When the Smoke Clears
The one-year anniversary of the Eaton and Palisades fires.
It is the one-year anniversary of the Eaton and Palisades fires. Anniversaries like this don’t arrive loudly. They show up quietly for people who were not impacted by the disaster; they may see a story on the news or remember the weeks of coverage, stirring memories; however, the truth is that most people have already moved on with their lives. For those who worked the fire, lived through it, or lost something in it, the date carries weight. Smoke has a way of lingering, even after the air clears.
I’ve been thinking about a friend of mine this week. An emergency manager. A professional. One of my tribe. Just before Christmas, her house caught fire. Not her fault. Not a mistake she made. The fire started next door, in a neighbor’s garage, where electric bikes were stored and charging. Modern conveniences, quietly dangerous when everything goes wrong at once.
One year ago, she was working the Eaton Fire. Standing in ash and smoke. Talking to families who had lost everything. This year, she is one of them.
That’s the part that sticks with me.
Emergency managers spend a lot of time walking through other people’s worst days. We help organize the chaos. We talk about recovery timelines. We hand out information and resources. We say things like “you’ll rebuild” and “this is the long game.” We mean it. We believe it. But belief is different when the loss belongs to you.
There is a concept in philosophy called negative visualization. The idea is simple and uncomfortable. To appreciate what you have, imagine losing it. Imagine your house burning down. Imagine your job disappearing. Imagine your car breaking down on the worst possible day. Then open your eyes and look around. Whatever is still there matters more.
Most days, I don’t do this intentionally. I drink my coffee. I sit in the garage. I complain about small things. Emails. Deadlines. Noise. Weather. Normal stuff. The kind of stuff you complain about when your world is still intact.
But loss has a way of forcing negative visualization on you without asking permission.
A house fire doesn’t just take walls and furniture. It takes routines. The chair you always sit in. The place where your keys go. The familiar creak in the floor. It takes holidays, too. Christmas becomes a date on the calendar instead of a place you return to.
What makes this harder is that my friend understood the process. She knew the steps. She knew the language. She knew exactly what was coming next. There is no ignorance to soften the blow. No mystery to distract you. Just the quiet knowledge that this will take years, not months, and that the word “temporary” can stretch longer than anyone admits.
And yet.
I watched something else happen in the middle of all that loss. Gratitude showed up, not as a platitude, but as a survival instinct. Gratitude for people who showed up. Gratitude for neighbors who helped. Gratitude for the fact that everyone made it out alive. Gratitude for the life that still exists beyond the rubble.
Negative visualization teaches that imagining loss helps you value what you have. Real loss teaches it faster and deeper.
When you lose everything, you stop taking the small things for granted. Heat. Water. Familiar streets. A safe place to sleep. You realize how thin the line is between “normal” and “gone.” And once you see that line, you never unsee it.
This is the part we don’t talk about enough in emergency management. We talk about resilience, but we rarely talk about gratitude as a form of resilience. Gratitude doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t rebuild homes. It doesn’t replace photos or heirlooms. But it steadies you. It keeps bitterness from becoming the thing that survives the disaster.
Sitting here in my garage, dry, warm, annoyed about something trivial, I try the exercise on purpose. I imagine the smoke. The sirens. The moment when you realize you can’t go back inside. And then I stop.
I look around.
The garage is still here. The house is still standing. The people I care about are safe. Right now, in this moment, life is intact.
That doesn’t mean it always will be. That’s the point.
Gratitude isn’t about pretending bad things won’t happen. It’s about recognizing that today, they haven’t happened yet. And that is not nothing. That is everything.
Maybe the key to gratitude isn’t positive thinking at all. Maybe it’s honest thinking. Clear-eyed. Uncomfortable. Grounded in the understanding that loss is not hypothetical.
And when the smoke clears, what remains deserves our attention.