical respite in my parents’ or sister’s homes, and emotional respite knowing that they are not going through the same devastation. That they hold some of the physical memories I have lost — the meticulously kept photo albums of my parents’ childhoods, with photos of their parents and grandparents.
And yet, hoping did not hold back catastrophe. All our homes are gone: My best friends from middle and high school, who were also drawn back to this community. My neighbors. My kids’ peditrician. My rabbis. My Torah study friends. My yoga friends. My writing friends. The Playgroup.
The Playgroup: When in 1968, my parents found this sleepy town and moved there because it was the most affordable (yes) place they could find close to the clean ocean air they prized, they found community with the young families of the Palisades Democratic Club. From that group, they formed a babysitting collective, taking turns watching five or six toddlers. To this day, though we are in our fifties, we are always and forever known as The Playgroup. The Playgroup adults were like aunts and uncles to me, and the kids like cousins. Even if we didn’t have the same friend groups at school, I knew they belonged to me like family.
Many of those kids found a way back to this community and watched our children follow us to the same elementary schools and high schools, play in the Palisades Rec Center sandbox together, and play baseball in the PPBA. My son Aaron Heisen, now a sportswriter, wrote his first piece in the Paul Revere Middle School newspaper about my Playgroup friend’s daughter Alyssa on the Paul Revere soccer team. Most or all of the Playgroup kids who came back to live here, and all of our parents who remained here, lost their homes, too.
The people I would normally call to lean on, to ask for advice, we are all trying so hard to keep our own families going, and we are still texting one another — how are you today? where are you today? I love you. We are strong.
What still exists is the will to keep going. What still exists are friends — and strangers — from all over outside the Palisades, offering places to stay, sending financial help to replace necessities — like this laptop I am writing on right now, ordering my dog’s food for me because it was beyond my capacity, and knowing we are loved and held.
What still exists is the memory of the necklace I wore almost every day, a gift from my grandparents, a heart-shaped necklace that hung above my own heart and which I touched for comfort in the year she was dying. I did not wear it last Tuesday, it is physically gone, too, but I close my eyes and touch my chest where it should be, and feel it there.
This is all the bandwith I have for today. I have hidden out pretending that I am getting sleep for as long as I can. I have more to say on what remains, because so much does, but this is all for now. Forgive typos and incoherence.
Laura
