I haven’t lost anything. I lost everything.
I am lucky beyond imagination. I am haunted beyond reason.
I am spared. No one is spared.
I turn the sharp turn into my leafy Altadena cul-de-sac, my home for a dozen years, and I beg loudly.
“Hail Mary, full of grace…”
It’s a Wednesday morning, several hours after the Eaton Fire began destroying thousands of lives, flames are still leaping from the burning destruction. Every block, the air is still dark with smoke and the streets are still crowded with trees, but my fiancée, Roxana, and I had just endured a night of sleepless terror. We had to come here. You had to see.
The charred carcass of a Volkswagen lies in the rubble of a house destroyed Wednesday by the Eaton fire in Altadena.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Have we lost this worst of lotteries? Have we received a direct blow from the hand of hell?
I scream and shake as Roxana, brave and determined, spins the car through flames and foliage down a scarred, soot-covered street where we see a bit of fence and a bit of white, and then there she is, standing strong in the middle of the landscape. ruins of my beloved neighborhood.
Our house. He survived. Did he survive?
“The Lord is with you…”
I begin to cry, flooded with gratitude and relief, until I look around at the barren, smoldering landscape and my heart almost instantly sinks into a much deeper emotion.
Guilt.
I was there, but where were everyone else? Where were my neighbors? Where were my friends? Why was I still standing and they weren’t?
My next door neighbor lived in an old house that was sprawling and still full of life. It was gone, burned to nothing, a portrait of death. How did I miss these flames?
Directly across the street was the tidy home of the kindly elderly professor who lived behind a multitude of beautiful trees. No more. More beauty. More privacy. No more house. The bones of his refuge lay crushed and piled and still flickering with flame. Why was she so cursed when I was so blessed?
Next door to her lived a wonderful lawyer who never complained when my house’s cars were parked in front of her beautifully renovated house. Everything is gone. Total carnage. His proud achievement had been reduced to ruins. Why didn’t I lose everything instead?
Times columnist Bill Plaschke stands in front of his Altadena home, Monday, Jan. 13, 2025. It was one of the few homes in his neighborhood that didn’t burn during the wildfires.
(Mark Potts/Los Angeles Times)
Of the eight houses in my cul-de-sac, four remained standing, three of them suffered damage and mine was the only one that seemed intact. There was no reason for this. There was no logic behind it. My neighbor Phil Barela said he had stayed out late the night before and put out a small fire at the back of our property, and I will forever thank him for saving the structure, but it was surely much more than that.
The fire that surrounded our house on all sides did not consume it. There had to be a reason. What was this reason?
During this frenetic Wednesday morning tour, we quickly passed through the house as flames flickered in the streets below. We were enveloped in the smell of smoke, but everything else seemed normal. Everything was exactly as we left it. Around a brown, thorny Christmas tree were old magazines, blankets, hastily discarded socks, all the trappings of an ordinary life.
A life that, like those of thousands of grateful Angelenos whose homes had survived, had nonetheless been changed forever.
Our house will have to be taken apart, cleaned, and basically gutted of drywall and insulation because of the smoke damage, and we were the lucky ones.
We were in danger of losing all our furniture and we were the lucky ones.
Once we are allowed to live in the house again, which could take months given all the water and electricity issues, we will spend the next two years living in the middle of a construction zone , and we were the lucky ones.
If you hear guilt in these statements, you hear it correctly, guilt as oppressive as a flame. Why have so many others lost priceless photo albums while we keep ours? Why do so many others have to rebuild their daily steps from scratch when our basic plan remains the same?
A few years ago, I wrote a book about the resilient Paradise High football team, which played a nearly undefeated season just months after their town was razed by the 2018 Camp Fire. called “Paradise Found” and its central character was a tough head coach, Rick Prinz, whose house surprisingly didn’t burn down.
I contacted Prinz this week to ask him about survivor’s guilt. He said it was real. He said he felt it immediately.
Firefighters attempt to prevent a fire from engulfing an adjacent home during the Eaton Fire in Altadena on January 8.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
“When we found out our house hadn’t burned down, it was very emotional, we were very grateful and amazed,” he said. “We also felt guilty for the loss of so many others. We did not share our joy with others and kept it to ourselves. I would try not to mention that our home survived those who lost so much.
Prinz admitted to the darker thoughts brought on by survivor’s guilt: “Yes, there were times when we thought maybe it would have been better if our house burned down,” he said.
But he recognized that getting his house back into working order was so difficult that he focused on that. — “Living with a burn scar, rising insurance costs, constant construction, terrible road conditions…survivor’s guilt begins to lessen,” he said.
This guilt is still strong here. I won’t complain. I can’t complain. I don’t deserve to complain.
Even a minute spent in this house is better than the horrible fate that awaited so many people who never had that time.
From this moment on, every day in this house will be a monument to pure luck, fair winds and Phil Barela and, certainly, I had nothing to do with any of that, and how can I live up to it of this?
There are many of us in Los Angeles in similar situations, homes intact but lives uprooted, forced nomads who may never return home until spring, people facing such a long and complicated road. Some of them, like Prinz, might already wish their homes were instead destroyed so they could start rebuilding from scratch.
You know who you are, those of you whose homes have been saved when your guilt threatens to destroy them. You know who you are, and apparently everyone else does too.
At one of the newer hotels we visited while waiting to be allowed home, I was approached by someone walking a large dog down a narrow hotel hallway, a common sight these days .
“Hello, are you an evacuee? » » she asked quickly.
“I am,” I said.
“I lost everything,” she said.
“I didn’t,” I said.
End of conversation. She turned abruptly and headed in the other direction. I was an outcast. I was not worthy to discuss a loss that could not be quantified. I wasn’t a real survivor.
Gusts send burning embers into the air, fueling the Eaton Fire on Jan. 8 in Altadena.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
That’s when I realized that no, we are all survivors, we have all been affected even though we still live in pristine neighborhoods with electricity, water and life. We were all burned. We will all be marked.
Just because your house is standing doesn’t mean you’re with it.
Right now, I’m trying to get up, but I’m not quite there yet. I am blessed but hindered. I have learned in recent days that intangible losses, while they cannot compete with tangible losses, can still stick deep in the throat. Those of us who own intact homes in burned areas can’t admit it publicly, nor should we, but it’s true.
I’m a creature of habit, a slave to routine, I begged for the same seat in the press box during the Dodgers playoffs, I take the same strange route to LA football games ‘USC, I wear the same basic black uniform every game of every game. sport.
And now, even though my house is there, everything else has disappeared, my traditions, my habits, my normality.
I used to walk down a nice street in Altadena to get to work. This street is now a long junkyard. I used to stop at the corner of Chevron Station every day to buy snacks and talk about the Lakers with the owner. This place has become a blackened shell.
My favorite burger restaurant is gone. One of my favorite breakfast places is gone. A dive bar that helped hold the neighborhood together is gone. The pizzeria is gone. The hardware store that just sold me air filters last week is gone.
From Altadena to Pacific Palisades, you all have stories like this. You have lost your favorite watering hole, your favorite grocery store, a corner of your city that had become your anchor, your strength, your best friend. All of Los Angeles has stories like this. Our daily lives have been mutilated beyond recognition. There have been deaths, there has been destruction, everyone, everywhere, no one counts, everything is going wrong and all of this requires a resilience that was deployed everywhere last week, including in my little burned-out neighborhood.
During the brief visit to our house the day after the fire, my neighbor Brian Pires stood in the middle of the street, amazed that his house had also survived as flames burst from his street corner. It was his garage. Suddenly it caught fire. He had no water, no hose, no chance, but he refused to give up. He jumped in his car and ran toward the main road, returning moments later with two fire trucks in tow. He managed to find the firefighters himself and lead them to the flames which they quickly extinguished.
In that moment, he wasn’t just a chiropractor protecting his home, he was all of Los Angeles fighting to breathe again with an unreal courage that transcends all tragedy.
Many of us may never get over the guilt of having a house still standing. But damn, we owe it to those who lost everything to keep them standing.
