True Crime + Holy Meditations

On our evening walk, the place that Stella and I are calling home away from home right now.

I had only finished one book since the fire.  I read it because someone invited me to a book club meeting, and I thought I should try to do normal things.

It turned out I wasn’t ready for normal things and couldn’t go. But The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah, was a pretty perfect book for me to read at that moment in my recovery.

It’s about a family moving to Alaska in 1974 which was the year my dad moved to Alaska from Los Angeles. He wanted me to move with him but I couldn’t leave my mom and my new school. But he did a smart thing and had me make the long trek with him and my new stepmom to move there. We drove in a truck with a cool camper attached, up the west coast of the United States, up the Alcan highway, onto the ferry through all the little islands and then back on the road up, up, up to Anchorage.

I was only with him in the summers, but the book reminded me of our times together with endless sun and beautiful landscapes, stepping onto tundra in places that made him ask me “How many people do you think have stepped right where you just stepped.”

I loved how my dad loved Alaska, like the dads portrayed in the book.  It made me feel like my dad was hugging me during those first weeks after the fire.

I have started several other books, just like I have started watching many movies or TV series. I often get stopped by something that serves as a trigger:  fire, loss, grief, trauma.

Oddly, I find documentaries and true crime soothing.  I think it’s because even if something bad happens, there is going to be a resolution of some sort by the time I get to the end.  They show relatively little footage of actual traumatizing events. Mostly it’s people talking about it, describing it or very badly reenacting what leads up to the bad things that happen to people.  If I need to fast forward I can.

Yes, I also watch some fun, uplifting things too sometimes, but somehow my psyche needs to see dark things get worked out.  Families recover from tragedies.  Lessons are learned.  Life becomes bright again.

I also spend time doing meditation and listening to spiritual teachings. 

So, I am doing this very bizarre emotional hopscotch from darkness to light. One foot down on darkness, two feet down on the light, one foot, two feet, one foot, two feet.

But when I had two friends over for dinner last Thursday night and they both talked about the book The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, I somehow knew I was supposed to read that and that I would actually get through it.  They said very little about the book, but I knew. 

I downloaded it on Audible as soon as they left.  At first, I was ever so slightly worried because it’s about a woman who is suicidal.

No, I am not suicidal. But swimming in someone else’s dark thoughts is not something I am drawn to do at the moment. 

But this is different. 

I had never read Matt Haig before. Wow!

I had two long drives back and forth from LA this weekend, and was able to devour this book.  I’ve already started the next title of his that called to me The Life Impossible, which is giving me similar comfort.

Both books (and I hear others of his books as well) deal with characters who have depression and/or anxiety, who come to bloom out of the darkness into the light of appreciating exactly what life has brought to them on a silver platter.

This is exactly the lesson I need right now.  I am fully aware of the many lessons I am getting due to losing my house in the fire.  I am also fully aware that I have no idea how many other lessons I will be receiving down the line.

But lessons there are. As Haig advises in The Midnight Library - at least a couple times — “Sometimes the only way to learn is to live.”

Woven into the evenings since I started the book, and all day Sunday I spent listening to The Midnight Library, I have been living inside an abominable task that makes me cry every time I even think of it, let alone talk about it, write about it or do it. 

It is something that my lawyer actually referred to as “evil.” 

She uttered it very softly on the phone in response to my tears - so softly I had to say “Did you say evil?” 

She said “Yes, the insurance companies do this because they know 95% of the people won’t do it, so they do it on purpose to save themselves money.”

Those of us who have lost or houses – or whose houses are still standing but that endured extreme smoke damage – have to write down every single thing we lost in the fire.  Obviously this is far easier for those who can go into their houses and do a physical inventory, but it’s a different kind of deep pain for them.

But I have to – in my mind’s eye – walk from room to room, open each drawer and closet, look at every wall.  And the garage.  Don’t get me started on the garage.

Every spoon, sweater, birthday candle, napkin ring, jar of peanut butter or tiny tub of gourmet salt.

We must write down the full inventory if we want to receive 100% of our house contents coverage. 

My insurance – like most insurance companies – paid out 75% of the policy immediately.  But you need to work for that last 25%.  Most people don’t do it.  But I need every bit of that money for my rebuild.

It is a gut-wrenching task. There are moments where I get excited to think of something I had forgotten about but immediately the glee is washed away with the awareness I found it only to lose it again.

I spent most of my Sunday working on this damn spreadsheet, taking breaks to walk Stella and listen to my book.

Midnight Library made it all bearable.

I needed a reminder of what I have always believed - that each turn, every choice, every last-minute decision or laid out belabored plan, each chance meeting, every blind date has brought me to this very perfect moment in my life. 

I truly don’t regret any moment of my life that led me to:

move back to LA from NYC, kicking and screaming but knowing it was right to follow my then boyfriend,

move back to the east side of LA to open the Angel Store because nothing felt quite right on the west side,

fall in love with Altadena and drive all over LA looking at houses, only to come back and say “this, this is where I want to live,”

drive around Altadena alone one very late night (after losing an Altadena house I adored to an all cash buyer) and spying a “For Sale” sign that had fallen down to the ground,

walk up a long dark uneven driveway seeing in the distance one single spotlight shining on a beautiful river rock fireplace in the center of an empty house,

listen to the silence, feeling the power of the mighty mountain only hundreds of yards away,

wondering if there was any way I could live in this magical place,

texting my real estate agent …

and buying the house that burned down.

I don’t regret any turn, any choice.

It’s all perfectly perfect for millions of discernible and indiscernible reasons.

On Monday night I put a piece of paper on the counter to keep track of all the things I need to do before I go back east on Thursday for a week, leaving CA, leaving Stella for the first time since the fire. 

I set a pen on top of the blank sheet of paper. This is what I do before trips. I have my running list to which I add, cross out, add, cross out until I cross of the last items, crumple up the paper and throw it away as I leave the house, proud that I have checked off all the to-do’s in my pre-trip prep.

But the next time I walked by the paper, I didn’t write down a to-do. I wrote this:

I love my life and my house burned down.

Even though a lot of my life is currently embroiled in fire-related feelings and matters, I am the sum total of all the twists and turns that brought me here.

And those twists and turns are pretty fricking magical.

Last night, Stella and I took our evening walk as I finished the book. We have passed this tree almost every day since being here but I didn’t see this beautiful “I love my life” tattoo/knotty life-affirming sculpture until then:

Life is beautiful and my house burned down.

Soon I’ll be back to  Life is beautiful.  Full stop.  I love my life.  Full stop.

Until then, I find comfort is life-and-magic-affirming books like those of my new favorite author, Matt Haig. Yes, I know I’m super late to the Matt Haig party. But the twists and turns finally got me here and I’m super grateful.

Thanks especially to Heidi and Patti for twisting and turning to my house last Thursday to make it so.