Twelve years ago, I wrote Fire in the House telling the story of my journey to the Amazon and receiving ayahuasca with a group of fellow travelers. I integrated that story into the main narrative of my life for the years before and several years after that journey. This post picks up with where that story leaves off.
Our move back to the East Coast in 2012 felt so exciting. We bought a house just miles from where Chris and I grew up, and after being renters and moving around quite a lot for about a decade, we were so ready to settle down and live in one place for more than a couple years. We loved the lush green backyard with a pond and the enormous cherry tree in the front yard. Even though there was quite a lot of renovating and updating needed in the house and the pond was filled with slimy scum, it still felt like our personal paradise.
The house was a refuge through so many changes. Our daughter went through middle school, high school and college while we lived there. My career changed rather drastically three different times, and Chris opened and sold a successful business during those years.
Smithbridge, the nickname we used for the house, became a tranquil haven after many years. We'd added a wood burning stove that sat in front of a beautiful old stone wall, and it put off enough heat to keep us warm one winter when an ice storm left us without power for almost a week. The backyard was the shining jewel of the property. My husband's friend designed and built a pool and spa that looked like it was always meant to be there. Along with Chris's rehabilitation of the pond and completion of all the landscaping, it felt like a five star resort back there.
When the world stopped in March of 2020, we were so grateful to have each other and this beautiful place to wait out whatever was to unfold.
The house was even the backdrop to our daughter's short stint of TikTok fame. She amassed around thirty thousand followers or so from dance videos she shot around the property during the pandemic. Chris and I even joined her in a couple videos, and making and sharing those videos was a happy and lighthearted note in those strange early months of lockdown.
I worked from home during the pandemic, a stroke of luck that I could keep earning while my husband's business had to close. In the first months of the pandemic, my job was also such an emotional support to me. To be sharing the odd experience of lockdown with each other over the phone and on Zoom made me feel like I had a rich community, growing closer instead of further away from people.
During the pandemic, work changed a lot though. By early 2021, it felt less like a connected community, and more like a place of endless demands and lots of stress. I later found out that my small company had started moving towards the market at that time, and all sorts of changes to make us more attractive to a bigger player were in motion. Our dynamic work family was morphing into a corporate hierarchy that could more easily merge.
By the middle of 2021, my mother's health was in rapid decline. She had around the clock caretakers over at her house, along with both my father and older brother. The two of them were keeping the regular household responsibilities going, but they were also getting in each other's faces more and more each passing day. Their relationship had always been tough, but the stress of seeing my mom change so much added a whole new pressure, and unfortunately there was a lot of yelling and tension.
And even more unfortunately, my sister with Down Syndrome was living there too. I'd been thinking for years that it wasn't the ideal place for her, but my mom was so attached and didn't want any discussion about Kristin moving out or doing something different. By that time, Kristin was in her 50s, and she'd always lived with my parents. To my parents, it was a given that with them was the best place for her.
On Kristin's birthday that year, I gave her a karaoke microphone that she could plug into her iPad. After she opened it, she told me that there was a problem: she threw her iPad away. That led to a massive trash can and room search to find that her iPad was in fact gone. It was an attention getting action on her part, and a wake up call to us all that Kristin wasn't getting the attention and care she needed. She'd become lost in this household of chaos.
After a big fight a few weeks later between my brother and my parents, my mom caved and told Kristin that she should move in with me. Kristin agreed and within a couple more weeks, it was done. My dad handed me a fistful of files regarding all aspects of her finances and health as we were taking her suitcases out the door, and with that they passed the baton making me officially in charge of her and all her affairs in one fell swoop. My days of just getting to be her fun little sister that gave her lots of hugs and attention were over.
Although the learning curve for being her guardian was steep, some of the sweetest moments of my life arose in those first weeks and months after she moved in. Tucking her in during those first nights of transition to my house, seeing her in the middle of the night walking to the bathroom all groggy and in her pjs, playing card game after card game around our big dining room table. I was getting to know her in a way that I hadn't since we were kids and shared a room.
I was adjusting to this new adventure in parent/sisterhood, and all the while, my mom was dying.
She'd been diagnosed with Parkinson's around 7 or 8 years earlier, and since late 2020, she'd been in and out of hospitals and nursing facilities, all under special visiting restrictions due to the pandemic. Her memory was deteriorating, and each one of these traumatic trips through the healthcare system sent her mind and emotions further down a hole.
By the end of 2021, everything had gotten heavy and hard and sad. My company was running full speed ahead towards closing with the big dog that had decided to acquire us. My mom was staying in a nursing home around the corner from me, and I visited her daily when I could find an hour or so to pull myself away. Kristin was emotionally fragile and touchy, but she wouldn't talk about my mom or go with me to visit her.
The work closing happened in mid-December, and I decided to leave instead of move on to the new company. Freed from work, I had a little time to work with my husband and daughter to put together a modest Christmas celebration for my dad and sister, and we did the best we could at being festive while my mom was getting closer to her end in the nursing home. The day after Christmas, I began working at lightening speed with hospice to bring my mom home before her death.
Even though she was no longer interactive by the time we got her home, I could sense that she relaxed in the presence of her home. I certainly was more at ease with her there. My dad was overwhelmed by it all, so he hid in the basement most of the time. My brother was still away, and my daughter and husband stayed back at my house with Kristin.
But I wasn't alone there. I was blessed by a fleet of loving women from hospice and the caretaking company who'd worked with my mom for the year or so before her death. They made my mom's last days as comfortable as possible. It wasn't the family gathered around the bedside sort-of death I would have liked her to have, but it was a dignified end for her and a sacred time for me.
As 2022 started, my days were rather empty and aimless. With no work calls or emails to fill my hours, I swam in a wide open space where strangely triggered fits of emotion could flow. My sister was also pretty disoriented; my mom had always been her north star.
I had noticed how Kristin always talked about her more independent younger days and how she wanted to go off to college like my daughter, to live in a dorm. Without much else to occupy my mind or days, I researched and called around trying to find different activities or communities where she could go for the day, or maybe even a place where she could live in a dorm and have regular activities. We found a book club that was meeting online and an exercise class at a gym close by, but neither one was working out very well.
My research into possibilities for Kristin kept leading to dead ends and depressing conversations about how few options there were for older special needs adults. The most prevalent possibility in my area were small group homes, and that wasn't the right thing for Kristin. The whole point was to find an opportunity for her to have a bigger social community, and this wouldn't expand her circle very much at all. And more, it would be the luck of the draw on whether her few housemates would be a good match for her personality and needs. It just didn't feel like a viable option from my perspective.
My husband and I were talking about possibilities one day during this time period, and my husband handed me his phone to show me a place he thought looked interesting. It was more of a nursing home than what I'd envisioned, and I scoffed, "no, not something like that!"
Then, I typed something into his phone, and the first thing that popped up was the site for Marbridge. I quickly poked around on the website, and then I handed the phone back to my husband and said, quite proud of myself, "something more like this."
He took the phone, and I watched him as his eyes started to widen. "Yeah. This place looks amazing!"
I grabbed the phone back out of his hands, eager to actually take a real look. Long story short, Kristin ended up visiting there with me a month or so later, and in May of 2022, she moved in to a dorm, got a full class schedule, and began living Marbridge's slogan: A Whole New Life.
That was the great blessing of 2022.
And while that blessing was unfolding, just weeks before the springtime memorial service I'd planned for our mother, the second big loss of my life happened. My best friend since childhood, Kim, died suddenly and tragically.
That spring and summer are a blurred mix of tears and travel in my memory. I went back and forth getting my sister settled into her new life, so far away from where she'd lived all her life. I also took a road trip, reconnecting with friends from so many phases past who were close to Kim, and returned to help create a memorial service for her in the summer. It was a healing time, but I struggled at getting used to being in a world that didn't have my mom and Kim in it.
When September came, I thought that maybe I was going to get the chance to land, to catch my breath, to begin figuring out what I was going to do with the rest of my life. Before I got much traction into anything at all, my dad died in an accident in early October. And then just a couple months later, we lost our beloved dog, Jack.
Before my mother's death, I'd never lost anyone very close to me. Now, losing loved ones had become my new identity. And with my father's death also came a huge mound of new responsibilities. Both overwhelmed by the tasks and grateful for the sense of purpose, I dove in and busied myself with getting things in order.
As 2023 continued to unfold, and month by month passed without further death or tragedy, I started to feel that maybe I was in the clear. Maybe the wave of tragedies was now complete, and I was officially on the other side of the death spiral. My parents' house sold quickly and easily, and once the weather warmed, things just kept zipping along. I felt myself beginning to feel excited and optimistic, ready for new adventures, new challenges, new possibilities.
Visits to my sister had me bouncing around to different Airbnbs in Austin for over a year without finding any that felt truly comfortable. In October of 2023, I felt enough solid ground beneath me to leap, and Chris and I decided to buy a cute place near Kristin, maybe just to set up as an Airbnb that we could use anytime we wanted, or maybe we'd sell Smithbridge and use it as a temporary place to live while we figured out where we'd move next. It felt exciting to be striking out in the world - making a decision, a change, a stand for something new.
The closing on the Austin place unfolded in mere weeks, and all felt so synchronistic and guided. Even our home inspection felt wonderful. The inspector felt so familiar to both Chris and me because he reminded us so much of my ex-boyfriend, the one that introduced Chris and me forever ago. We'd just seen that old friend in the summer, after he'd heard about Kim's death. The inspector reminding us of this special person from our past gave us a warm feeling, a sense we were on the right path.
For Thanksgiving, we planned to celebrate in Austin. My daughter had relocated out west by that time, and she flew in so that all four of us could be together. Chris and I packed up a truck with spare furniture we'd claimed from my parent's house before it sold, along with some other odds and ends that we didn't need at Smithbridge, and with that, we were off.
It was a beautiful trip, and we left Austin feeling filled with optimism. Even a flat tire on our first of two long days driving back to Smithbridge didn't get us down. We just took it as a sign to ease up and added an extra day to our trip, so that we could spend our last night in one of our favorite towns: Asheville, North Carolina. And it was such a nice night there. We ate at a restaurant where we'd gone on our 20th anniversary in 2020; it had been our first trip since the start of the pandemic. During this 2023 overnight in Asheville, we reveled in the excitement of all we could create with our lives now that things seemed to be settling down.
As we made our way to Smithbridge the next day, this song played in the car during our final approach. Chris didn't say anything, but the lyrics at the start of the song began to stir him. We rode in silence for the last miles, and as we drove past the front of the house, the lighting looked eerie, but neither of us said anything. When Chris pressed the garage door opener, and the door began to open, I breathed a sign of relief without really thinking about why.
As soon as the car stopped in the garage, I hopped out and ran in to go use the bathroom.
Water coming from the ceiling, hitting my face. What the fuck?!
"Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god," I say it like it's like a mantra that I just cannot stop. I look around.
Inches of water on the floor and more spilling in through the ceiling each second. The things I'd left on the coffee table a mass of melted paper. The book I'd been reading hardly recognizable. The pictures of my parents on the table soaked through.
Chris is in the house now too. I'm still unable to stop my mantra, and I hear him scream "oh shit!" He opens the basement door, and I see him disappear behind it heading down the stairs.
I run back out to the garage. I'm wet, and it's so cold out. But I can't look at what's happening in there. I start crying and brace myself against the car. I notice Skippy is in there alone and confused. I get in the back seat next to him, still crying. I rest my head against him and just take a moment to weep. He probably needs to go to the bathroom, or just get out of the car after all day in here, so I lift him up and put him in the fenced in front yard.
It is so fucking cold. I didn't dress for this at all. I remember there is a jacket somewhere buried in the trunk, but I just can't even bother digging for it. I shiver and leave Skippy alone there in the front yard and run out to the back, to my favorite tree back there: Hope. That's what I named her during a little argument in our first years in the house after Chris suggested that maybe we cut her down. The name stuck for all of us.
I make full contact with Hope, let her hold my weight. I feel oddly warmer as I stand so close to her. It is a clear night with a nearly full waning moon, so quiet and crisp. As I face towards the woods, I sense that everything is fine, and all is exactly as it should be.
I turn back and face the house. The lighting is rather eerie from the fixtures that are hanging loose and shining into the water, but for the most part it looks rather normal. The same way it has looked so many nights before from out here.
How could it be that seconds earlier, I was in the middle of hell and everything felt so irreparably wrong, and now, I am out here and things feel peaceful and ok. I stay with Hope and just breathe.
A truck pulls into the driveway, and the headlights rouse me. I head back up, and see Chris talking to someone pulling a bunch of gear out his truck. I learn it's the fire marshal responding to our 911 call. As he and Chris go into the house, I go and get Skippy from the yard and bring him back to the car. I sit in the back with him so we can get warm together. The tears start again.
The fire marshal wearing high rubber boots and using a wooden pole turned off the electricity to the house. Chris had already shut the water off before he came, and the marshal told Chris that he was lucky to be alive. With the electricity still on, going down into all that water in the basement without any protective gear was a death wish.
Before he left, the fire marshal also told us that he thought the house was a tear down. With so much water in there, he said it would always have issues with mold and all sorts of problems. I audibly shrieked at the thought that the house would never be lived in again.
In a state of shock and overwhelm, we got things as stabilized as we could and left to stay at an Airbnb for the night. On the way, Chris told me that he had visions of a flood as he listened to Tracy Chapman sing Times Are A Changin' during those last minutes of our ride. In retrospect both of us realized there was this strange feeling that something might happen. We'd dismissed it, thinking it was just that we'd gotten so used to bad things happening.
As we reviewed how this could've happened, there was one memory in particular that was so puzzling.
Generally, we turned off the water to the house for a trip of a week or more. This being almost two weeks, as we were getting ready to pull out, him driving the truck and me the car we'd return in, I called to him and said, "did you turn off the water?"
He got out of the truck, and I joined him in the driveway.
"I didn't, actually. We just got that new whole house humidifier, and I didn't see a switch to turn it off. I don't know if it'll break it to turn off the water. And remember what that inspector said at the new house?"
I did remember, and I nodded my head. The inspector, the one who put us both at ease because he looked like our old friend, had told us that he was of the mind that you shouldn't turn off the water when you go away. He said something about how sewer gases can fill up the lines and smell up the house.
Chris was often one of those overly worried types, so I really appreciated his willingness to just let it go and trust the universe. I agreed that we should just leave the water on - nothing had ever happened before, so of course, it would be just fine.
And yet, sometime possibly as early as when we were standing there having that conversation in our driveway, the water supply line to our upstairs bathroom toilet randomly shot off and across the room, and water began to slowly fill our beloved home. By how much water had accumulated, it likely was sometime in the first days of our trip when the water began.
Never in my life have I felt as shaky as I did in the first days and weeks after the flood. It wasn't that the house was at the top of some pyramid of value for me; it just felt eternal, dependable and safe. Seeing that safe space where we'd weathered the pandemic and so many changes in such a state of destruction shook me to the core.
The remediation contractor we called said the house could be dried out and rehabilitated, so we started the process, even though we felt like we'd never live there again. We spent a little over the week in the area grabbing special items and checking on the remediation work, and it was a knife in my heart each time we visited. Mold had started growing on everything because it took days to get the drying process moving because of a weekend and the timing lag on insurance approvals. It didn't even feel safe to be in there and breathe the air. And the house was overtaken by men I didn't know or feel comfortable around, walking around like they owned the place, pulling down walls and pulling out our personal items that were too waterlogged to be saved.
Days after we were set to return from Austin, we ironically had the very last renovation we planned to do on the house scheduled: a replacement of all the old upstairs carpets. We'd waited on this last step because Jack had some incontinence issues in his last years. With him gone for months now, it felt like time for that final touch to make the house complete. Now, instead, the carpets were being ripped out by the water remediation workers, and there were much bigger jobs to handle than getting new carpets in there.
I've come to see Smithbridge as sand mandala, like the ones monks spend so much time creating in such intricate detail, and then, with a swipe of their arm, it's all scattered away. Gone forever, in a teaching that life is in the process of creating, not holding on to the thing of beauty with attachment.
But I was so incredibly attached, and I felt the pain of it in those first months after the flood. My mourning of Smithbridge merged with the morning of my mom, my best friend, my dad and Jack. I'd spent so many special times with each of them in that house.
On the way back to Austin before Christmas, we stopped in Asheville as we were passing through to meet with a couple friends and catch our breath. That was our last time in Asheville, and when Asheville flooded in September of this past year from Hurricane Helene, I felt it so deeply. It was such a familiar feeling of seeing a place I loved decimated by water, and such an odd sense of synchronicity that my last times in Asheville are on either side of discovering my own flood tragedy.
Austin gave us a warm winter and a new home to fill and settle into. Having our place there to catch us was an amazing saving grace. It gave us a pathway to move forward, build something new, a focus to help us stay in the present and experience what was there for us, instead of dwelling on what we'd lost.
We sold Smithbridge in early spring to a flipper who wanted to flip it into his own family's dream home, and then in June, after a frustrating and drawn out process, the insurance claim and final bills for the remediation services were finally closed out. What we recovered from the house was delivered to our new place in Austin, and by the end of summer, it was all behind us, like a strange dream. Even thinking about Smithbridge now, looking back to pictures, remembering little details, it feels like a fantasy. Like the amazing place we created over a decade was another dimension, and some portal opened mysteriously and sucked it up. We've seen some pictures of the rebuild by the new owners, and it really is not at all the same house.
We just crossed the anniversary of the flood a couple weeks ago. Looking back at all that's happened, I feel gratitude, not sadness. I crossed a threshold I didn't think I'd ever cross, a shift of actually not wishing that the flood had not happened. I've gained so much liberation and insight in the experience.
One thread that is still bearing so much fruit is all I've learned about trauma. Here in Austin, I found a yoga class early in the year that has been a real life changer for me. It's a very slow and restorative style class, and the teacher ends the class with a sequence that leads to involuntary shaking of the body called neurogenic tremors. The process is known as trauma release exercises, or TRE, and the discovery of it came in large part from the observation of how wild animals shake after experiencing a trauma. Scientists have discovered that shaking is a healing response that allows the animal to move past destabilizing events without carrying the trauma with them. A whole movement has blossomed in trauma therapy and somatic practices that centers around helping humans do a similar process to release stored trauma from the body.
There's an exercise that my teacher often does in class, where she tells us to tense up our whole body as much as we possibly can and then hold it along with our breath for a few seconds. Then, she tells us to release with an exhale and dump out all that tension. She says that it can help us release not only the tension we'd just created, but also release old tension that we didn't even realize we were holding, that we couldn't consciously contact and release.
This exercise feels like a metaphor for my flood. It was an increase of tension in my body, on top of the heavy load of stress and trauma I was already carrying. As I released that tension, so much else fell off with it: old patterns of behaving, anxiety, people pleasing tendencies, even personality traits that no longer felt aligned with who I'd become. So many tears that I'd never really been able to release started to flow, lost feelings and memories were able to rise to the surface.
Landing here in Austin has been different than any other transition I've experienced before. The kind people and interesting things we've found to do have changed my everyday life in a drastic way. More music and rhythm, more laughter and relaxed community experiences, more smiles and waves from strangers, more walks and sunshine. Even my relationship with Chris feels completely renewed. Realizing that our time together could've ended that night if he had been electrocuted when he went down to turn off the water flipped a switch to make me so grateful for each day we do get together, so grateful we are able to keep going on to the next adventure.
Turns out the flood was a magical culmination of everything that came before. The word that oddly comes to mind when I think of it now is generosity. In a way that I could have never imagined on the day when we first discovered the flood, it feels like one of the greatest gifts the universe ever gave me: a sort-of dramatic evaporation of all that won't serve me on the road ahead, leaving me renewed and stronger, and much closer to Home than I've ever been before.
