The Eaton Fire destroyed the Altadena home being rented by Meghan Daum and thus turned all her "material possessions into ash," she writes in a New York Times essay. Since then, "I've had to accept more help in more forms from more people—friends and strangers alike—than in the entire preceding 50-plus years of my life." And it hasn't been easy: Daum explains that she had self-reliance drilled into her by her parents, and her first instinct was to reject the offers of help. When friends tried to set up a GoFundMe page for her, she found the idea "unseemly" and stopped them. But the offers kept coming, and Daum (a writer and podcaster) grudgingly put up a "tip jar" on her Substack page.
This part of the ordeal has been a revelation to her—the need for people to lend a hand, particularly people in her neighborhood whose homes survived the fires:
- "I will undoubtedly learn countless lessons from this disaster ... (but) the greatest so far has been the realization that help plays by the same rules as love. In order to give it, you must be willing to accept it. In accepting it, you open the valve for even more. I wish my parents and grandparents had been able to learn this lesson. Their lives would probably have been better for it."
(Read the
full essay.)