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Nexties! It’s been a month since I last wrote to you, and it’s been A Month in general.
On Nov. 1, just as I was starting to write an edition of this very newsletter, I got a text from my dad. “Our house is burning,” was all it said. I was able to ferret out that he and my mom were in an ambulance en route to one hospital; my brothers, who live at home, were en route to another.
A fire had ripped through the second floor of their house. My brothers’ bedrooms — rooms that had, at various points, once belonged to me — were gutted by flames.
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I hate when writers say they don’t have the words for something — I mean, isn’t that our whole deal? — but it is hard to explain what it feels like when your entire family is in the hospital and your childhood home is smouldering and you see your baby brothers (who are very much toddlers to you in that moment) laying on gurneys with sooty mouths and noses and one is already intubated because it took you a while to get there because you couldn’t decide which hospital to go to and everyone at the scene had left you standing on the street holding a bunch of pieces of paper with phone numbers on them.
Actually, I can describe what I felt in that moment: I felt utterly, completely alone.
Everyone is alive and out of the hospital and as OK as people can be following a house fire.
My middle brother spent weeks in the ICU with inhalation burns and burns to his face and hands; my youngest brother sustained burns to his hands and came to stay with me. And I ended up taking a short leave of absence to help my family, so that is where I’ve been.
To be very honest with you, as I always aim to be: I haven’t really processed all of this fully, so I can’t offer a tidy essay about it. But I can share a few reflections:
Asking for and accepting help is hard, but good. I’m a pretty self-sufficient person and I don’t like being a burden or an inconvenience in any way, but this whole experience has really snapped into focus for me that relentless self-sufficiency is not a great way to live.
Accepting help can be hard if you also have some icks around being vulnerable (hi), but like any muscle, it’s one you have to work.
Taking time away is fine. Obviously, it helps to: A) Have a small emergency fund; and B) Have an incredibly understanding and supportive workplace, and I had both.
But what I mean by “fine” is this: the world will not end if you need to rearrange your priorities (or, in my case, have them rearranged for you) for a bit. The newspaper, incredibly, still came out every day without me. (This newsletter, however, did not, but only two of you emailed me.)
Neighbourhood Facebook groups are not just for insufferable dog-poop narcs, it turns out! I am absolutely in awe of the way my community, which is also my parents’ community and has been for 37 years, has rallied around them and continues to support them with donations of money and furniture and time and whatever else they can give. It’s astonishing.
Community care is so important and vital, and it’s easy to forget about it in our increasingly siloed lives. I am incredibly, heart-burstingly grateful.
Thinking about how you are in a crisis is worthwhile. I’ve been really inspired by the many ways in which my friends (and man, do I have real ones) have supported me during this time and it has made me think about how I can better support them in the future since … life will life, occasionally.
I think I used to be self-conscious about offering concrete help — i.e. “I am bringing you a chicken pot pie” — because, again, I didn’t want to be an imposition.
I also appreciated the people who added “no need to respond” to their texts. The air traffic controlling of updates and check ins, while appreciated, could be overwhelming, and I appreciated this grace.
Home is not a house. Allow me to grate some cheese on this missive, but it’s honestly not. Home is people.
Eating pizza with my family on the living room floor of their empty new rental, it was hard not to be struck by how like home it already felt because they were all there.
You do have to laugh. Even on your worst day. Maybe especially on your worst day. That first night, after my youngest brother was discharged to me after 10 hours in the ER, we put on The Simpsons for some distraction.
It was the episode in which Artie Ziff tells Homer. “You, sir, are a moron.”
“A Mormon?” Homer replies, “But I’m from earth!”
My brother and I laughed out loud, a release valve from the hell day we just had. You know a joke is good if it can still make you laugh out loud on the day your house burned down.
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