The Fire Took the House. It Didn’t Take What Made It Home

A reader writes:

People keep saying to me, “At least nobody was hurt.” They are right, and I thank God for it every day. But I want to write about the other thing, the thing people don’t say, because I think somebody reading this might need to hear it.

Our house burned down fourteen months ago. It was an electrical fault in the ceiling, the fire officer said, probably old wiring that had been there since before we bought it. It started in the early evening. My husband smelled it first. By the time we had the children and my mother out on the road, the back of the roof was alight. We stood across the street in our house clothes and watched it go. My son, who was nine, kept asking if his bicycle would be all right. I didn’t have the heart to tell him.

I am not going to describe the next weeks in detail. There was a lot of paperwork, a lot of sleeping at my sister’s, a lot of crying in the bathroom so the children wouldn’t hear. The insurance covered some of it, not all. We had underinsured the contents without realising. I still get angry at myself about that, and I would tell anybody reading this to check their policy tonight.

What I want to write about is what I grieved, because it surprised me.

I thought I would miss the house. I did, a little. But it wasn’t the walls I dreamed about. It was the pencil marks on the kitchen door frame where we measured the children every birthday. It was my grandmother’s Bible with her handwriting in the margins. It was the photographs from my wedding and the only picture I had of my father as a young man. It was the smell of the verandah after rain. It was the chair my mother always sat in, which nobody else was allowed to use. You can’t claim for those. There isn’t a line on the form.

For a while I thought that meant home was gone. That’s the honest truth. I would stand in my sister’s spare room, which was kind of her but very small, and think: we have nothing now. We are starting from nothing.

The turning point, if there was one, was a Sunday about two months after. The church had collected some things for us and a sister brought them round. Among them was a plastic bag of photographs. She had gone round the congregation and asked everybody to look for pictures with our family in them. Christenings, harvest services, the children in Christmas plays, my husband and me at somebody’s wedding twenty years ago looking very young. Somebody had even found one of my father at a church picnic that I had never seen.

I sat on my sister’s bed with those photographs and I cried differently. Not because of what was lost, but because I realised that our life had not only been kept in that house. It had been kept in other people. In their albums, in their memories, in their prayers. The house held some of it. But it was never the only place.

We rented a small place after that, then another. We are now rebuilding on the same land, slowly. I will not pretend the new house will be the same. It won’t have the pencil marks. My son is ten now, and we measured him against the new door frame, bare concrete, no paint yet. He wanted to write “9” as well as “10” so the old number wouldn’t be lost. So we did.

I have been reading a lot in 2 Corinthians, where Paul talks about our earthly house, this tent, being destroyed, and having a building from God that is eternal (2 Corinthians 5:1). I used to think that verse was only about dying. Now I think it is about more. It is about not putting the whole weight of your life on something that can burn.

I don’t want to make it sound neat. Some days I am still angry. I am angry at the old wiring, angry at myself about the insurance, angry that my children had to watch that. My mother has not been the same since; she keeps asking where her chair went. Faith has not made the loss smaller. It has made it survivable.

If you have lost a home, whether to fire or storm or flood or a bank, I want you to know that what you are feeling is real grief and it is allowed. You are not ungrateful for missing it. But I also want you to know that the things that made it home, the people, the love, the stories, the faith, are not as easy to burn as they feel in the first weeks. Some of them are sitting in other people’s photo albums, waiting to be handed back to you.

Home is more than bricks. I didn’t really know that until the bricks were gone.

— Marcia, Clarendon

Editor’s note

Thank you, Marcia, for writing so honestly about a loss many families fear and some have lived through. Two things stand out. First, the practical: old wiring and inadequate contents cover are both common, and both can be checked by a qualified electrician and your insurer before disaster, not after. Second, the deeper point: the congregation that gathered photographs gave something no policy could. Churches and neighbours can think about what they might return to a family who has lost everything, not only what they might give. We pray that the new house on your land fills with new marks on the door frame.

This article is general information only and is not financial, legal, tax or other professional advice. Please speak to a qualified professional about your own circumstances.

Reader letters may be edited for length and clarity, and names and identifying details are changed.

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