Today is the one-year anniversary of the day I conjured the Eaton fire.
A couple of weeks before Christmas, I was at Full Circle Thrift on Lake, and I found two dolls in a plastic bag. They were colorful, clearly handmade and dotted with tiny beads and trinkets. One was beautiful and almost charming, wearing a flower-printed dress with a painted mask. The other was ugly, with a skull head, and a dark vibe.
Now that I look back on it, I wonder what mother in their right mind would give voodoo death dolls to their (adult) child for Christmas. But I am a strange, headlong mother, who likes to give unconventional gifts to my unconventional kids. H. has always. liked a strange trinket, a tarot deck, folk art and anything of a mystical nature. So I wrapped those fuckers up and put them under the Christmas tree.
When H. opened their gift on Christmas morning they were clearly taken aback. “Mom, I think these are voodoo dolls, they have some very bad energy.” When I looked at them again, I felt shocked by my own naïveté and cluelessness and ashamed for being that white lady who didn’t understand the dark magic within those objects.
The dolls in my house for five days, haunting me while I puzzled over what to do with them. What does one do with such totems? It didn’t seem right to donate them back to the thrift. Should I throw them away? Green bin? Black bin? Recycling??? All my knowledge of cursed objects comes from a single episode of The Brady Bunch in which they find a haunted tiki figurine on a Hawaiian island. But there was no burial ground for me to return them to. So I decided my only choice was to burn them.
On the morning of December 30th I took the dolls into my back yard, laid them on my Weber grill, doused them in lighter fluid and lit them on fire. As I watched them burn I was overwhelmed by a feeling of ill portent. Would immolation destroy these dolls or give them more power? I was hoping that whatever dark magic they held would go up in smoke. But I also knew that, coming from a long line of atheists, I didn’t know fuckall about ceremony or magic.
I pushed my doubts aside. After a difficult divorce and years of heartbreak, I had finally found peace with a deeply kind man and together we bought a house in Altadena,—a place I had always wanted to live, and coincidentally, the last place in Los Angeles a school teacher and a writer could afford. We had spent five years renovating, gardening and upgrading the property into our own little paradise.
On top of that blessing, we had also just celebrated H’s wedding to their beloved partner N. The wedding was held at the Autocamp in Joshua Tree a week before Christmas, and it brought together not only their two families, but the two halves of our own, fractured family.
My ex-husband, a man with whom I had a dark and deeply painful past, was in attendance. I had been preparing all year to see him. I had been the one to initiate the divorce, and in retribution he assaulted me, then went on a smear campaign, telling our kids and all our mutual friends what a piece of shit I was. For a long time, I agreed with him, because guilt and shame have always been my default modes. When I finally understood the truth about what had happened between us, I tried to tell it in my book. In a move worthy of Trump, he had bought a galley off the internet to make sure I hadn’t spilled his beans. He threatened me with a lawsuit unless I redacted that truth from the manuscript before publication. Reader, I did.
I spent a year fretting over what I would say to him at the wedding. How I would bear his presence. But it turned out, the joy of the wedding outweighed my dread. H’s happiness, the music, the desert air, the friends and family all muted my worry.
He arrived just as the nuptials were about to begin. After years of assigning him power, I was struck by how small and frail he looked. It turned out I didn’t have to worry about what I might say to him, because his tactic was to pretend I wasn’t there.
The ceremony was so beautiful, and it brought back memories of our own wedding, way back in 1991. It had been held in my uncle’s back yard in the Pacific Palisades Highlands. The groom wore a brown suit and I wore an antique tea-length dress made of Irish linen and flats so that I wouldn’t tower over him in the photos.
Our wedding was a much smaller and simpler affair than this one, but it had been held with just as much love and optimism. As I watched these two beautiful people commit to a lifetime of love, even my own, bitter, cynical heart softened to the possibility of happily ever after.
Though my marriage had ended badly, it had been begun in genuine affection, if not true love. We had a decade of happiness before it all unspooled. Whatever regrets I have, it produced two wonderful children, now grown into loving, hilarious adults who had both found wonderful partners, so as I sat in the dark, listening to toasts, I found myself wondering if the marriage hadn’t actually been a success.
By the time the dancing started, I had come around to feeling that was wrong not to acknowledge this moment with the man who I had co-created this half of this union with.
Full of good will and good tequila, I staggered out into the night to look for my ex-husband. I found him at the dark edge of the party, winding up cables from the P.A. system he had brought for the event.
“Hey,” I said, clearly surprising him.
“Hi.”
“Nice, wedding, huh?”
“Really beautiful,” he said.
“Look,” I dove in, not knowing where I was going, “I know you and I are a hot fucking mess, but I just want to say I think we did good on the kids. They are both so wonderful, don’t you think?”
“They’re coming along,” was his very on-brand, mitigating reply. He had never been any good at joy, which was always a part of our mismatch.
“Well, I think they’re both amazing and I’m proud of them,” I chirped, feeling the familiar drear of our union returning, dampening my spirits and the night around us. I was about to turn on my heel, as miffed women do, and march back to the party, but then he said something uncharacteristically generous;
“Whatever good there is in them, is because of you.”
It was an astonishing statement. One that I knew that wasn’t entirely true, but I took the compliment for the miracle it was. It was the only kind thing he had said to me in the fifteen years since we split up, and despite all the tsuris between us, I felt a softening, a gentle completion of our toxic cycle.
Because they were made of fabric and stuffed with straw, it didn’t take long for the voodoo dolls to burn. Within minutes all that was left was a pile of pale ashes, trembling in the breeze. I put the lid on the grill and put the lighter and propellant back on the mantle of our outdoor fireplace. We had spent the pandemic in front of this fireplace, visiting safely with friends. It stood stuffed with dry kindling, a red wheelbarrow was parked next to it, also full of dry kindling. We weren’t using it much now that we could all safely congregate indoors. It felt like the worst was behind us. All I needed to brace for was the January Trump inauguration. But my personal karma felt clean.
Hoo boy.
One week later, on January 7th, the Eaton fire sparked to life, and my house burned down on January 8th along with most of Altadena. The Santa Anas were the lighter fluid, the So Cal Edison spark was the match.
We returned to our destroyed property on January 9th. As we picked through the rubble, the fire’s path was wholly evident. It had come from the east and burned our house from front to back, eating everything right up to the concrete back patio where, out of fuel, it had finally laid down. There, we stared in non-comprehension at an astonishing tableau: the outdoor brick fireplace was the only thing left standing, and it was still stuffed with dry kindling. The wheelbarrow beside it was also untouched—its rubber tire intact and still inflated. On the mantle of that fireplace sat the plastic bottle full of lighter fluid and the lighter I had used to immolate the dolls, were also intact. I circled around the back of the fireplace and there was the Weber grill, right where I had left it, but now it was lying on its side. As if the voodoo goblins had kicked it over as they escaped to do their dark work.
I have never been a superstitious person, but in the scramble to explain this impossible loss, my mind lurched reflexively towards guilt. Was this my fault? Had I doomed us all by burning the dolls? There is a pending lawsuit against Edison that says otherwise, but for the past twelve months, I have been haunted by guilt and shame.
Which is really no different than how I have felt in the face of all my other life disasters. I feel guilty for leaving that sad marriage, guilty for being a flawed mother, a resentful daughter, guilty for allowing my writing career be smothered by insecurity and scandal, guilty for not having saved more things when we fled the fire, guilty for having survived the fire when my neighbors didn’t. I feel guilty for leaning too heavily on my kids to help me navigate my innumerable losses.
In September, H. delivered the final blow on this fucked year by cutting ties with me, diagnosing me as a narcissist and demanding accountability. They told me I lack boundaries—which is the one piece I can agree with. They want accountability from me, but what that looks like or how I might offer it to someone who won’t talk to me has me caught in a devilish double-bind.
They said they want me to do “the work,” which is something they have been witnessed me doing all their life.
I have been on the project of healing my inherited generational trauma, sexual abuse, abandonment and now the senseless tragedy of the fire and the loss of my darling H. It’s not easy. The damage feels like it has coiled itself around the strands of my DNA. I have spent hours in therapy, done EMDR, and somatic healing. I have written two memoirs, and drunk the vine—all in an effort to expunge, or at least right-size my personal damage. But I remain, like all us humans, a work-in-progress.
The lessons of 2025 have been profound. One of the things I have learned is that I am not responsible for anyone else’s peace or happiness—only my own. I have begun practicing white magic now by broadcasting wildflower seeds across the burnt soil of my lot, imagining the house that one day will grow in the place where the old one stood, by leaning into my friendships, and the relationship I have with the kid that stuck with me. I hold an open space in my heart for H’s return, but I won’t let their loss stop its beating. I believe in their big, soft heart. I know their goodness, and I hope one day they will remember mine.
Writing this Substack is part of that white magic, and I thank you for reading it. I am using words, the only power I have, to conjure healing, understanding and forgiveness for all the hurt people who have hurt me—most of all myself.
I wish us all a happier new year.
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