A Personal–Professional Experience of Losing My Home to Wildfire: Linking Personal Experience with the Professional Literature

This article reports on the author’s personal–professional experience of losing a home to wildfire. The article is presented as a self-conducted narrative case study. The author used for narrative raw data 400,076 words from her blog-text that covered the period from the evening of the fire (June, 28, 2012) through 2 year and 3 months post-fire (September, 2014). Thirteen themes were selected based on frequency (>10 %, n = 7) and salience (n = 6). The results echo the extant literature on disaster recovery. The themes greater than 10 % included: the presence of and guilt induced by victim blaming; the overwhelming emotional and logistical aspects of property loss; concerns about both economic and financial issues; a need for understanding a “normal” recovery trajectory; interconnections of community and individual recovery; forced redefinition of the self and the importance of recognizing closure as elusive and multifaceted. Themes selected for salience included the importance of privacy; the difficulty of rapid schema development; lack of knowledge as to how to engage in ritual greetings; the negative effects of disclosure on others; the importance of having a federal disaster declaration; and that anniversary date anticipation exceeded the anniversary itself. The author concludes that resilience and psychological equilibrium are attainable, particularly with counselling and social support. The author also calls for more research on “normal” recovery, particularly process-oriented research that helps define the trajectory of individuals and families who struggle but survive disasters without significant post-disaster pathology.