We're supposed to be ok by now, right?

Nearly a year in, I don't think we are.

Our burning house caught on video in a documentary. This is around 4:59PM, or about 3 hours after the first house in our neighborhood caught fire. The red circles above are a before and “during” of our Italian Alder tree.

A few days ago, 9News Denver released a documentary about the Marshall Fire called Burned: Six Hours in December (link). They did a great job outlining the fire timeline (interactive link) and included police and fire-department footage I’d not seen before. Toward the end of the documentary, a police car films affected neighborhoods driving north on McCaslin, near our house. In it, houses were still burning. Some hadn’t burned, yet.

I watched closely. I’d not seen this video before. There’s something macabre in me that wants to know what it looked like when our house burned. Would it be in the video?

It was. We see a glimpse of it for maybe a second. When I saw it I paused, rewound, played, paused, rewound, and played again to be sure. I pulled the photo above from a frame in the documentary. It’s our house.

The path the cop car from Golden took in the video, including landmarks I could pick out.

At the 21-second mark of the police video (link), we can 939 Eldorado lane, our home, on fire. I know because you can see the open-space gap in the video, and right afterward a burning structure where our house was. It was 4:59PM. And our three neighbor’s houses to the left weren’t burning yet. Wow. They survived the first wave.

I’d always wondered about the sequence of things. When did our house burn? Did it go in the first wave, with some of the others, around 2:30PM? Was it later? Did the Fire Department try to save it?

Now I knew. Our house almost made it to sundown.

Why did I need to know?

An unsettling thought hit me. Why did I need to know? Shouldn’t I be ok by now? We bought a beautiful house down in Wash Park in Denver in May. It’s filled with new furniture. We hosted Thanksgiving there. Our kids like their school. My parents and brothers are close by. We started over. We should be ok.

Are we ok?

I think about the fire, and the consequences of our decisions, every day. Did we make the right decision moving our boys away from their world? Did we make the right decision leaving a community that understands our grief? Don’t we have a moral obligation to rebuild and play our part in helping Louisville put itself back together?

I don’t know.

Am I supposed to have these questions still?

I don’t know.

The Boulder County JCC is offering ten free sessions for people impacted by the Marshall Fire (details). We started sessions for our nine- and seven-year olds last week (they love it). Emily and I have decided to talk to someone, too. Our sessions start in January.

I think it’ll be a long road before we’re ok.