I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a quote widely attributed to Tennessee Williams: “We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.”
When the Palisades fire broke out in January, forcing my teenage daughter and me to evacuate from our quaint canyon home while my husband was at work on the other side of town, I did my best to gather our most essential items before heading for safety. Drenched in a cold and sudden sweat, I grabbed our family’s passports, a baby album, my vintage Levi’s — tossing them all into a large silver suitcase.
As my girl and I crawled out of Santa Monica, inching our way through a clogged artery of cars, I felt as though I were in a dream: Neighbors lined the streets, loading up the trunks of their cars while a massive plume of black smoke hunted us in our rearview mirror. Between chatting nervously with my daughter and navigating the roads, it occurred to me that I’d forgotten my grandmother’s brass heart-shaped locket. I’d forgotten the framed photo of my husband and me from our honeymoon to Maui decades earlier. While my daughter tried to calm our two panting pups in the back seat, I worried: What else had I forgotten to save?
No one knew at the time that what began as a local wildfire would quickly come to decimate our city; a beloved small town within the larger landscape of L.A. And I had no idea that my own life — specifically my marriage and the little family we’d created — was itself about to be scorched.
When you choose to live in Los Angeles, you do so with the understanding that, at some point, you may be required to brace yourself for all manner of natural disasters. Earthquakes are the one that have always scared me the most. As a little girl living with my mother in Ohio as my father resided in L.A., I used to pray at bedtime that he’d make it through the night. When, at 18, I finally made my way out West for good, I began reciting the same prayer for myself.
Fires weren’t so much on my radar, but as it happens, they have the ability to shift the earth beneath one’s feet just as drastically. After days of uncertainty, staring at the Firewatch app as miles of hillside and countless numbers of homes were reduced to ash, we let out a collective sigh as we learned that our house remained standing. And yet with the entire contents of our home ravaged by toxic soot and smoke, we, along with thousands of others, were displaced, forced to find temporary housing.
Five weeks passed in a fever-dream of Airbnbs and air mattresses until, finally, we were able to secure a short-term lease on a place of our own. It was a minor miracle in the current L.A. market of limited availability and price gouging. Standing in the barren living room of an unfurnished Hollywood rental, my husband and I should have collapsed in relief. Instead, we did what any exhausted couple of 20-plus years might do: We fought.
“I need a break,” he said, jaw clenched.
“What do you mean?” I shot back. But after months of couples therapy, I knew exactly what he meant. He needed a break from us, or, rather, from me. Our dogs barked incessantly.
I dropped my head into my hands and squeezed hard — a futile attempt to contain the chaos in my brain. Tears forced their way through closed lids, streaming hot down my cheeks. As a little girl growing up in the ’80s, one of my favorite movies was “Firestarter,” starring an 8-year-old Drew Barrymore. When enraged or overwhelmed, Barrymore’s character would start fires with her mind. I remember fearing back then that I, too, might have this power, so profound was my pain.
Now, despite decades of my own inner work, despite years of actively trying to not be ruled by the wounds of my past, I couldn’t help but to detonate at the threat of my husband leaving me.
But having a child means that even during times of disaster, natural or self-made, we must carry on. As the days passed, I attempted to blend our old life with our new one by scattering our few family photos around the apartment, helping my daughter navigate a new bus route, dealing with insurance adjusters. Yet as my husband grew increasingly more distant, I sank into a state of despair.
Loss suddenly seemed everywhere. Beyond the many dear friends who lost their homes in the Palisades and Altadena fires, beyond the decimation to our once gorgeous coastline between Santa Monica and Malibu, I thought of my daughter who would soon be off to college, of my ailing father, of my marriage. Unable to eat or sleep, I sought out help. I met with my trusted longtime therapist, emailed my spiritual teacher, road-tripped down to Orange County to visit my best friend. I also met with a grief therapist with whom I’d worked a decade earlier.
“You have some very real, very major things happening. But this isn’t just about now. What does this feeling remind you of, Evan?” she asked, her voice soft and supportive as she leaned in toward the screen separating us.
Suddenly I was no longer idling in my parked car, phone propped up on my steering wheel. I was 9 years old again, unaccompanied on an airplane somewhere above the continental U.S., being hurled between two contentiously divorced parents. As I talked through my present-day experience, I began to understand exactly what had happened between my husband and me on the day of our move; why I had lashed out so fiercely.
Famed psychologist Richard Schwartz, founder of Internal Family Systems therapy, posits that our minds are made up of different sub-personalities much like a family system. He labels some of these parts our exiles — the wounded selves that hold our deepest pain. When my husband questioned our marriage, my exiles, my most fragile, fearful parts felt wildly threatened. That is when my firefighters — our most reactive, protective parts (and no, the irony is not lost on me) — stormed in to shield them unfortunately in the only way they knew how: through rage.
They weren’t trying to destroy my marriage; they were just trying to keep me from once again experiencing the anguish of being launched into the world, alone and afraid.
Every day for over a week, I knelt before a makeshift altar in my bedroom, anchored myself to my breath and performed a most Herculean feat: twice daily, hour-long meditations. Rather than resist my sadness, I allowed myself to feel it fully — even when this meant soaking my T-shirt in tears, even when it felt as though the tears would never stop.
“I can handle my life” became my new mantra.
As I began to experience the sort of clarity and calm that only meditation can bring, I had a powerful insight: I recently trained to work as a doula, supporting women through labor, reminding them that the most unfathomable pain — in life as in birth — comes just before the new version of themselves can be born.
I considered how, for days on end, I’d cried in the shower, doubled over in heartache. I can’t survive this, I’d sobbed to my best friend. You will, she insisted.
I pleaded to the universe to spare me of my suffering, to reverse time, to let me be anywhere but here.
Just like birthing mamas do in the throes of labor.
But as I was recently reminded, our agony isn’t the end of the story. It’s the threshold. And when once we emerge on the other side — and we always do no matter how unlikely our survival may seem — we emerge transformed.
After eight interminable days, it struck me: My husband was suffering just as deeply as I was.
Sitting across from him at a tiny, borrowed wooden table, I chose to tell him: “I understand now. I hear you. I’m sorry.” Suddenly, he softened. My ability to empathize enabled him to see a door where once he’d believed none had existed.
In the end, had I saved love? It’s such an amorphous, ever-evolving entity; I’m not really sure. Though I certainly hope so.
But what I do know now is that this fire hadn’t come to destroy me; it came to show me what was indestructible. It came to show me that I could, indeed, handle my life.
The author is a writer, yoga teacher and doula in L.A. She is at work on a memoir. She’s on Instagram: @evanecooper
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