Fire

I’m still having a difficult time wrapping my mind around Courtney and Evelyn’s fire experience. This morning I recalled a stage Courtney went through as a child where she was scared to death that we would have a house fire. Perhaps it was from a fire safety program at her school or from something she saw on television, but she was nearly panicked over the idea that our house would burn to the ground. Her fear, which at the time I found absolutely unrealistic, nearly came to fruition a quarter of a century later in her own home.

The fire in her apartment building began on the fourth floor, but she had no way of knowing this when the smoke alarm in her sixth floor apartment went off. She grabbed only her cell phone and entered a smoke filled hallway with her three month old daughter, my granddaughter, Evelyn.

This was on Monday so Courtney was at home with Evelyn. Had it been Tuesday or Thursday Evelyn would have been home with my niece, Taylor, the nanny and Courtney would have been at Columbia University finishing her final month of law school. But it was a Monday and Courtney was in her bathrobe breastfeeding Evelyn when their recently replaced smoke alarm began beeping.

I can only imagine the thoughts that went through my daughter’s mind at that time: annoyance, disbelief, and panic, followed by a mother’s instinct to save her child. She put her palm to the front door feeling for heat, there was none, so she exited and made her way down a stairway so dark with smoke she fell once on her hip, still protecting her child. The fifth floor was smokier than the sixth, but not knowing where the fire was she didn’t know where to go. She somehow managed to open a window in the hallway and hold Evelyn to it so she could breathe fresh air. And then my soft-spoken daughter screamed louder than she thought she could for help until New York’s finest firefighters burst onto the fifth floor, ran them down the remaining flights of stairs and into an ambulance for the hospital.

Fortunately they were not physically injured. Courtney is hoarse and is coughing up soot. Evelyn’s pediatrician gave her a clean bill of health and assured Courtney that the baby will have no traumatic memories of the fire. When Courtney was able to phone me after she was released from the hospital she kept repeating, “I thought Evelyn was going to die.” How does a parent recover from that? How does a grandparent, on the other side of the country, recover from that? I can’t close my eyes without imagining what horrors Courtney experienced in the few minutes between the smoke alarm sounding and the ambulance doors closing. I know she will never be able to forget it.

She has learned the toughest lesson of motherhood. Try as we will we can’t be sure of our children’s safety. We have to protect them and let them gradually make their way in the world. There will be illness and the first day of school and driver’s education classes and dates with boys in cars and going off to college. I pray that she never experiences anything worse than this horrific fire. I am sorry she had to learn this lesson so soon and so traumatically. I am not there now to hug them, but I will be soon. In the meantime I am saying I love you more often and giving more hugs to those who are near to me. I hope everyone does the same.