The Gift of Knowing She Wasn’t Alone
Deborah thought she knew what she had lost when the Eaton Fire destroyed her home. She was wrong.
For more than six decades, Deborah’s Altadena house had been the place four generations of her family could always return to. It was where children grew up, grandchildren played, family gathered and anyone who needed a place to land knew there was a door they could walk through. It was home in the deepest sense of the word.
Deborah was 9 years old when her mother bought the house in 1961. The family moved in just two days before her 10th birthday, and Deborah grew up believing the house was a birthday present.
Decades later, she would make sure that gift continued for the generations that followed, eventually purchasing the house from her parents, who remained and were cared for in that same home. Years back, Deborah and her son, Daryl, began restoring it little by little. Her son even left his job for two years to help clean, repair and transform the property. Mother and son poured themselves into the effort, turning it into their shared passion project.
Though it had been the center of activity for her family before, the remodeled home brought new life to her children, grandchildren, nephews and friends. Its yard was alive with turtles, ducks and rabbits. There were jasmine-scented evenings, parrots and nightingales, neighbors walking their dogs and stopping to talk. Deborah’s oldest son David, called it the family “homestead.” Deborah called it security.
Then, in January 2025, the Eaton Fire took it all.
“My whole life burned up,” Deborah says. The house was gone. So was her art, her writing and family heirlooms passed down from her grandparents and great-grandmother. But some of the hardest things she lost could not be packed into boxes in the first place. It was the routine and ordinary life that her home offered that she missed. The familiar sounds. The familiar faces. The evenings outside with neighbors. The feeling that tomorrow would look much like today. And, most painfully, the certainty that, from the age of nine, she had always known where home was.
For the first time in her life, Deborah didn’t know what came next.
The insurance payout was not enough to rebuild. Though her son had construction experience and could do much of the work himself, the process could take years they simply did not have.
The family considered everything from putting a trailer on the plot to rebuilding the only thing they could afford – a tiny home – a fraction of the home she grew up in. At one point, Deborah even wondered whether she would have to sell the property and leave the community—and the family she had spent her life keeping close.
She had always been independent. Asking for help was not something that came naturally.
But the fire left Deborah with little choice. And that is when something unexpected began to happen. People showed up.
Neighbors checked on one another. Some were longtime friends; others were people Deborah barely knew. They shared information, offered encouragement and helped one another navigate the uncertainty that followed the fire.
Some of those neighbors eventually connected Deborah with San Gabriel Valley Habitat for Humanity and encouraged her to apply for help. Slowly, what had seemed impossible began to take shape. Her insurance proceeds, grants, SGV Habitat’s support and the generosity of its partners each became part of a path forward.
Could this be possible, she wondered? Could SGV Habitat clear the way for her family and give them a future to build toward?
The day that Deborah learned that SGV Habitat could make her dream of rebuilding possible felt remarkably like the day, at age nine, when she learned she was getting a new home – a birthday wish come true! And the icing on the cake was the possibility of a four-bedroom home rather than the three-bedroom home the family had originally hoped to rebuild. That extra room would mean something profound. A grandchild with special needs could have a room of his own, while the other children could have space of their own, too. For a family whose home had once been a refuge for everyone, it felt like that refuge was beginning to return.
Daryl says the family now stays on speed dial, sharing every update and celebrating every step of progress since hearing the news from SGV Habitat. Some of the grandchildren are already asking when they can pick up a hammer and join the process. There is laughter again. There is anticipation. There is hope. But somewhere along this journey, Deborah realized that rebuilding the house was only part of what was happening.
The fire had taken away the place where she felt she belonged. In its absence, she discovered something she had somehow overlooked all those years: she belonged to a community, too.
People she knew. People she barely knew. Friends. Former coworkers she calls her “work family.” Family members. Neighbors. SGV Habitat staff, volunteers, partners and donors.
They kept showing up.
Above are paintings created by homeowner Deborah, inspired by her home and her experience during the Eaton Fire. Through her artwork, Deborah reflects on the place she called home and the impact of the fire, capturing both the memories of what was and the emotions of this life-changing experience.
And for someone who had spent a lifetime believing she needed to handle things herself, that realization was almost as life-changing as the prospect of rebuilding. “I had a village that I didn’t know I had,” she says. That may be the most enduring gift to come from such a devastating loss.
Because Deborah is no longer measuring home only in walls, windows and rooms.
She is measuring it in people. In the neighbor who reached out. The friend who helped. The family member who answered the phone. The organization that found a way forward when she could no longer see one. The volunteers and partners whose work turned hope into something tangible.
She thinks of it as a pebble dropped into a pond. One act of kindness creates a ripple. Then another. And another. The ripple that began when Deborah lost her home has traveled farther than she ever could have imagined. Now it is carrying her toward a groundbreaking.
Toward a new front door. Toward boxes being packed and grandchildren waiting for their chance to pick up a hammer. Toward home.
Deborah is already envisioning the first day she returns. The party she imagines will become a cherished chapter in her family’s history—a celebration filled with laughter in the yard, stories passed down through generations, and the simple joy of being surrounded once again by the people who make a house feel like home.
And five years from now, Deborah sees trees and plants filling the yard, with her family gathered around her. She sees the place she worked so hard to preserve for future generations once again becoming a refuge—a place where children can grow up knowing they will always have somewhere to go.
The house will be new. The memories will be different. But perhaps home will mean even more than it did before. Because after losing everything, Deborah has learned something she never expected to learn at this stage of her life:
She was never alone.
And now, as SGV Habitat and its partners help her family rebuild better than before, they are not simply putting walls back around a piece of land. They are helping restore a promise—a promise that began with a little girl moving into a new home just before her 10th birthday more than 60 years ago and continued through every generation that found safety there. A promise that, after the fire, nearly disappeared.
But didn’t.
Because a home can burn.
A community can rebuild.
And sometimes, when you finally have to ask for help, you discover the greatest gift was waiting there all along.
A village.
“I feel safe again,” Deborah says.
