What Remains to Be Said

Here’s my identification, officer.
I was born in that house over there.
My love’s a martyr. Here’s a picture.

THE WRITER Jessica Abughattas sent me these lines on January 29, 2025, as part of her poem “Beautiful Altadena.” Two days later, the Eaton Fire, which destroyed Abughattas’s home along with some 14,021 acres in the San Gabriel Mountains, was declared officially contained. In her email, Abughattas mentioned that she and her family were in the middle of relocating to another state.

Both the Eaton Fire and the Palisades Fire—the latter razing 23,448 acres across the Santa Monica Mountains before it, too, was “contained” on the 31st—began on January 7: 22 days before Abughattas shared her poem; a year ago, today. Revisited now, the spare immediacy of “Beautiful Altadena” pushes back—it can’t have been a year. It has been.

On Monday, I spoke with a writer about the loss of his own house in Pasadena. “Honestly,” he admitted at one point, “it kind of feels like there’s nothing to say.” We sat on the phone, silently scrolling through a shared Google Doc in which he had gathered images of a house undone, insurance receipts, lists of missing items, screenshots from community support channels, building permits, thousands of words’ worth of writing—a painstaking inventory of the past year, during which there was everything and nothing to say.

He’s not alone. In “One Step Removed from Ash,” an essay mourning the loss of her mother’s home in the Palisades, Vanessa Holyoak intones Maurice Blanchot: “When all is said, what remains to be said is the disaster. Ruin of words, demise of writing, faintness faintly murmuring: what remains without remains.” A line later, Holyoak concurs in paraphrase—“The disaster marks language’s limit.” And yet, she adds, “I write from this absence, from this lack.”

In “Incendiary,” which traces the aftermath of the 1991 firestorm in Berkeley and Oakland, Charley Burlock observes that “living with grief, like living in an increasingly unlivable landscape, means having to negotiate, daily, with irretrievable befores and unimaginable afters, all condensed into an unruly now. It means building and tending to altars: finding beauty, or at least survival, in the wreckage.” 

As I write, Los Angeles is negotiating, daily, with a grief about which there is everything and nothing to say. Our city’s “unruly now” is made up of tens of thousands of individuals displaced, families forced to leave wrecked homes, schools, and workplaces, spaces in which, just over a year ago, life simply went on. It is made up of identity cards, pictures, altars, survival plans. We’ve gathered a few of these to share with you, well aware of language’s limits but hoping, even so, to find something in the wreckage—or, at the very least, to pause and acknowledge what remains without remains. Wrote Abughattas: “If only you would stop being so damn beautiful, / I could try and forget you.”

—Ellie Eberlee, Managing Editor

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Featured image: Andrew Avitt (USDA Forest Service), Edge of the Eaton Fire Near Mt Wilson, January 14, 2025. Flickr, CC0, flickr.com. Accessed January 6, 2026. Image has been cropped.