Sonoma’s Vintage House offers emotional support for senior fire survivors

Kelsey Maddox is taking group therapy to the community of seniors who lost it all last October.|

Emotional Rescue

Burning Sage:Weekly group support for senior fire survivors. For information, contact Kelsey Maddox, Program and Services Manager, kelsey.maddox@vintagehouse.org or the Vintage House, 996-0311.

County services: The County's mental health recovery website offers links to disaster resource guides, crisis helplines, free therapy and crisis counseling online at sonomacountyrecovers.org/mental-health-wellness.

Bilingual: A county-sponsored listening session in Spanish will be held at La Luz Center, 17560 Greger St, Sonoma, on September 5.

California HOPE: Sonoma County's program provides outreach and counseling to those affected by the wildfires. Counselors can be reached at CAHopeSonoma@petalumapeople.org, 565-4868.

As the anniversary of the October fires approaches, health care and social work professionals expect continued stress, anxiety, insomnia, anger and other signals of unresolved emotional response to the disaster.

“Post-traumatic stress for an incident like this really starts showing up after six to eight months,” said Kelsey Maddox, the programs and services manager at Vintage House senior center, and the fatigue of dealing with disaster is “going to a deeper level.”

In anticipation of such a spike in anxiety, Maddox has started a program called Burning Sage to help seniors deal with the emotional and physical disruption of the fire.

Over the past few months, some of the immediate energy and optimism that comes from community cohesion – the #SonomaStrong period – has begun to fade, giving place to disillusionment, depression and bouts of anxiety that bears a striking resemblance to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder – PTSD – a syndrome more commonly associated with war.

While the program’s name, Burning Sage, evokes the smoky hogan of a Native American cleansing ceremony, Maddox pointed out the pun. “It’s a double-entendre, since ‘sage’ is also a wise person,” he told the Index-Tribune. “The wisdom comes from being an elder.” The October fires brought out some of that elder-wisdom.

Begun in June, with hopes to generate weekly support group therapy for seniors from Oakmont to Sonoma, Burning Sage has now coalesced to a single weekly meeting in Glen Ellen. That’s where Sue Remick lives, and where she and her husband Bill lost everything they had when their Dunbar Road house burned to the ground.

They had only lived there eight years – it was their “forever home,” custom-designed and built by Bill Remick, who had spent his working life building custom homes for others. Now what he had built there, what they had built there, was gone.

The Remicks weren’t home the night the fires broke out, however, having flown down Oct. 8 in the afternoon to San Diego to see friends. “We had only been there two or three hours when got a call from neighbor saying our house was on fire.”

But it wasn’t just about property and architecture. “Younger people say, why don’t you just replace what you lost,” Remick said. “But from the standpoint of the meanings of those articles had for us, you can’t replace that. Everything brought back a memory.”

For any survivor of last October’s fires – or the ones that continue to flare up across California even now – dealing with the incineration of memories is difficult. Even for those who lost nothing, survivor’s guilt can be a burden. But for those who lost a great deal – homes, possessions, property – the losses can be devastatingly personal.

Despite the absence of New Age aromatics, the Burning Sage gatherings – initially at Vintage House, and now in Glen Ellen – Maddox says they have become a different kind of ritual, a therapeutic community with fire trauma as their common ground.

At the first Burning Sage meeting, a number of people showed up for whom the fire was not a personal loss, Remick remembered. “A lot of people came who didn’t have the experience, they were sort of coming along for the ride.” Their presence didn’t sit well with those for whom the fire was an actual trauma.

But it didn’t take long for the groups to winnow down to those who shared the experience, the loss not just of a house but decades of memory, dreams, proud moments and even sad ones. They were at a similar point in their lives, retired and getting older – and they understood each other.

“Ever since we moved here we’ve been amazed at the community and the people who lived around us,” said Remick. “We developed very strong bonds.”

“Groups are powerful,” said Maddox, 68, an experienced hospice care counselor and group facilitator, with a degree from the California Institute of Integral Studies. “In a group when you witness someone else processing their emotional frustration or pain, you realize we’re not isolated. There’s an identification that happens in group process – ‘Oh, you too!’ That identification is really bonding and healing.”

Maddox is doubly suited to the role of disaster counselor: he survived two hurricanes while living in Kauai, including the devastating Hurricane Iniki in 1992. He says that everything he had at that second was “gone with the wind.”

“A hurricane is a day of disaster and three months of cleaning up,” he said. “But with fire, there’s nothing left but ashes.”

Not only have many in the area lost their homes, property and memorabilia, they’ve also lost their neighborhood, as Remick laments. But with the incineration of so many homes in their community, that neighborhood was itself extinguished. When the Remicks decided they wanted to rebuild they did so in hopes of reviving that lost community.

But many of their Dunbar Road neighbors weren’t as fortunate with their careers, or their pensions, or their insurance company, and just couldn’t afford to rebuild.

“Many decided they’d had it and just left,” said Remick. “That community has basically disappeared.”

Change at any age can be challenging. A traumatic incident like a hurricane or an earthquake or a firestorm, can be destructive in unseen ways, said Maddox. “There are all levels of grief that people are dealing with, of their own personal identity or their role as grandparents, little epiphanies or memories – it’s really a difficult process.”

So the small group of seniors – mostly women, a fact Maddox hopes can change – gather together every week to share their struggles, chart their difficult progress, recall what they have lost and can never regain. And invariably, the tears flow.

In that context, said Remick, “It’s difficult not to show the depth of your grief.”

Emotional Rescue

Burning Sage:Weekly group support for senior fire survivors. For information, contact Kelsey Maddox, Program and Services Manager, kelsey.maddox@vintagehouse.org or the Vintage House, 996-0311.

County services: The County's mental health recovery website offers links to disaster resource guides, crisis helplines, free therapy and crisis counseling online at sonomacountyrecovers.org/mental-health-wellness.

Bilingual: A county-sponsored listening session in Spanish will be held at La Luz Center, 17560 Greger St, Sonoma, on September 5.

California HOPE: Sonoma County's program provides outreach and counseling to those affected by the wildfires. Counselors can be reached at CAHopeSonoma@petalumapeople.org, 565-4868.

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