You May Still Be Grieving the Eaton Fire (Even If You Think You’ve Moved On)

Maybe you’ve stopped checking the burn map. Maybe your insurance came through, or your house was fine, or your block has been mostly rebuilt and you’ve settled into whatever the new normal looks like. You’ve stopped talking about it as much. The conversations with neighbors have moved on. You’ve moved on.

And yet.

Something isn’t quite right.

The wind catches you off guard. You change the channel when there’s footage from a fire anywhere else in the country. You feel tired in a way that sleep isn’t fixing. You snapped at your partner over something small and felt the edge of something much bigger underneath. You drove past a particular intersection last week and had to pull over for a minute. You scrolled past a one-year-anniversary post in January and felt — what? Annoyance? Numbness? Some small lurch you couldn’t name?

If any of this sounds familiar, you may not actually be past it.

You may have just put it away.

There’s a difference.

The Grief That Doesn’t Look Like Grief

Most people, when they think of grief, picture the obvious version: crying, sadness, the inability to function. That’s grief in its acute form. But grief in its longer-term form — especially after a community-level trauma like the Eaton Fire — often doesn’t look like grief at all.

It looks like a persistent low-grade fatigue.

A shorter fuse than feels like you.

Trouble concentrating on things that used to be easy.

A subtle pulling-away from people, or a sudden need for more contact than usual.

Sleep that’s adequate in hours but not in quality.

A faint background hum of dread that doesn’t have an obvious source.

The occasional inexplicable cry in the car.

A reluctance to make plans more than a few weeks out.

Difficulty enjoying things you used to enjoy, in a way that’s just a little off — not depression-level, but not quite right.

The strange experience of feeling fine all day and then being unable to fall asleep.

This is what carrying unprocessed grief looks like in the body of someone who has otherwise gotten on with their life.

Why “Moving On” Often Means “Putting Away”

After a major event, most of us are not given the time, space, or psychological permission to actually grieve. We have insurance to deal with. Kids to keep stable. Jobs that didn’t pause. Conversations that grew tired of being about the fire. Communities that needed to rebuild and didn’t have the capacity to keep talking about loss for as long as the loss actually lasted.

So we put it away. Not consciously, exactly — more reflexively. We learn to function around the thing rather than through it. We tell ourselves we’re “doing well, considering.” We find ourselves saying we’ve moved on, and we mean it, and it’s true in the ways that matter for getting through a Tuesday.

But the grief doesn’t disappear when we stop attending to it. It goes underground. And underground grief tends to surface in small, surprising ways — the irritability, the fatigue, the inability to fully relax, the sudden tearfulness in response to something seemingly unrelated. The body keeps the score the mind decided it was done with.

This isn’t a moral failure or a sign that something is wrong with you. It’s how human nervous systems handle being asked to keep going through events that would, in a less demanding world, take years to integrate.

The Things That Are Actually Grief

If you live in Pasadena, Altadena, or Sierra Madre — or any of the surrounding neighborhoods that watched and waited and worried — you’ve been carrying things you may not have named as grief.

The way you take a different route home now, automatically, without thinking about why.

The way the smell of a backyard fire pit makes your shoulders rise toward your ears.

The way you can’t quite watch news about other fires anywhere — Northern California, Canada, Australia — without scrolling past quickly.

The way Santa Ana wind season feels different now, and you didn’t realize how much.

The way certain trees that aren’t there anymore still surprise you, sixteen months in.

The way you bought new things to replace what you lost and still don’t feel at home with them.

The way the photos on your phone now have an emotional charge.

The way the photos on your phone now have a before and an after.

The way your relationship with your kids, or your spouse, or your neighbors, shifted somehow in the recovery and never quite shifted back.

These are not small things. These are grief, doing what grief does when it doesn’t get a place to land.

What Anniversary Reactions Are Trying to Tell You

The first anniversary of the fire passed in January. Many people noticed something — a tightening, a sadness, a flicker of dread, a memory that wouldn’t quite leave them alone for a few days. Then the season changed and the anniversary feeling went underground again, and life resumed.

These reactions tend to repeat. Year two, year three, year five. They get less acute over time, especially if the underlying material has been processed. They get more diffuse and harder to recognize if it hasn’t.

What anniversary reactions are doing is giving you a yearly invitation to come back to the work. They’re not pathology. They’re your nervous system flagging that there’s something here still asking to be heard.

You don’t have to take the invitation every time it comes. But it might be worth asking yourself, the next time the wind picks up or you find yourself crying in the car, whether the part of you that put the fire away is ready to take a look.

What to Do If You Recognize Yourself Here

If reading this has touched something in you — a feeling, a memory, a quiet oh — you have a few options.

You can keep going as you have been. Many people do, and life goes on, and the reactions soften over time even without intervention. There’s no obligation to address everything you’re carrying.

You can talk it through with people who lived it with you. Sometimes naming the experience to someone who understands is enough. The Pasadena and Altadena communities have built remarkable peer support networks — informal and formal — and connection often does what nothing else can.

Or, if the grief feels bigger than the conversations are reaching, you can work with a trauma-trained therapist. EMDR — Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing — is one of several research-supported approaches for helping the brain integrate experiences that got stuck in their original, unprocessed form. It’s specifically designed for the kind of grief and trauma that the conscious mind has tried to move past, but that the body is still holding.

You don’t have to be in crisis to start. The people who tend to benefit most from this kind of work are often the ones who functioned well during the worst of it — and now have the bandwidth to actually process what was happening underneath the functioning.

A Few Things People Wonder

Is it normal to still be affected by the fire this long after?

Yes. Year two and year three are when many people first notice that the experience hasn’t fully integrated. The acute phase used your survival systems; the integration phase needs different conditions, and those often only become available later.

My reactions don’t seem “big enough” to need help. Should I still consider talking to someone?

The threshold for trauma-focused work isn’t severity — it’s whether something is still affecting you. Quiet, persistent reactions can be addressed just as effectively as dramatic ones, and often more efficiently because the nervous system isn’t in active overwhelm.

What’s the difference between grief and trauma?

Grief is the response to loss. Trauma is the response to overwhelm. After a wildfire, most people carry both — the loss of what was, and the overwhelm of what happened. They can be worked with separately or together.

Will the wind, the smell of smoke, or anniversary dates ever stop affecting me?

For most people, yes — to varying degrees. Caring about fire risk is appropriate; being hijacked by reminders of fire is the part that softens with trauma-focused work. The goal isn’t to forget. It’s to remember without being thrown.

A Quiet Reminder

If you read this far, something probably resonated. That’s worth listening to.

You don’t have to keep moving past something that’s still here. There’s no failure in noticing it now. There’s no too late. Grief and trauma respond to attention at any distance from the original event — and many people find that addressing it years out, when life is quieter and they have more capacity, is actually easier than trying to do it in the rubble.

If you’d like to talk about whether trauma-focused therapy, like EMDR, could help, my practice, Thomas Blake Therapy, is located at 210 S Orange Grove Blvd in Pasadena, with virtual sessions available throughout California. I work with clients across the greater Los Angeles area, including Altadena, Sierra Madre, South Pasadena, San Marino, Eagle Rock, Highland Park, Glendale, Burbank, Silver Lake, and Atwater Village.

You don’t have to come in knowing what you want to work on. Sometimes I think I might still be grieving the fire is exactly the right place to start.

EMDR Therapy for Eaton Fire Grief in Pasadena and Altadena

Thomas Blake Therapy offers EMDR therapy for unresolved grief and trauma in Pasadena, Altadena, and across the greater Los Angeles area. If the Eaton Fire is still here in ways you didn’t expect, you don’t have to keep moving past it alone. Book a free 15-minute consultation