May 6, 2026

In 2022, my stepfather, David, died in a hospital bed in the Santa Monica apartment he had shared with my mother. He was almost blind. He could barely speak. He couldn’t swallow very well. He had to wear a diaper and couldn’t stand or walk. He needed the rails lifted up on each side of his bed so he wouldn’t fall. He was only 75 and many of the folks in the board-and-care home where he had lived for a year were much older and senile.

He was done battling Parkinsonism. Once he was eligible for hospice care, he earned the right to leave the board-and-care and die at home. At the apartment, he had round the clock care but my mother and I were there, too. During his last week, he voluntarily stopped eating and drinking (VSED). He still had two senses: he could smell and he could hear. We lit candles and had good-smelling oils to rub his hands and feet. We had implements to keep his mouth moist and his lips from chapping. We read books to him - Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Mary Oliver poetry. My favorite T.S. Eliot poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which I could never get through without crying. David died on September 22. 2022 was a hard year but we got through it.

In early 2023, my mother moved to Pacific Palisades to be closer to George, Catherine, Blaze, and me. And our three dogs. Sparky, as I have previously written, was my mother’s favorite. They had a special bond. He was at her house more than he was at ours, even though he was not officially on her lease.

2023 proved to be a tricky year both personally and career-wise. My film, PLAN C, premiered at Sundance and SXSW but didn’t sell. Well, it “sort of” sold for a low five-figure minimum guarantee. When you’re still in debt for making a film and now you’ve also got to hit the road and pay for the publicity, impact and festival travel, etc. - it doesn’t begin to make you whole. After the “sort of” sale, a deal which I should never have done, the film premiered on Friday, October 6, 2023. We had a good turn out that night. There was optimism in the air.

But it didn’t last.

My theatrical release was a bust and all the money I had put into publicizing and promoting and traveling was for naught. It was a “sunk cost,” as George says.

George and I met when he was twenty-eight and getting his MBA. I was twenty-one and an English major. After nearly thirty years of marriage, I think it’s safe to say I also have earned a sort-of MBA by osmosis - MBA-lite.

2023 was the year Catherine left for Williams College across the country in New England. From Pacific Palisades, it felt extremely far away because it was – and is. While her friends could drive home to do their laundry or for a long weekend, there would be none of that for her. The distance was too long, There were no direct flights. My mother had loaned us her fancy porch chairs for Catherine’s send-off party for LA kids in her Williams class (the class of 2027, which seemed far off back then). Since the house and the chairs looked so good, my mother said we could keep them. That fall, after Catherine left, we sat in those chairs every morning and had coffee and sent Catherine dog videos. There was definitely something “life changing” about it. The morning coffee. The green cups. The nice chairs. The serenity of it.

George was devastated that our life was changing in ways we didn’t fully understand. We had turned some invisible corner in our family. George and Catherine had always had a contentious relationship. They could never agree on a restaurant. Catherine was the dress code enforcer; George would usually allow only one or two comments about his shoes or jeans or sweater before he lost it. Catherine had been especially high strung in 2023 about getting into college and turning 18 so the tension with George escalated. I was surprised by George’s grief when she left. He said he would miss her going on adventures with him - like to Arizona for car parts or to find a new breakfast sandwich hours away in LA Saturday morning traffic.

Also in the fall of 2023, Blaze started her freshman year of high school at a new hard-to-get-into private school. The year began with an online bullying incident. It didn’t take long for Blaze to have to make a change and for us to have to drive all the way to Miracle Mile by the La Brea Tarpits for her to attend a one-on-one school for the remainder of the school year. The commute was not sustainable; depending on the time of day, it could easily take 3 hours round-trip (and this was just for a pick up or a drop off). When we made 16-year-old Blaze take a city bus to the other side of the 405 freeway, to pick her up from a gas station that was only forty-five minutes round trip - to make our round-trip just a little less onerous - she was verbally harassed by a homeless man, in a sexual manner, and no one stepped in to help. Not the bus driver. Not the fellow passengers. Eventually the homeless man got off but not before causing a lot of trauma for Blaze. So the bus was out from then on. Still, the commute was not going to be sustainable for Blaze’s sophomore year. We had to figure out another option.

In May 2024, Sarah, the woman in Missouri with whom I’d been filming for ten years, had a huge loss. Her forty-five year old mother died suddenly from complications due to diabetes. Sarah had found her dead in her bed. I scraped together funding and flew to Missouri with a crew to film with her.

In the summer of 2024, we did a second neuropsych test for Blaze, which was not a bad thing in and of itself but did result in conflicting advice about what to do in response. We knew then that we could get an IEP (Individualized Education Plan) if we went to our local public school, which was just down the street – literally a block away. We also knew we would have to fight for her IEP, which would involve letting Blaze fail a class or two, which would be its own trauma. In the end, we decided it would be the lesser of two evils to have her give the local school a shot. It would mean so much less stress for us, her parents, as there would be zero commute. It was the gift of time, which also meant we could be more present for Blaze.

So that fall, Blaze enrolled in Pacific Palisades Charter High. It was a tough school, socially and academically. While Blaze did scrape by in most of her classes, she received bad grades (Cs and Ds). Still, she loved the experience. With the extra time, I prepared elaborate after school snacks.

That fall, however - early in the school year - George’s 90-year-old mother fell and was hospitalized. George began living in Santa Barbara with his father, to help navigate his mother’s hospitalization and care. She had already been suffering from mild dementia, and after the fall, things got worse. For most of September and October 2024, I was holding down the fort solo in Los Angeles. In November, the day before the election, she died.

George stayed in Santa Barbara to help his father and sisters with the funeral arrangements. On election day, Catherine flew home for the burial. She only learned the result of the election when she changed planes in Detroit. We were disbelieving. We had lots of Harris yard signs we had to take down. We were also still navigating grief - including George’s grief which was now all-encompassing.

We had Thanksgiving 2024 at our house in the Palisades. My mother brought out all the family linens and china. We tried to make the day especially comfortable and respectfully festive. In December, my mother rented a house in Carpinteria so we could all be together to attend my mother-in-law’s celebration of life, spend Christmas together, and then also celebrate my father-in-law’s 90th birthday, which was just before the new year.

As I reflect on it, 2022, 2023, and 2024 were rough. If I had to give one word to that two and a half year period, it would be grief.

All of us were looking forward to the new beginnings we would certainly enjoy in 2025. George would spend less time in Santa Barbara. I would finish my film about Sarah. Blaze would recommit to succeeding at Pacific Palisades Charter High.

And then January 7, 2025, happened. The fire.

The year and half since then are a blur, an inelegant clawing back and recalibration of ambitions, a scaling back of stuff, and a rejiggering of priorities replete with navel gazing and smaller, quieter living. I very much live in the “now” now.

At times in the post-fire period, I’ve been rudderless, in limbo, a zombie. But folks, it’s now May 6, 2026. A full sixteen months since the fire. With a goal of being less rudderless, it’s been recommended that I write down what I want the next two years to look like. If I find the words, if I put it in writing - a description of my ideal future - I might actually make it happen.

For some reason, in order to do that, I felt compelled to write about the two-plus years before the fire. To write about that first, because that did happen and, yes, I’m still making sense of it. And to make sense, I also need to get those words on a page here. Before finding any of the other “dream-questy” words and ideas that might follow. My planning for a future now needs to account for the fact that a lot can happen (and did happen) in two years pre-fire.

To put a fine point on it, looking at and planning for the future feels funny. It’s almost impossible to take the task seriously.

Still, here I am. And like a good student, I will try to take stock and write about what might come next, and what I would PREFER to come next, if I were to have any control over it.

So, here goes it: