It’s been over a month since the house burned down and it’s
still unbelievable to me. We lost
everything. Everything that survived the
fire fit into half of a 10x15ft storage unit, and the back of a friend’s
Cherokee. I’m doing better emotionally
now than I was, but it still sneaks up on my and stabs me in the heart every
now and then…and it hurts. Some things that
were lost…that cause me pain:
- The last letter my mom wrote me
- Old family letters dated back to the 1790s
- Thousands of family photographs that I’d been cataloging
- An old painting by a great uncle from 1899
- A stack of email responses to one I sent out to my mom’s
friends and former students announcing her death in 2004. So heartfelt. I’d been keeping it in the garage for so
long, and had only recently brought it into the house – If it’d stayed in the garage,
it would have survived
- A little squirt gun in the shape of an Easter bunny. It was one of my mom’s gag things. She’d say, “did you see this cute little
Easter bunny?” Then squirt you with it
when you got close.
- An afghan made by my mom
- An old Stetson of my uncle's that I loved
- A beautiful leather jacket my ex-wife got me
- An afghan made by Shelley’s mom
- All Shelley’s Swarovsky crystal
- Shelley’s grandfather clock
- A picture of my mom in a little brass frame that I loved
- Mom’s old Phi Beta Kappa pin
- A crocheted sunflower my mom did and had framed. I really
loved that thing
- All my digital photographs.
Thousands and thousands
- About $4,000 worth of camera gear
- My computer
- My laptop
- My guitars
- About $700 worth of harmonicas
- All our kitchen things – Knick knacks, family stuff, etc.
- The Hindu Rope plant I grew from a small clipping from my
mom.
Our two cats. Kitty,
who was 14 years old. She was Shelley’s
cat, but I came to love that cat. Baby, who was 6 years old. We got Baby when she was a kitten and she
attached herself to me. I was in love
with that cat. I loved her so much, and
she loved me. It breaks my heart to
think they died in the house, scared and without us there to save them. There’s part of me that still hopes they got
out before they were overcome by smoke, but with every day that goes by, that
hope fades. It still hurts like hell
though.
Shortly after the fire, Shelley went to Hawaii. She, her daughter, her granddaughter, and her
sister had purchased tickets for a week-long vacation last summer. There was no
sense in wasting the money spent, so she went.
I stayed at a friend’s house and took a little over a week off. There was so much to do. I dug through debris, sorted through things
that survived, and separated & sorted photographs that survived, the latter
of which was an extremely laborious task.
At one point I found yet another pile of photos and nearly broke
down. The emotional strain of going
through the photos, and realizing I couldn’t possibly sort through this next
pile of photos was unbelievable. I found
a company to do the last pile of them, thankfully, but the emotional strain was
really hard. So hard I went to my doctor, who prescribed me some stuff to help
with the anxiety. It helped.
The whole experience has been unbelievably tragic and
heart-wrenching. You see fire victims on
television and thing, “Wow. That’s awful.” But until you’ve gone through a fire and lost
everything, you don’t and cannot possibly know how horrible the experience
is. Fortunately, and I know it sounds cliché
(it did when people were saying it to me), we weren’t hurt.
The only thing we can do is look forward. That’s easier said than done. I’m doing better, but I still get a kick in
the chest every now and then. The other
day on the way to work is when I realized I’d lost mom’s sunflower and I broke
down and bawled like a baby in the car.
I loved that thing. I loved so
much we lost.
The one thing good about this experience is that I’ve seen
how good people can be. People offered
homes, food, cars, money, household goods, shoulders, etc. One couple washed
ten loads of the clothes that survived the fire – three times each. A coworker let us stay with him for almost a
month. Other coworkers collected and
gave us things we might need. It’s
really been a wonderful epiphany
Today the debris that was once our home is to be leveled
and removed today. The rain might put a damper on that, but you never know.
