Emotional Scars From Last Christmas’ Fire Still Fresh

I don’t know why the image of the fire popped into my head, other than I remember reading about it in the paper last Christmas. I remember seeing the photograph of a young woman standing outside her gutted apartment in Costa Mesa and saying that the fire had destroyed just about everything she and her three children had.

I got it in my head to find her this Christmas Day, to see if there was a happy ending.

Christmas Day, however, isn’t the best time to track someone down, and I couldn’t find the woman.

But I did find Andrea Keith, who had lived in the converted garage-apartment behind the unit that burned and whose life also was turned upside down last Christmas Eve. Although the fire didn’t damage Keith’s apartment, the entire property was condemned and Keith never spent another day in her home.

I always wonder about people who go through traumatic experiences. We read about them in the paper and then go about our business. It’s not humanly possible to keep up with all the victims in the world.

I mentioned that to Keith, who’s 40, a secretary and also taking psychology classes at National University in the hopes of becoming a therapist. She knew what I meant. “I have a lot more empathy for people with post-traumatic stress,” she said as we talked in her new apartment. “I didn’t have any understanding of that before.”

I asked her what she remembered from last Christmas, of the fire, and whether it seemed like some long-gone moment in her life. “There are little fading glimpses, but other times it’s also like it was just here, like I’ve stepped into that time warp for a second or two,” she said. “Then there are times when it seems like it was a hundred years ago.”

She remembers getting up last Christmas Eve day and plugging in the Christmas tree lights. The day before, she had made quiches and baked pies. “I remember thinking that morning that it was so quiet and calm,” she said.

Then, sometime after 7 a.m., neighbors started yelling and pounding on her walls. She saw smoke coming out of her neighbor’s upper window but because she had not smelled smoke and nobody really thinks about fire, things still did not register immediately.

She spent the next five or six hours outside, realizing the main house was gutted but thinking she might be able to return to her apartment. It wasn’t to be. Eventually, the shock hit just as if she had been routed in the dead of night.

“It’s the same kind of trauma,” she said. “You wake up, you’re thrown out of your house, you can’t object, you can’t argue, you can’t validate your own side and come to some negotiation. You’re just out.”

Her boyfriend said she could live in a trailer next to his parents’ house, but after three days, he told her the situation was untenable and she moved out. It also ended their relationship and she remembers driving around without a place to stay, thinking, “I’m a homeless person now. I guess there’s that park down there in Costa Mesa and I guess I could sleep in my car.”

Instead, a couple offered her a room and she lived with them for a month. She was unable to get another place right away because she could not get a refund from the landlord on either her last week’s rent for December, her prepaid last month’s rent or her deposit.

In the midst of that early gloom came the occasional moments of light. “One guy from work who I’d only known for about nine months walked over and said: ‘I know you won’t ask for this, but if you need it, use it. If you don’t, give it back.’ It was $250. He said he hoped that if he were ever in that situation, there’d be somebody there to help him.”

Soon after the fire, Keith returned to the apartment to see what was salvageable. She ran into the third tenant in the building and confessed “weird” behavior--namely, that since the fire she had gotten up at night to just look at or hold onto some of her possessions. The woman told Keith she had been doing exactly the same thing.

Keith said she had not been thinking much about the fire as this Christmas approached--until just a few days before. “I haven’t been able to divorce it yet. In fact, I was really surprised because I was doing OK, and then the other night I was totally overwhelmed and feeling depressed. I told myself that things were going OK, that I have a place to live, I have a good job and a lot to be thankful for. But I still felt like crying and was really sad. I had to let myself feel that sadness and I started realizing that it was my house and the loss of it and that I was grieving.”

She turned down an invitation to dinner at a girlfriend’s house, but could not put a finger on why. “I just said I wanted to hang out at my house. It was like I really had this need to be home.”

A footnote to Andrea Keith’s story is that she wound up living only a block or so from her former apartment. But while she used to love to work in the yard outside to make it feel homey, she said she cannot make herself invest the time now.

“I put so much time into the yard at the other place. Gardening was really important. Here, you can see when you walked in. I don’t do it. I don’t do that anymore. I don’t want to get ripped off, I don’t want to get burned--literally or figuratively--again.”