What The Fire Actually Took

 This is part 2 of 5. Read Part one here

About eleven months ago, our lives looked very different.  If I’m being honest, it was already cracking.

Our home was beautiful, but our foundation wasn’t. The space between family members had grown wide and brittle. And the only way I knew how to cope was by closing doors,  emotional ones, mostly, and staying busy enough not to feel the ache underneath.

Then the fire came.

It took everything I thought was mine; every object, photograph, and memory, gone in a single night.  But what I’ve learned since is that the fire didn’t just take things.
It took illusion.

In the ashes, I found truth.

Truth about my family, my past, my patterns, and about who I’ve always been underneath all of it.

For decades, I tried to find that truth through therapy, travel, meditation, building a business, Torah study, ketamine journeys, workshops, mentors, teachers, all of it. But none of it cracked me open the way the fire did.

Loss has a way of stripping away everything that isn’t real.

And for the first time, I could finally see what had always been hidden: A mother who was never really there, and a sibling whose cruelty I mistook for protection.

I don’t share this to dwell in their shadows. This story was never meant to be about them.
 

It’s about me.

Because, as my therapist often reminds me, they were my teachers. They taught me what love is not.  They showed me how deeply I can survive. And now, I can finally see that who they are, or aren’t, has nothing to do with who I am.

The fire took the power they once held.

And in the space that opened, I found agency.

It also gave me back something I didn’t know I’d lost: my husband.

After forty years of marriage (and forty-seven years together), this past year felt like our first. When everything burned down, so did the distance between us. There were no roles to play, no layers to hide behind. Just two people standing in ashes, choosing each other…again.

For years, I told myself that meeting Mitch at seventeen had held me back. Now I see that it saved me. Loyalty, the quiet, unwavering kind, is what rises when everything else falls away.

Starting over wasn’t a punishment.

It was a promise.

The fire gave me the chance to unbury what I’d buried long before the flames:
The grief, the loneliness, the exhaustion of caretaking everyone but myself.

It burned away the noise so I could hear what was always there, the goodness, the strength, the wholeness I had spent years trying to earn but already possessed.

Sometimes, I still wake up at 3 a.m. and find myself opening invisible drawers, rifling through memory boxes that no longer exist, touching the ghosts of what once was. Grief sneaks in that way; quiet, ordinary, persistent. But even then, I know: what we lost was only the weight we were never meant to carry.

The past year has been the hardest and holiest of my life.

 I’ve learned that:

✨ Healing doesn’t come from rebuilding what was, but from trusting what’s becoming.
✨ Freedom isn’t in forgiveness; it’s in release.
✨ Love, when stripped of illusion, is simpler, quieter, and infinitely more real.

The fire forced me to see the truth.
But truth gave me peace.
And that peace is what I’ll build everything else on.

As we step into this next chapter, I keep returning to one mantra:

You can’t lose what’s meant to liberate you.

Maybe that’s what transformation really is, not a return to who we were,
But a homecoming to who we’ve always been.

With love, light, and gratitude,
Susan

P.S. This is part 2 of 5. Read Part one here

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