Ashes are not the stuff of life.
I found out in August 2023 thanks to a funeral home who was preparing to cremate my mother. I was told that the organic matter in a person's body vaporizes when burned at sufficient temperature, leaving behind the pulverized inorganic substance we call ash.
So what you might call “mom” is actually a bunch of inert minerals indistinguishable from anyone else's remains. Place the material in the soil and plants will grow around it but not through it.
However, these ashes mean something. They are definitive, heartbreakingly inadequate and tangible proof of my mother's existence. They are a relic that helps me reflect on life before and after death.
I thought about that as ashes from trees, homes and possessions destroyed by the Eaton Fire in Altadena covered sidewalks, cars and anything else left outside during last week's apocalyptic windstorm. My family lives a few miles downwind from Altadena, and on the night of January 7, conditions seemed extreme enough that we, too, had to leave. East of us, several houses burned in a place where it is believed that the fire was caused by embers expelled from Altadena.
A niece in Glendale, farther from the origin of the Eaton fire but under greater threat than us, was evacuated to our home. Family, friends, former high school classmates, many fled. Some lost their homes and more.
Their losses are real and incomparable to the sheer anguish felt by those of us who still have roofs over our heads and schools our children can attend. Our suffering, if you can call it that, comes from empathy; theirs, from the relentless bully of experience.
And yet, the collective trauma in Los Angeles is undeniable, especially in the communities near Altadena and Pacific Palisades. The ash that fell on us for days was nothing more than a physical reminder, a merciful reminder, of the destruction that lay just down the road from where we stood.
Nearly two weeks later, Altadena ashes remain in sidewalk cracks and other hard-to-clean places in my neighborhood. At any other time, you'd think a group of cigarette smokers hadn't cleaned up after themselves. Or, if this were a more “typical” fire deep in the mountains, it could be remains of brush and trees washed down from the Angeles National Forest. that happened during the Bobcat fire in 2020.
This time, and after this fire, it is different.
Driving the family minivan, I used the wipers to wipe dust and grime from the windshield, then wondered what remnants of other families' lives I had mindlessly wiped away. Perhaps these specks were once family photographs, diplomas hanging on the walls, perhaps even pages from the hymnals of the burned-out church where the spouse of one of my wife's colleagues is the rector.
What house ashes are neighbors scattering by sweeping the entrances to their houses? Could any of the remains be from the classroom in Altadena where my wife and I took our children to Mrs. Henry's early parenting class? From the house on Christmas Tree Lane where, two years ago, model train builders graciously entertained my children?
The winds had blown these ashes, relics of Altadena's trauma, around us. And while we may mourn the remains of a deceased loved one, it might prompt us to consider the question: what now?
In the 1950s, my grandparents settled in a modest bungalow down the hills and fire-prone canyons of Glendale. Living within sight of the mountains reminded them of their home in Norway. Is it the sense of security that once allowed them to make that deal with nature (possibly the quintessential quality of life in Los Angeles – Is he gone? Have we dumped so much carbon into the atmosphere that what was once “far enough” from nature is now “too close”?
Fortunately, these ashes are not the stuff of life. And judging by the GoFundMe pages and promises of rebuilding, Altadena's beating heart remains. Plans are being made to relight the cedars on Christmas Tree Lane as soon as possible, in a show of community resilience.
But I hope we never completely erase the memory of these ashes. It might serve to remind us, long after the broader collective trauma fades, that the people who lost so much in Altadena—the real life in that community—still need our help.
