I’m an independent journalist and author with an uncertain road ahead. To support my work, please subscribe to my Patreon page, or Venmo me directly, @rothschildmd. Only if you can afford it, of course.

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When you think that you’ve lost everything
You find out you can always lose a little more
I’m just going down the road feeling bad
Tryin’ to get to heaven before they close the door

The first thing you do when you find out your house burned down is to start making lists of all the things you’ll need to do next.

Ok, no. That’s nonsense. The first thing you do is suppress the urge to find a hole to get sick in. Based on the stories I’m hearing from folks who also lost their houses in the Eaton Fire, some are more successful than others. Hey, no judgement.

So then, the second thing you do when you find out your house burned down, after the vomiting, is start making lists of all the things you’ll need to do next.

For those who lost their homes in the wildfire plague of California, lists will become the currency of the realm. Notepads and piles of receipts become more valuable than gold. You will make lists on your phone, in your head, on scraps of paper, and in disjoined texts to yourself at three in the morning.

There are things you have to do for the remains of your last house so you stop paying for things you won’t need for a long time. You have to cancel DirecTV, your Stitch Fix subscription, your Amazon subscribe and save. You don’t want to get charged for your air filters and Flonase getting delivered to a burned out husk, after all. You have to call your mortgage company and explain very patiently that no, you don’t have a check from your insurance company to repair the damage to your house because your house doesn’t exist anymore.

Speaking of insurance, you have to start that ball rolling – assuming you’re lucky enough to not have gotten kicked off your homeowners policy. You have to make calls, start files, download pictures, and save everything electronically. They’ll want you to document everything you spend while out of your house, while also documenting everything you had in your house when it burned down so it can be replaced, or at least some version of it can be bought again. Assuming it can. The lists are granular and demand an absurd level of detail so as to make sure you don’t squeeze a few extra pennies.

Salad plates, white, ceramic, x12. Hundred year old brass Shabbat candlesticks, x2. Pushpins, clear, container, x1. Never opened.

You make lists of where you’ve stayed while on the road. Lists of things you’ll need to get at Target to be able to have something resembling clean clothes and some food, assuming they have anything left. Lists of people to thank for their generosity and kindness. Lists of donations. Lists of people to contact who you may or may not get around to. To-do lists for the next day, most of which you won’t get to because you’re strung out and wrung out and bone tired. Lists of lists.

Eventually, we’ll get to lists of things to do for the next house. But that’s so far down the line it’s not even possible to conceptualize it. So we stay in the realm of the immediate, the thing that has to get done today. That’s all any of us can handle.

Of course, there are other lists. I’ve seen multiple lists of businesses burned out of Pasadena and Altadena. Restaurants and shops and bars and people’s life’s work that are gone and might not ever come back. The coffee place where we grabbed horchata con espresso right after the elementary school holiday show. The dry cleaners where I took the suit I had made for my mom’s funeral – a suit that’s now gone. The bar in walking distance where I celebrated my 40th birthday, and where the bartender had seen me on CNN once.

And that’s to say nothing of the businesses burned out from the other fires, which I can’t even wrap my mind around yet. There are the lists of your friends who lost their homes, though in truth it would take less time to list those who hadn’t. There are the lists of the things they lost and the things they took with them. Some are heartwarming – the friends who were out of town but managed to get in touch with a neighbor who saved their cats and Social Security cards before the flames crept in. Others are ludicrous – the good friends who managed to save their house, while packing, among other things, a strapless bra meant for an evening gown. Hey, one day, right?

The lists come at you from every direction. Lists of historic structures, built from materials that aren’t made anymore. A century of American architecture decimated and just waiting to be turned into a vast field of glass and concrete shit boxes. Lists of places you can pick up free food and water, because the water in Altadena has been declared “do not use.” And there are the lists of GoFundMe pages from your friends, your neighbors, your community. You want to give to them all. But you can’t, because you need as much as you can get for yourself at the moment. A bottomless pit of need and despair.

The lists become documentation, not just for insurance purposes, but for remembrance. I’m finding in these first few days that witnessing and remembering is just as important as FEMA applications and itemizing Target receipts. Connecting with friends and going over what they saved, what they need, where they’ve been. Their lists. The list of our collective loss. This is how we even start to come to grips with what’s happened. We do it through writing it down, taking pictures, shooting videos, and leaving as many concrete reminders as we can.

So we make lists. We take notes. We scribble nonsense and send ourselves incomprehensible texts. It’s how we get through these days and do the things we need to do, but it’s also how we pay tribute to what we had and what we lost. Because there is just so goddamn much of it.

This piece will go up Monday, 1/13. We have a list of things to do for the day. Maybe we’ll even get to some of them.

Altadena Will Rebuild.