Burned Away: Moving on from Tragedy while also being a College Student

When personal tragedy, like a natural disaster, strikes, why does it seem life never slows down?

My mom, brother, and I opening presents in our old living room on Christmas, 2022. This photo was taken five days before the fire. // Photo credit: Bryan Pearce

Written by Sam Pearce

The trip back to campus in January 2022 was surprisingly normal for me, except for the fact that I was only carrying one bag. It was a raggedy, beat-up black rolling suitcase with holes in it that looked like it was from the ’90s. Probably something mom picked out from the thrift store. Not the suitcase I would have chosen, but then, I didn’t really have the luxury of choosing anything.

I deboarded the plane at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to be greeted by the typical Washington winter rain. I then took the BellAir shuttle up to campus and took the 190 route from The Four Points Hotel back to my dorm room. I sat outside for a while though, avoiding going back to my room as long as I could manage.

When I did finally decide to go back, I shakily jiggled the old key in the ancient Fairhaven lock until the door swung open and I saw everything. When I’d left that room for break in December, the college stuff that stayed behind consisted of my dying LED strip lights, posters and twin-sized sheets I’d never need again. Now, in return, it was everything I had left to call my own.

At around 10:30 a.m. on December 30 2021, a small fire ignited in the Marshall Mesa area in Boulder County, Colorado. The cause is still not confirmed, but it is likely that the origin was an underground coal fire.

Whatever the case, much of the towns of Superior and Louisville were in flames mere hours later. Winters in Colorado are usually pretty arid so that, plus the 40mph winds, with gusts of twice that, ensured that the fire spread shockingly fast.

By the morning of New Year’s Eve, 1,084 houses and seven commercial structures were completely destroyed, with damage to numerous others.

The aftermath of the fire: burnt grass, rubble everywhere, the aspen trees in front of the house dead and falling down. Nothing was left of the old house; the structure was completely flattened, along with most other houses in our neighborhood. // Photo credit: Bryan Pearce

I was at my grandparent’s house when we got the news. My parents, brother and I had headed there when Louisville was evacuated, taking only overnight stuff with us. We barely saw any of the fire, but had witnessed, in horror, a massive plume of smoke coming from Louisville as we drove south.

I’d been anxiously scanning Twitter, the news and friends’ messages all night to see any updates.

When I woke up at 6 a.m., one of the first things I saw on Twitter was drone photos of the damage. A neighborhood that was reduced to gray ash, with street corners and cul-de-sacs that looked disturbingly familiar.

I showed the photo to my mom, then to my dad, to confirm what I already knew: our house was gone. The house I’d lived in for 17 years was nothing but a pile of burnt boards and gray ashes.

And then, barely three days later, I was back in school.

“It’s kind of like being booted over to an alternate universe where everything looks the same, but it’s not,” my mom said.

That nightmarish, parallel universe feeling is one way that many of us who lost our homes felt grief.

Everyone experiences grief differently. It’s something that really has no set timeline. Though the grieving process is said to be around one to two years, it often takes much longer.

A house fire is a unique kind of grief that can’t really be compared to anything. In our case, thankfully, the evacuation ran smoothly and no one in Louisville or Superior was killed.

But there is still so much loss that can’t really be measured: volumes of old family photographs, entire wardrobes of clothes, mementos from loved ones who have passed and so many day-to-day conveniences that suddenly are inaccessible.

There are so many other kinds of grief that impact people deeply and make it hard to go on with their lives. I had a hard enough time resuming my routines after losing my house, and I can’t even imagine having to return to normalcy after losing a parent, a friend, a partner.

For me, going back to school felt disturbingly ordinary. I was going to class, writing discussion posts and working — and for the most part, no one around me knew what I had been through. “My house burned down this New Year’s Eve” isn’t something that is relevant in a whole lot of conversations.

For my parents, post-fire life was an even bigger struggle. While I was at least housed in my dorm room, with food and some of my clothing, they were rushing to find new housing, frantically buying bags upon bags of groceries, filling out mountains of insurance paperwork, returning to their jobs, answering hundreds of sympathetic phone calls and on and on.

“The aftermath was all-encompassing,” my dad said. “It was just incredibly time-consuming and took away from our ability to deal with usual life. Having to go through normal life carrying all this emotional trauma on top of all of that is even more difficult.”

And through all of this, life never slowed down. For any of us.

The old Pearce family house in winter of 2019. We moved into this house in early 2005, and lived there up until the fire in 2021. // Photo Credit: Bryan Pearce

In the past couple of decades, thankfully, conversations around mental health have taken off and become much more mainstream. People are allowing themselves mental health days off work, taking more time for self-care and communicating their needs more openly and with less shame.

There is still so far to go in this field, though. No matter how much your school, job or institution claims to be conscious of your mental health, there will always be expectations to meet and checklists to complete.

Grief doesn’t just impact mental health. When you lose something, whether that’s a family member, a pet or a house, that’s part of your support network gone. Something that used to help you function in the world and get through a day’s work is suddenly gone.

For me, I don’t have an easy solution for this.

Even though, by now, I’ve found new routines and ways of living, there’s still a lot that’s missing. I still have all the normal strains of day-to-day life, but the loss always worms its way in.

If I were to say one thing that’s gotten me through all of this, it is generosity. The generosity of my grandparents to give up their collections of photographs to replace the ones we lost. The generosity of people I don’t even know donating to my parents’ GoFundMe page. The generosity of volunteers to set up donation centers all-around Boulder County to help us replace the many things we lost. The generosity of whoever donated these super cool coral reef socks that I now have.

Ultimately, it’s other people that have helped me be resilient. All of those people who have donated, staying in touch with the people who care about me, with all that people have given me and done for me, my room is no longer empty.