This post was inspired by the Creative by Nature podcast episode, “My Childhood Home Burned Down: The Memories, Grief, and Healing It Brought to the Surface” You can listen to the full episode by clicking here.
Almost two months ago, my childhood home burned down.
Even writing those words still feels surreal.
The house hadn’t belonged to my family for years. My mom passed away more than five years ago, and we sold the property shortly afterward. Logically, it wasn’t mine anymore. But grief isn’t always logical.
On a Sunday morning, I had just said goodbye to my husband as he headed off to church when I heard sirens in the distance. Shortly afterward, my aunt sent me a message. I assumed it was another photograph of one of the paintings she’d been working on. Instead, it was a picture of my childhood home engulfed in flames. I couldn’t believe it. In the photo, I could tell exactly where she was standing—at her house, which used to be my grandmother’s house. Growing up, we were so close that we could simply walk down the road to visit. You could see our house from hers if you stood in the right place. And there it was: smoke, flames, first responders, and my childhood home burning to the ground.
I was about thirty minutes away, and there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t go there. I couldn’t intervene. I couldn’t save anything. So I did the only thing I could do. I started making breakfast sandwiches for my daughter for the week ahead. While I cooked, I put on some of Lee Harris’s music mantras. The first one was, “I release all energies and emotions that are not mine.” That felt intentional because in that moment, it felt like the burning of the house represented the release of so much energy that had been attached to it for years. Then I listened to “I Call Back My Power,” followed by “I Awaken My Heart to Love.” Looking back, I realize I wasn’t avoiding what was happening. I was regulating. I was reaching for the tools that I’ve spent years learning how to use.
A little later, my sister called and shared a livestream of the fire. Together, we watched the house become completely engulfed in flames. As I watched, I could see the rooms. My room. My brother’s room. My mom’s room. The room my sister stayed in. The room I grew up in eventually belonged to everyone at one point or another. When I moved out, my brother moved into it. When he moved out, my sister used it. Later, my mom ended up sleeping there too. That room carried the story of our family.
As I watched the fire, memories and emotions began surfacing. By the time my mom’s mental health had significantly declined, the house had become something very different from the home I grew up in. Her hoarding had gotten out of control, and it became increasingly difficult for her to care for the property. Eventually, it became unsafe. My younger sister didn’t leave because she was ready to move out. She left because the courts determined the home was not a safe environment for a child. My aunt and uncle took her in. The house that once held so many memories had become a source of pain, stress, heartbreak, and shame.
That brought up something I hadn’t thought about in years. There was a time when I wanted that house gone. Not renovated. Not cleaned up. Gone. When we first discovered the extent of my mom’s hoarding, I remember feeling like the whole thing should just be demolished. After she passed away, my brother, sister, and I even talked about whether the local fire company could do a controlled burn someday so we wouldn’t have to deal with it anymore. At the time, it felt like if the house disappeared, maybe all the anger, resentment, grief, and pain attached to it would disappear too.
But that’s not what happened.
As I sat there watching it burn, I didn’t feel anger. I didn’t feel relief. I felt sad. Heartbroken. Confused. And guilty.
Because this wasn’t just a house fire. A family was inside. The father had escaped, but he lost his wife and children. I remember sitting there feeling guilty for mourning the loss of a house that wasn’t even mine anymore while another family was experiencing an unimaginable tragedy. I felt selfish for having my own grief. But over the days that followed, I began to understand something important. This wasn’t the first time I had lost that house.
It was the fourth.
The first loss happened in the winter of 2018 when our family could no longer ignore how much help my mom needed. That was when the reality of her hoarding became impossible to hide. Looking back, that was also the beginning of my own unraveling. It was the beginning of panic attacks, anxiety, and losing the illusion of control that I had spent so much of my life trying to maintain. It was the beginning of facing truths about my childhood, my family, and my relationship with my mom that I wasn’t ready to see before. The house was still standing, but my childhood home was already gone.
The second loss came after my mom died. We intended to clean out the property. We thought we’d sort through everything, save what mattered, and somehow make sense of decades of belongings, memories, and pain. But the reality was overwhelming. The house held far more than physical possessions. It held grief. It held responsibility. It held stories that no one knew how to carry anymore. Eventually, we sold it as-is. It sold quickly, and just like that, it was no longer ours.
The third loss happened when the new owners renovated it and later put it back on the market. I remember looking through the listing photos. The greenhouse had been opened up. The staircase had been moved. Rooms were reconfigured. The layout had changed. It was beautiful, but it wasn’t my house. The familiar threads were still there, but everything had been transformed. I remember crying when I saw those photos because once again I was grieving something that no longer existed.
And then came the fourth loss.
The fire.
The final goodbye.
The one that left nothing behind but ashes.
The day after the fire, I went to work thinking I’d be okay. I told myself it was a lighter day, a quieter day, and that I could handle it. But when my school counselor asked how I was doing, I immediately started sobbing. It wasn’t because she said anything extraordinary. It was because I could hear the care in her voice, and suddenly everything came rushing out. Sitting in her office, I found myself asking a question I hadn’t expected: How many times do I have to lose this house?
Later that day, I came home and did a meditation. Usually when guided meditations ask me to imagine a safe place, I go somewhere like Yosemite National Park or another place in nature. But this time was different. When I closed my eyes, I found myself sitting in the ashes. More specifically, I was sitting where the kitchen floor would have been. When the meditation asked me to call forward the version of myself that needed healing, something unexpected happened. Every version of me that had lived in that house appeared. Not just one inner child. All of them.
What struck me most was that no one was fixing anyone. There was no rescuing. No reparenting. We were simply there together. Witnessing. Feeling. Holding space for one another. When the meditation ended, those younger versions of me slowly disappeared as if they were being carried away by the wind. Not because they were abandoning me, but because they didn’t need to stay. And maybe, for the first time, neither did I.
In the weeks that followed, I created artwork inspired by the experience. One piece centered around integration and the gathering of those younger versions of myself in the ashes. Another featured a phoenix rising from the fire. The phoenix kept appearing for me—not as a symbol of becoming someone new, but as a reminder that sometimes what rises from the ashes is simply a truer version of who you’ve been all along.
The fire happened in a moment, but the healing didn’t. The healing started years ago with burnout, panic attacks, grief, loss, and learning how to stay present with uncomfortable emotions instead of running from them. It began when my life started cracking open and I was forced to ask deeper questions about who I was underneath the roles, expectations, coping mechanisms, and stories I had been carrying for so long.
The fire may have been the final chapter in the story of that house, but it also revealed how much healing had already taken place.
Maybe grief isn’t always about losing something once. Maybe grief arrives in layers, asking us to revisit old stories from a new place of understanding. Maybe healing works the same way.
Today, when I think about that house, I don’t think about the fire first. I think about everything it held—the beauty, the pain, the memories, the lessons, and the people who shaped me there. And I think about the questions that remain:
What are we still carrying simply because it used to belong to us?
And what becomes possible when we finally let it go?
Listen to the Full Conversation
If this blog post resonated with you, you can listen to the full podcast episode:
My Childhood Home Burned Down: The Memories, Grief, and Healing It Brought to the Surface