What We Lost In the Fire: On the Stories We Tell To Fill Life’s Empty Spaces

My mother’s younger sister died in a fire in her twenties. How that fire started and how it ended, where blame lay and, later, why people needed blame and needed it to lay someplace you could point to, even touch—those things were never clarified for me, and perhaps never clarified, period.

No one ever told me about the firefighters, though there had to have been some. And no one told me about the funeral or the eulogies or how it felt, for example, for my grandmother to lose a child and in that way. No one ever had anecdotes about how the loss was handled, if the house was rebuilt, sold, or abandoned, what my aunt’s life had been like, her character. The fire lacked a story.

As it came together in my young mind, “the fire” was less a line of linear details and more an abstract canvas with disparate, often urgent, images. Its lack of facts became, for a child, a mystery, a myth, a feeling. That feeling, a mix of fear, sadness, and curiosity, informed later losses in my life by teaching me neat conclusions are the exception not the rule. Clarity, in so many situations, is a chimera. Maybe no one wanted clarity about that fire. Maybe no one wanted a story. When it comes to our most complex experiences, we usually prefer healing to detective work. We like the idea of truth but not as much as we like the feeling of true peace of mind.

As a girl, I kept a “fire bag” by my bed with all the things I needed to take in case another fire came to take me. Fire, the one long, chronic threat that could never be actually extinguished. Fire, at once as abstract, fantastic, and threatening as a dragon, might arrive at any time it felt like it. Fire was casual and ferocious in equal measure, ruthlessly democratic in its appetite for destruction. I can remember and recall that feeling easily even as I have tried, and failed, to remember what was in that bag. What could possibly have meant so much then that I cannot remember it.

Was there a deck of cards, a toy, a copy of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. My aunt was, by all accounts, beautiful. She was also a smoker. Her autopsy indicated cirrhosis of the liver, by which you might deduce she had been drinking, a lot. Yet do those facts constitute clues, or the start of what might become a story. For my mother facts have become memories, fiercely ringed with layers of love and forgiveness, better long-term strategies than regret. My mother, throughout my childhood, never slept above the third floor in any home or hotel, and she traveled a lot. That habit went unquestioned and unexplained, though everyone understood. In life you do not show up to the snowstorm in a bikini. Unless it is your first snowstorm.

Years later, my fire bag long lost or forgotten, I went away to college to the same place my childhood best friend was already a student. He had moved off campus and into a house with a group of handsome scholar-athletes, all with what seemed like clear locks on the future. They were only one year older, but they seemed so grown up. They were at the age where they could live in a house they called “ours,” though I could not have calculated a mortgage. They seemed confident, socially at ease, assured.

Then one night, when they were out, that house they lived in burned to the ground. They returned home in the middle of the night, from a party and in their tuxedoes, to watch as everything they owned was destroyed. A preposterous, indelible, image, almost too on the nose. That fire had a story, and a lesson, a cast of heroes and what I imagined, then, as their emotional arcs. I imagined that the fire changed them, in some fundamental way. It was not my fire, yet I wanted meaning from it.

The English author E.M. Forster famously differentiated story from plot. “The king died, and then the queen died, that is a story,” he wrote. “The king died, then the queen died because of grief, that is a plot.” A plot provides reason, answers. A plot is a thing you can follow. A story is closer to myth, which is why stories are the animating element of our unconscious, only occasionally locking onto logic, probably by accident. So far in my adult life I never lived above the third floor. You might say that is part of my plot though it reveals nothing about my story.

The New Year has been defined by another fire, in Los Angeles. A friend sent “The Santa Anas,” Joan Didion’s 1968 essay in which she wrote “to live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.” A deeply mechanistic view of human behavior. I read that and thought “mechanistic” meant robotic, logical, literal. Then I looked it up and learned it means something entirely different and far more complex. “Mechanistic” means that we understand certain types of phenomena only by understanding their underlying causes, characteristics, and qualities.

Fine, but what if we cannot understand causes, characteristics, and qualities. What fills the void. Imagination, terror. A cigarette left unintentionally burning. Boys in black tie standing in a line. Didion, in the same essay, provides images to indicate the climate of fear about the winds, which is really fear about the fires. A neighbor wandering his house holding a machete. The Santa Ana are violent and unpredictable, to Didion. Like fire. The Santa Ana can provide a story or a plot, depending on our need and our experience.

I would never presume to know what it feels like to lose everything, though my mother could, if she wanted. My mother’s choices remind me the mechanistic view is far from the only option when encountering natural disaster or catastrophic personal loss. The mechanistic view can show that the shape of an artillery shell fired towards a target is assured, a perfect parabola, out of your hands. Yet loss is not an artillery shell. It defies physics. It is a feeling waiting, often impatiently, for insight. Insight, and perspective. And story.

Some people believe there are only two stories and that we simply keep telling them in new ways. Story one, a stranger comes to town. Story two, a hero takes a journey. I think there is a third story, the one told in the second person. This is the story you tell yourself. This is the story in which you lose everything you thought mattered and have to start over. This is the story that breaks your heart and then, one day, opens it up again. You do not know the ending of the story when you start, and that is why you keep going. It is the most important story you will ever tell, even if you never put it into words.