Embracing humanity is a truly exhausting feat.  I am fully in the throes of grief, confusion, loss, anger, fatigue, and feeling it all for me and so deeply for others. I’m trying to keep it all together, with the dichotomy of it all –

Trying to stay informed but not letting the news drown me

Leading a team, handling crisis after crisis

Grace for others, wondering what grace for me looks like

Sleep is forgotten this week and I have forgotten to eat again

I feel guilt for doing the one thing and not the other…

One of my favorite psychologists, Dr. Ramani reminded us to not “brightside” ourselves or others through this time.

I felt this deeply.

I’m generally a positive person, and the positive person problem is always trying to turn a situation around to see the good. Cue the triggering childhood religious statements of: “God allowed this to happen for a reason” and “It is God’s will.”  This week we heard a lot of “At least no one was hurt” and other such nonsensical statements.

I’m always trying to fix things and trying to turn crisis into opportunity.  This journey of loss will have moments where silver linings come in, but f*ck, not this week.

This week, we get to grieve. 

My friend, who lost everything in the fires, shared about a particular picture that was burned – he detailed the moments before the picture was taken, the emotions, the joy of the event.  What was lost was not just that picture, he explained, but rather, the fact that no one will ever share that memory with him. No one will know the story, no one will ever see the picture and ask about it, his children will not carry it forward – as there is nothing to carry forward.  As if his memory, his own existence was erased.

Part of loss, whatever kind of loss, is about the loss of the past, and the current loss, but so much of it is about the anticipated loss that it brings.  Through this loss journey, I suspect we will come back to the loss of “would-have-beens” many times.

But on this day, one of diametrically opposed worldviews (from MLK to inauguration), one of profound grief in my own life, and a collective grief of the amazing city I live in, I want to continue to let people know that it is okay to grief.  And we don’t have to make ourselves feel better by “brightsiding” and tricking ourselves into seeing that silver lining.  If we want to help others, do not say “At least….”.  For “at least” statements, negate someone’s pain, and part of the process is accepting the loss.

I feel the losses greatly today.  I am humbled by embers, literally and metaphorically.

Let’s try to accept the loss of “brightsiding,” as it may actually help find the way to the brighter side.

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Read: Navigating Loss: A Journey Together in 2025

Purchase: Stumbling Towards Dawn: Musings of Loss, Change, and Hope

Read about the Launching of Crista Dawn and follow her on Facebook and Instagram.

 

Our first week’s journey into the impact on loss was supposed to be on “Loss of Time”…  In fact, it was written and planned, and a few things happened and, as poetically as possible, it was going to be late. You know, because there was some serious loss of time happening, but then something grander took over my life, the SoCal fires. 

As a lifelong SoCal resident, I am quite accustomed to earthquakes, drought, and wildfires.  These are normal things. And I can assure you, what has happened this week was not normal.  Massive unprecedented windstorms brought havoc to our streets, and these were newsworthy in themselves. Cue announcer voice:  “Windstorm 2025 –  breaking massive trees, creating chaos and debris in our towns.”  But alas, that is not the story. 

As of this writing, no less than six wildfires in SoCal are burning.  Three of them brought massive loss of property and damage.  The Pacific Palisades and Eaton fires have each taken at least 1,000 homes and are raging out of control with ZERO containment.  The air quality is so bad that they closed down the entire Los Angeles United School District (LAUSD), the second largest in the nation with over 1,000 schools and 600,000 students.  It looks like post-apocalyptic.

And the loss, unimaginable this loss. I am watching as people I love, dearly love, suffer.  I am close to this, in location and in situation – but I am safe, and my home is a refuge at the moment.   

We have lost amazing places in SoCal: restaurants full of memories, schools where our children learned, fantastic views charred with devastation. Things that will never be rebuilt. Things that will never be the same: a favorite clothing store, the dentist who fixed that tooth, the florist where those special flowers came from.  There are no English words for either the collective loss we are all suffering with or for this horrible, deep individual loss.

A loss of a home – the loss of someone’s largest, and sometimes ONLY, asset is one thing. Add to that loss, the loss of everything ever owned. EVERYTHING. Many people I know had only the clothes on their backs; others were able to grab some paperwork.

Our brains do not know how to process this.  When your entire existence doesn’t exist anymore: not the photo albums that didn’t get digitized, not the cool shirt from the band, not your father’s class ring.  

We live in such safety at home; we are not in a war zone and we find solace in our walls – whether they are owned by us, or we rent a room from someone, whether our “roommates” are peaceful or toxic, whether our material things bring us joy or weigh us down – our homes bring us a mixed bag of familiar comfort. 

I could look up some counseling websites on how to process this unimaginable loss and share pearls of wisdom, but frankly, I’m not in that headspace.  The intent of this loss journey is to live through the grief, acknowledge the loss, and collectively share the pain.  

Do not take for gratitude that pillow under your head tonight, that shower that surrounds you, or the mementos from your childhood.  Recognizing the temporariness of “stuff” and knowing stuff will not bring you joy, but also that the complete loss of all of it, will shatter you to your core. 

Nature is not f’ing around.  So, let’s wrap up those who are impacted by it.  I see you.

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Read: Navigating Loss: A Journey Together in 2025

Purchase: Stumbling Towards Dawn: Musings of Loss, Change, and Hope

Read about the Launching of Crista Dawn and follow her on Facebook and Instagram.

 

As I contemplate self-flagellation at this new year’s dawning, I think of all of the things I didn’t accomplish, of those the things I dared myself to dream, and I actually find myself quite content with my journey over the past year. However, I recognize that I did not hold up my end of the bargain as a writer in 2024 and I want to continue to challenge that.

To that end, I have discovered that I’m an expert in loss.  Not at the psychology of grief (there are far more experts in that), but rather in the actual experience of losing things and people. As I have become more accustom to the constant state of loss, I am finally able to give it space both in my heart and mind.

People have become so used to losing that we stop even acknowledging it and often ignore its impact on our world.  So I want it to give it the space it deserves, and therefore 2025 will be my year of loss. And while I will hope to have LESS loss in the year, I want to walk through the types of loss we experience, why they matter, and share stories of how we might process some of it together.  Each week I want to explore a different loss, some grand and difficult, some small and seemly insignificant, some hard to process, and some even funny.

Loss is everywhere.

We lose jobs to under-qualified people, we lose money in the markets, we lose our homes to natural disasters, we lose our health to diseases and age, and we lose people we love.

And then there is grief.

That unspoken journey that we keep in the confines of the therapist’s office, support groups, and alone in our pillows.  Grief is the emotional suffering that we each go through when we have loss. More often than not, we suffer alone.  But we don’t have shared language or understanding of how to grieve, or even how to explain how the sense of loss impacts us.

So, I’m taking a stab at at exploring this thing we call “loss.”  In my own little way, to the few people who might see this, maybe they will share with more so that if just one person sees that they are not alone in their loss, in their grief, than my writing will not be in vain.  If I can process through this, and make a bit more sense of it all, then maybe you can too.

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Purchase: Stumbling Towards Dawn: Musings of Loss, Change, and Hope

Read about the Launching of Crista Dawn and follow her on Facebook and Instagram.