What We Lose When Our Personal Landmarks Burn
When the places that shaped you are lost, how do you hold on to your sense of self?
It’s been a heavy start to 2025.
Between the music documentaries I’ve been watching and the grief of losing Granny, there have been more tears than I care to admit.
Then came the fires.
Like you, I’ve been paralyzed by the news of the Los Angeles fires—a historic series of blazes that have devastated an entire city. What does it mean to watch a familiar, densely populated area bigger than Manhattan be suddenly and unexpectedly destroyed in a day? An area that took years to build, decades to solidify, and cumulative lifetimes to become historic?
Community Loss
I read as journalists rattle off the landmarks that are no more. Historic homes like the Will Rogers Ranch and the Andrew McNally House, built in 1887 by the co-founder of the Rand McNally publishing company, were leveled. Centers of worship and schools—the Altadena Community Church, Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center, and the Palisades Charter High School, a backdrop for Hollywood productions like Freaky Friday—were destroyed. Multiple touchstones of modern history are gone overnight.
What does that do to a person?
What does that do to a community?
What does that do to our ability to observe and understand our history?
I never visited them, but I wonder: What did Topanga Ranch Motel or The Bunny Museum mean to that community or to those who had visited over the years? What did these landmarks mean to people whose sole experience of Los Angeles may have been a trip to see them?
Personal Loss
On the individual scale, beyond the personal landmarks like schools and churches that mark pivotal moments of one’s lifetime, countless personal artifacts are gone. High school diplomas, wedding albums, photos of deceased relatives attending your graduation, funeral programs, framed baptismal gowns.
To try to empathize and put myself in this unfathomable emotional scenario, I’ve thought about what it would be like if my personal landmarks were ravaged by fire.
I think about my childhood church and my high school—places that evoke the little girl I fear is long gone. What would it mean for them to go up in flames? How would it feel to have them erased overnight, as if they had never existed?
I’ve only had one such loss: Saint Philip Baptist Church, my paternal grandparents’ church home in southeastern Georgia, burned when I was a young adult. I’d attended Sunday School there as a little girl in lace-ruffled ankle socks and patent leather Mary Jane shoes. We’d get there early on Sunday mornings, before the rest of the congregation, to help Grandpa and the other deacons.
My brother and I would help pull the plastic accordion walls to partition the downstairs fellowship hall into classrooms for Sunday School while Granny finalized the printed programs for Sunday Service. Years later, during my senior year of high school, we held Grandpa’s funeral there.
The original Saint Philip Baptist Church had a familiar musty smell—a mix of aging hymnals, a gas furnace, sand, and heat—that I both hated and loved. I hated it because it was unpleasant, but I loved it because whenever I smelled it, I was instantly transported to the summers of my childhood.
A few years ago, I wanted to take my own children there so I could become childlike with them and show them a part of my story. I wanted to experience the “smelling salts” that would bring those deliciously joyful memories flooding back. Then my grandmother reminded me the original church had burned down while I was off living life. I knew this had happened, but somehow I had forgotten. All that was left on the right side of North Racetrack Street where the old church once stood was the brick monument sign. A newer, more modern church had been built across the street.
Had the brick sign not remained in its original spot, I think I might have lost my mind, believing I’d imagined my whole childhood.
That is the insanity I fear in the aftermath of these fires.
Root Shock
It makes me think of “root shock,” a term coined by Dr. Mindy Fullilove, a psychiatrist who studies the psychological impacts of displacement on communities. Root shock is defined as “the traumatic stress response resulting from being separated from one’s established community and familiar environment, often due to factors like gentrification, urban renewal, or natural disasters.” This can manifest in mental health issues like anxiety, depression, and anger.
The small bit of root shock I experienced from losing a childhood landmark is nothing compared to what those displaced by gentrification or the Los Angeles fires will endure. But I distinctly remember feeling mentally disoriented. If I couldn’t walk into the church I remembered, hear the familiar “thwack” of the screen door hitting its frame, and smell that unpleasant but familiar scent, I thought I wouldn’t be able to conjure the feeling of 1986 again.
And I couldn’t.
Looking for Meaning
What does it mean to lose the places that make you feel like yourself?
What does it mean to lose the places that hold the moments that made you who you are?
What does it mean to lose the places you thought would safely preserve your memories while you went about the business of living?
What does that do to a person? To a community?
In PURPOSESCAPING terms, no season is wasted—so what is this season here to teach?
Is the lesson to clarify the necessary and strip away the unnecessary?
Is it to reduce my reliance on physical treasures that anchor my memories?
Is it to decrease my attachment to the things of this world so I can survive without them?
Is it to need and love nothing so I don’t fear losing anything?
The lesson can’t be to close my heart to all attachments so loss doesn’t destroy me. For what meaning is there if nothing can destroy me?
Perhaps the lesson is to anticipate being devastated—and welcome it even—because devastation reminds us that we’re alive.
These fires—and the swift devastation they caused—have altered what I thought possible. They’ve shifted our realm of normal. Preparing to flee, watching your landmarks disappear, and losing your memories is now something we may have to prepare for.
Maybe the only lesson is to stay present as each moment unfolds.
Because absolutely nothing is promised to the future, not even the relics of our past.
Thank You 🙏🏾Thank You❤️ Thank You✨
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