Kristy Kelly: When your knees buckle
A house fire will break you.
It doesn’t just take everything you own. It takes the memories of scrubbing crayon off every surface and digging Play-Doh out of the carpet. Never again will you walk down hallways lined with slightly crooked photos where you once stepped on Legos at two in the morning. There will never again be tangible evidence of your children’s handprints at that age, left behind on a wall, a table, or a door.
It’s just gone.
That kind of emotional devastation changes your attachment to things for the rest of your life.
There should be some cosmic balance in the world. A universal scale that says my little girl, who survived an apartment fire, a house fire, and a trailer fire, should never have to live through another one as an adult with her own children.
There is anger in me that I don’t know what to do with or where to put it, because there is no one to blame. No one did anything wrong.
My daughter took pictures of everything. Her walls were lined with photographs she had taken with her camera, which she also no longer has, capturing every moment of her children’s lives.
Probably because she never got to see her own.
When she called to tell me her house was on fire, I heard it in her voice. I can’t fully explain it. It was a complete and terrible acceptance that there was nothing she could do or say that would change the reality unfolding in front of her.
It shattered my heart to hear that sound come out of her mouth.
The world isn’t fair. There is no balance. Tragic things happen to people all the time.
When my grandchildren arrived, smelling of ash and covered in soot, we prepared them for bed. I put their tent in the living room, and the four-year-old called it her “safe-sleep space.” We listened as each one shared their version of watching their house burn down. There is something especially traumatic about hearing a five-year-old tell you that all her toys “got gone.”
Who do you rage at when the truth is simply life?
You’re mad at life. At circumstance. At nothing.
And then Kinston happened.
I may deck the next person who says something ugly about this town to my face.
While I was having an emotional breakdown, every freaking person I know stood up and asked what we needed. It was instant. I blinked, and someone had something.
Some of the first items we received were books, and I couldn’t even go out to take them in person because I was already crying. Books, which are so very important to me, were among the first things someone thought to give my grandchildren.
It burst the rage I couldn’t let go of. It was just gone.
While I try to be a good person, I have never done anything to deserve the outpouring of support my family is receiving. I am humbled beyond words. Apparently, I was the last person to realize that I’d built a family here.
There is a difference between saying work is like family and being a family that works together.
After a long, long week, I was taken to lunch. On the way back, we started driving in the wrong direction, so I asked where we were going.
We were going to Walmart to buy my grandchildren what they needed.
The tears came, but that is a moment I will never forget. Here, in the middle of a tragedy that wasn’t technically mine but had broken me anyway, were two women taking me shopping for children they knew well enough to understand which clothes, styles, and items they would prefer.
Like family.
The fact that they were right in their assessments meant they were close family.
I don’t think I understood what that meant before.
A house fire doesn’t have to break you completely if you learn to lean.
My daughter is walking with her head a little higher today, and that awful deadness in her voice has started to lift.
There are no checks and balances in life. Sometimes it is simply unfair.
And maybe that can be survived, because there are people in this world who will stand shoulder to shoulder with you when your knees buckle, simply because they want to.
A GoFundMe has been created to help my daughter, Hunter and her children begin rebuilding after the fire. Those who would like to help can donate here.
