Eaton Fire II
I deplore the popular use of the word “emotional” as a weak substitute for the hundred or so emotions that humans experience. Say or show what it is. Sad, angry, grief, etc. In this moment I am experiencing intense grief. My adult identity was built in Altadena, California. My children grew up there and experienced the early symptoms of severe mental illnesses that affected the rest of their lives. Yesterday was the third anniversary of my daughter’s death from lung cancer she contracted from ninety pack-years of smoking, a common consequence of psychiatric disorders.
In Altadena Mary Jo and I bought our first home in 1983 following the end of my twenty-year first marriage to Julie. It was destroyed in the Eaton Fire of 2025. We moved away in 1999. It was sold a few years ago for over one million dollars. I feel sorry for the current owners. It’s not about the money, we also loved that place and installed a special stained-glass window in the master bedroom upstairs. I feel the collective ache of the displaced Altadenans losing prized possessions, pets, cars and their identities.
It is a diverse, bohemian enclave in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains.
My former home in Altadena
When my first wife and I looked at homes there in 1974 we were routinely told not to buy there because "that’s where the black people live." Pasadena/Altadena had just undergone the throes of judicially enforced desegregation of their schools, resulting in a proliferation of private schools just as the south responded to school integration. Nonetheless, we bought a home on New York drive that I remembered from childhood as a mansion on the corner of Holliston Avenue.
We started medical practices, joined the local country club, and enrolled the kids in elementary school, including Antonia our honorary daughter. (Their junior high was destroyed in the fire.) My marriage to Julie came apart, and the children acted out—or that’s what I thought was happening. My daughter became a super-child and my son a juvenile delinquent. Antonia went back to her mother. Mary Jo and I participated in Toughlove, where we met our lifelong best friends Elaine and Keith Piper.
Our two children were ultimately enrolled in a special school from which my son was truant, smoking pot in the Arroyo Seco. I put him in the ASAP program and his mother and I decided to put him in the now notorious Cascade School in Northern California. (He benefitted greatly and had no evidence of abuse other than asserting that KP duty was abusive). My son ultimately was diagnosed a classic bi-polar 1 triggered by alcohol. He has refused medication as it impairs his unfounded grandiosity. Subsequently he has spent about five years in the “correctional” system.
On a course of Ritalin for ADHD my daughter manifested paranoid delusions and was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder with predominant depressive symptoms. She cooperated with medical care and showed the strength of character to accept her illness and function as best she could. I could not have been prouder. She lived with her devoted S/O Bill Whoolery for the rest of her life. In her final days Antonia returned to care for her and eventually married Bill. They live at Lake Havasu. Rather than sponsor Gaelen's illness I told my son that failing to take medication would result in my cutting him off. (He has hit up my wife for a few dollars on occasion—she’s a softie.) He was last seen at the Cobb Estate in Altadena where he would camp out. His last remaining friend in Altadena says that he hasn’t seen Gaelen in months.
And so, it has come to pass that at age 80 I have had a remarkably fulfilling life except for these dreadful losses. My daughter died, courageous and decisive to the end. My son has been lost for a generation, too proud to trade his hypomanic euphoria for the “leaden” feeling that drugs can cause. None of this is of course about me. I’m the luckiest person in the world, but I have to accept the emptiness, the might-have-been’s from losing my children and my homes. I can only hope that my son turns up alive.
In the meanwhile, I drown in memories of the most important period of my life. I have long since grieved for the loss of my dreams for my children. I scoffed at a colleague who complained that his daughter was only getting B’s in school, saying, “you’ve been blessed by God.” Looking at my novels I realize that loss was the ongoing theme of my early life—and my career as an oncologist. I must embrace it again. It is painful and enervating, but it’s also an old friend returning to my personal life after so many years.
