From the Middle East to California, tragedies remind us what it’s like to lose a home

A Palestinian man sits amid the destruction in the Shujaiya neighbourhood of Gaza City this month. AFP

Every month for almost 20 years, I have made a payment to the accounts department of a storage facility in the south-east of England.

The transaction, which through the grinding gears of inflation and rising costs now amounts to Dh500 ($140) a month, is related to the safe-keeping of a few boxes of personal effects recovered from the house fire my father died in nearly two decades ago.

The property had been owned by my parents for more than 30 years when the fire took hold. After it was extinguished, a chunk of what I knew was gone. I’d lost one of my parents and the house I had spent most of my childhood in.

The news cycle this past week has been filled with distressing pictures and harrowing testimonies from the wildfires in California, provoking neural connections and stirring my own memory bank. To this day, anytime there is a major fire anywhere in the world, my gut reaction is that I have some small fragment of knowledge about how that feels for those affected.

In our own story, my brother and I spent days sifting through the fire-damaged house and making swift judgments about what could be saved and what was lost. We ordered a succession of rubbish skips as we set about clearing the smoke and fire damaged contents of the house. Each container was bigger than the last.

We had to get rid of the better part of everything. Those few boxes that are still in storage contain what we could reasonably salvage from the house. The so-called “sadmin” (sad administration or paperwork that has to be completed after the death of a close relative) related to both the fire and my father’s death stretched on and on.

For years we’ve said that we should divide up the remaining effects between us. It makes sense to do so. The material value of what’s now locked up in a nondescript warehouse on a trading estate in England was outstripped years ago by the cost of storing these items.

But the other currency those possessions represent - our shared past, our collective history as a family, our memories - is next to impossible to accurately price. And so, the payment is collected every month and the boxes go untouched for another day, another month, another year. The sunk costs sink further. It is an informal tax on personal loss that shows no signs of having an expiry date, nor is it a tax I want to avoid.

As a metaphor for grief and loss, the boxes in the storage facility are surprisingly apt: memories and emotions that have been packed and locked up in darkness, neither fully raw nor entirely processed.

We were also fortunate. The house was insured and the insurers treated us with dignity. At least we could recover something, because life provides multiple reminders that no one has a monopoly on grief and there is no geographical or logical cap on misery.

This two-week-old year has already been full of sadness and challenge for many. The long-running inability to get a ceasefire deal done in Gaza, which looked like it was finally agreed on Wednesday evening only to hit a further obstacle on Thursday, means that thousands have died and hundreds of thousands more have been displaced or injured since the war began in October 2023. More than 85 per cent of homes in the enclave have been destroyed or damaged in the past 15 months.

Even the hope that Syria is entering a new era following the overthrow of the Assad regime is tempered by the reality of what exactly is left behind, as Syrian Olympic swimmer Yusra Mardini told The National last weekend, when asked about what she planned to do when she makes her first trip back to her home country in more than a decade.

“I am going to see her [my grandmother]. And then I’m going to see my 100 per cent destroyed home … destroyed in the first year of the war,” she said.

In Los Angeles, fires have claimed at least 25 lives and wreaked havoc on the future of millions in California since last week. The story of the fire-wrecked Al Taqwa Mosque in Los Angeles is one of thousands that will and have been heard. The statewide reconstruction bill already extends to many billions of dollars, although who pays for rebuilding is an open question that seems likely to end in misery.

The in-state US insurance market was described as “creaking” by The Economist this week in a piece that detailed how insurers have either stopped selling new policies or left the market altogether. Alternative plans designed to bridge the gap left by those departing insurers have created deep crevasses of underinsurance or none.

With fires still active, winds changing direction and firefighters battling blazes around the clock, no end is in sight for those affected in California. About the only certainty is that communities will need to support one another today, tomorrow and the day after. The road ahead will be difficult. Grief and loss are often impossible to process evenly.