Resilience in the Face of Loss: Navigating Tragedy and Finding Strength in Community
There's no better way to start this letter than with a huge and heartfelt thank you to everyone who's reached out during this unprecedented time. My team members, Zanne and Kristina, and I all live in Los Angeles, and we deeply appreciate the love and concern that has been directed our way over the past 8 days.
I just had to count on my fingers just now to verify that yes, this actually has been going on for eight days (and counting). WTH, people. WTH.
As I look out the window in Venice right now — where I've been staying since last Tuesday — the sky is an unbroken palette of blue, the air is clear, and the palm trees across the street aren't even gently swaying. And yet just 15 miles up the coast, in the canyon where I live, the wind has already picked up and gusts are projected for up to 50 mph today.
For 27 years, Topanga Canyon has been my beloved home. I raised my daughters there, made lifelong friends there, found the place that spoke most closely to my heart. Topangans are a hardy, resilient bunch. We chose to live in this beautiful, magical, vulnerable place. We know we're signing a silent contract with nature when we move there. We think we know what that means.
Those of us who've lived in the canyon a long time have been to the fire rodeo before. Mandatory evacuations and hurricane-force winds aren't unfamiliar to us. We know how to prepare. Bring in the outdoor furniture, pull potted plants away from the house, cover the vents, take down curtains, fill garbage pails with water and towels for firefighters to use on errant embers. Then pack up the children, the pets, the passports, the laptops, the family heirlooms, clothing for 3-4 days, and get in the car. Unless, as many choose, you stay and try to save your home. No judgment there. I know plenty of people who do both, for reasons I respect in both directions.
But we've never faced a fire event like this one, not in my time here. This one is big, and fast, and fierce. Watching structures that have been part of my landscape for 27 years burn on videos, restaurants where we celebrated family milestones, the corner anchor store where we bought our Halloween pumpkins every year, rows of beach houses I drove past every day, the site of my old office, my daughters' preschool, their friends' neighborhoods... all of it turned to ash within a day. No one ever imagine it could happen like this.
Saturday afternoon I went to the pharmacy counter at a CVS in Venice to transfer a prescription, because my CVS in the Palisades was behind a roadblock in a neighborhood that burned to the ground. That's a sentence I never expected to be saying out loud. The last few words caught in my throat.
The pharmacist didn't even blink. "What's your date of birth?" she asked, as she pulled up my prescription in the computer. "Can you verify your name?"
I guess this is happening a lot in Los Angeles right now.
When the fire broke out, I had just returned from 9 days in Mexico and couldn't get back into the canyon, so all of my possessions are still there. My neighborhood is safe for now, thanks to the incredible efforts of firefighters and pilots. But for a few days, while so many friends were losing their homes, it was an intense exercise in letting go of things and stuff and physical items in my mind and converting them to memory, a whole new and different form of anticipatory grief.
The house in the Santa Monica Mountains we sold in 2022, the house where both of my daughters grew up, where one of them was born, where we'd redone every room over 23 years and buried our pets and blown out birthday candles and cooked for all our friends and laughed and fought and loved, a house we'd protected through multiple fire threats, is in a neighborhood that was hit hard. One of my first friends in Topanga, an adventurer, an icon, a gentle, wise, true mountain main, lost his life trying to defend his house when the worst of it came through on Tuesday night. The old crew of friends who raised our kids together, and all of our kids, are gutted.
Losing him is tragedy enough. But losing him is also losing a metaphor, a romantic vision, an ideal. If Arthur, who was always the most self-sufficent and the most prepared of all of us, could succumb to an event of this magnitude, then nature is more indiscriminate and uncompromising and cruel than we ever imagined.
That's something we all need to absorb, sit with, and ultimately accept in order to keep living here. That's going to take time.
The trauma, both collective and personal, that Los Angelenos will be sorting through in the weeks, months, and years to come will be profound. We simply don't know what happens next for the communities that were most affected (Altadena, Pacific Palisades, Malibu). And not knowing is rarely a comfortable place to be.
I imagine that your world, just like mine, is an intricate and interconnected web of connections. So you may also know people who've lost homes, pets, possessions, safety, savings, neighborhoods, friends. So many of us feel helpless against the sheer magnitude of this amount of loss.
As news of recovery continues to trickle in, I'll be creating a list of anyone in the Motherless Daughters community who may be in need of immediate aid. In the meantime, this is a brief list of options to consider where you can make a difference right now and where contributions will go directly to the parties in need:
If you know anyone in Los Angeles in crisis who doesn't have access to mental health support, this is a list of therapists who are offering their services to fire victims for free.
To celebrate the life of my friend Arthur Simoneau, who lost his life in the fire, and help his family with expenses you can contribute to their Go Fund me here: You can also read about Arthur in the Los Angeles Times here. He was truly exceptional and irreplaceable.
My longtime friend, Dorothy Reinhold, along with her husband Andrew and children Katie and Nick, lost their family home in the Palisades fire. Dorothy is a well-known food blogger, and I've been told that the best way to help her right now is by visiting her blog. Last night I made her recipe for Ginger Vegetable Stir Fry and it was fabulous. You can check out her blog and find some of her recipes at ShockinglyDelicious.com. Her Ginger Vegetable Stir Fry recipe is here (I added shrimp and served it over steamed white sushi rice).
Niki and Chuck, dear friends and former neighbors, also lost their beautiful home on Sandstone Ranch in Topanga last week. It was the site of so many community gatherings. You can help the Schmid family get back on their feet here.
Miss Jennifer, a beloved instructor at Manzanita School in Topanga, lost both her current home in Topanga and her longtime family home in Altadena. She's the single mom of Ruby Grace and Noah and an exceptional human being who does so much for others. Here's the link to donate to help her and her family at this time.
The Maier family — my friend Lisa, her husband, and three kids — lost their home in the Sunset Mesa neighborhood of Malibu. They are the kindest, most generous family you can imagine. Their entire community was decimated and it's going to take years, if even that, to rebuild. You can contribute to their Go Fund Me page here.
Thank you in advance for your support!
We're committed to continuing our online services throughout this time, whatever the next weeks may bring. If you've already registered for a retreat in Topanga in March, all systems are still go. If necessary, we'll move the meeting place to an alternate, nearby site. You'll be receiving communications from us about this as the weeks unfold.
In the meantime, please know how much I appreciate all of the messages and check-ins I've received, and how deeply moved I am to know how many of you are thinking of us here in Los Angeles and have been reaching out to ask how you can help. It means the world to those of us who are discovering, and re-discovering, that in this messy, glorious world full of beauty and uncalculated risk, human connections are, always, what matter most.
Sending love and good wishes to you all.