"I Have Ten Cats Inside!!"

Ten years ago today was our fire. I lost everything.

It’s that time again. Christmas?? Yeah - but no. Today is the day of our fire. Ten years ago I lost everything to it, including ten cats. I tried writing this out earlier, and I had the whole day detailed, and somehow I hit something and it all deleted. I don’t feel like going back through all that again. It’s hard. But yeah, everything. If the fire didn’t get it, water damage did. Oh, some books and CDs and cassettes were salvaged. A few vinyl albums. But not much else. Ten years. Wow. The day usually comes and goes, and it crosses my mind and I’ll reflect a bit, but this year it’s seeming to hit harder. A lot has happened the ten years since that happened. The biggest thing being that I lost my mom a couple years ago. Mom, who was so vital in getting me through that hard time. We stayed with my parents the first month after until we found a rental home to move to with our few belongings. I got angry after our fire. It was only five days after Thanksgiving that year, 2013. I still had leftovers in the fridge and chili on the stove I had made the night before and we had that evening for leftovers. I had seen Sigur Ros that September. Any joy I had remaining from that was totally erased. Why did it always seem that anything good that happened to me had to be paid for by something bad?? That’s how it felt to me. And now everyone was getting ready for Christmas. The last thing in the world I felt like then was Christmas. People were stopping by my parents’ house to give donations, then they probably continued on to do their Christmas shopping or whatever. Bah. And really?? People were giving us TVs and a blender that looked like from the 80s. Our fire was nothing but an excuse for people to get rid of their junk and old clothes. There were three TVs in my parents’ garage!! Three!! I suppose maybe these people were trying to be nice but… Here is some advice for you if you want to help people who have just gone through a fire. Please give gift cards or money. Those were the things that helped the most. We could buy clothes that were our own style and size and we bought so many home furnishings and such when we got the rental home. The TVs and blender and junk were given away. Also what made me angry was how there were virtually no resources on the computer for advice about how to deal with the aftermath of a fire. I found about tornadoes and hurricanes. But nothing about fires. And the one thing that always made me fume was the platitudes. Especially, “At least you all got out okay.” I lost ten cats. Ten precious pets. No we didn’t. (I know that’s a lot of cats. Whatever.) One person at the scene of the fire told me now I could get a new house and make new memories. I wasn’t in the market for a new house at the time of our fire. I was quite happy with the old one.

You see fires all the time on the news. They talk to the victims, and they’re always trying to be positive and almost all of them say it’s okay - you can get new stuff. Man, the stuff I lost that meant so much to me that I’ll never be able to replace!! Pictures, gifts from friends and family who had died, my high school yearbooks all signed by school friends, again, some who had died… Again pets. Stop it with trying to be positive. It hurts!! And you can’t get all new everything - and it’s okay!!

The fire left me reeling for almost a year. Our house looked like a scene from the apocalypse. There were pages from all my books blowing around in the yard. I couldn’t go in the place and see everything that was left. I could see various things through the holes that were once windows, and that was enough for me. I didn’t want to see litterboxes and my son’s toys and everything left behind. I heard my pot of chili was splashed all over the kitchen. It’s weird, but I took it personally. The smell of smoke hung in the air for probably a month. And of course it would have to be the worst snow we had in 30 years that winter. 2013 - 2014. It was relentless. No sooner than it finished snowing - a day or two later it snowed again. It all added up. I had two cats that weren’t accounted for (eight were found dead under the couch - cats hide when they’re scared whereas dogs run), so daily we returned to the house and yelled for them and looked around, hoping they’d come back to the house area. I was traipsing about in the dark with snow up to my knees yelling for my Tadpole and my James for three months. I only missed two days. One night it was below zero and just so cold. It felt strange and like something out of a weird movie some nights with our burned-out house as a setting as I walked about the yard looking for cat paw prints and calling their names. After three months I finally gave up and figured they probably would’ve shown up by now. Meanwhile I wondered where they had gone to, what they were eating if anything, or if they had died all alone out there in the snow and cold. I was anxious. Some days it was unbearable. I’d wake up (after about three hours of sleep) with diarrhea and shaking. I lost about 13 pounds. Later on in the year I started going to my parents’ everyday for awhile. That helped. Otherwise I was home alone all day while my son and husband were at school and work. I tried to keep busy, but I was just doing the bare minimum. By evening I was really tired, and that helped to ease the anxiety. Evenings were okay. We had the old house demolished. Something I didn’t want to see. But we came back to the house site one day thinking they were done, and they weren’t. I got to see an excavator loading a bunch of our stuff into a dumptruck. I saw videotape hanging from it (I had tons of videotapes I had recorded - more stuff you can never get back no one mentions) as well as one of the husband’s shoes. All our stuff was going to a dump across the river in Ohio. (Sometimes I wondered if I went to that dump and looked around, if I could find our things.) Later, after we had a new home hauled in on the same site, the basement filled in with house brick remains and a lot of dirt, I was finding little things out in the yard that was ours. Some of the son’s Legos or a game piece. A chunk of shirt. A couple books and magazines. Hard stuff to come upon. We moved into the new house in April. Pretty quick actually. Only four and a half months since the fire. But that didn’t mean everything was okay. It took about a year for the anxiety to fade off, as I said. But once in the house I was trying to locate where in the other house things were. The kitchen window above the sink was where my son’s new room is. The bathroom was where the kitchen now is. Stuff like that. A whole new life with all new things (and by then a new cat) took some getting used to. It messes with your head.

Now, ten years later, here we are. And what a ten years. I’d list the changes, but many are personal and not so great. The worst has been losing my mom. I can’t say things are better. My son is 19 now. All grown up and out of school and getting a beard. I don’t know how it has affected him. He has never really talked about his feelings. I know we both went through anxiety when leaving the home. We felt unsafe. In 2017 he had a trip to King’s Island with his sixth grade class, and I was going with him. I was nervous to leave the house and go so far away for so long. He threw up on the bus. I panicked in an elevator when my mom was in the hospital for a week right after the fire that spring. I was nervous til I got back home. I was about to panic stuck in line at some road work once, too. It still crops up sometimes in certain situations. I suppose just something I’ll have to deal with. If you know someone who has had a fire, please give them your support and patience. I didn’t have much and it was hard.