How to cope when disasters strip away pieces of the past

They are the possessions that tell your story: the photos of old friends and relatives. The ring your mom left you. The hand-knit Christmas stockings. Your grandfather’s secretary desk and the letters inside.

When disasters strike, these artefacts of your own rich history might be the toughest belongings to lose.

“It still hits me now — a picture of my dad that my grandmother painted, which was hanging on the wall by the piano,” says Martha Tecca, whose house in Lyme, New Hampshire, burned to the ground 10 years ago. She and her husband had been on a hike and lost everything but the clothes they were wearing.

“The things that are sort of generational — those are the pieces you feel worst about at the time,” she says.

Of course, lost things are just things. Those who mourn them are conscious that others are suffering far worse from catastrophes, including the wildfires, hurricanes, floods and other natural disasters that have struck with greater intensity in recent years.

Still, these family heirlooms, mementoes and handmade relics are irreplaceable. How do you cope with losing them — and, perhaps, recapture some of the lost memories?

BE PATIENT

“Grief is the natural response to loss, whatever that loss is,” says Mary-Frances O’Connor, a psychology professor at the University of Arizona and author of The Grieving Body: How the Stress of Loss Can Be an Opportunity for Healing. “Objects are often cues for our memory, our habits, for our culture, our social interaction.”

And it takes time, she says, “to understand: What does it mean for our life that this thing is gone?”

There are so many immediate, practical tasks to attend to after a catastrophic event — finding a place to live, filing insurance claims — that it might take a while to really absorb the loss of mementoes.

In Barbara Lambert’s case, she gave herself permission to stop searching for everything that might have been lost, reluctant to stir up sadness over things she hadn’t looked at in a long time, anyway. Lambert’s Larchmont, New York, home was gutted by the remnants of Hurricane Ida in 2021.

She grabbed documents, jewellery and medications as the waters rose around her legs. But the flood destroyed relics like scrapbooks, old Playbills from Broadway shows, ticket stubs and her son’s grade-school art.

“It’s very overwhelming, devastating, but you realise what you really need to get through life,” she says.

LOOK TO COMMUNITY

Jenny Mackenzie’s home in Peacham, Vermont, was destroyed along with half her family’s belongings in the floods created by the remnants of Hurricane Beryl in 2024. While she was able, over time, to find and restore items like her daughters’ stuffed animals in the debris, the toughest loss was a handmade canoe she had received as a college graduation present. She found it two weeks later in shards along the river.

Were it not for friends and neighbours, she “would have walked away” from the mud-filled house without trying to retrieve much. But dozens of people turned up to help. A neighbour came and dug up what was salvageable of her beloved garden beds, since replanted. Other neighbours spent days rescuing and restoring furniture. Picture “over 60 people shovelling mud and passing our possessions across the river”, she recalls.

Natural disasters often affect entire communities, O’Connor notes, so “this is a shared loss”.

“Our shared response builds meaning and memorialises,” she says.

Tecca said friends around the country sent photos to help fill the gaps in her collection, unsolicited. One friend got Tecca and her husband new copies of their college diplomas.

“In terms of things, we ended up getting more than we lost,” she said.

Jack Pitney and his wife were at Toys R Us with their toddler when a mudslide slammed into their Glendale, California, house in 2005. They came home to find his playroom buried, and with it, all his toys.

“The only one he had left was in his hand: It was the one we had just bought,” Pitney says. “It was a big deal. For a two-year-old, there is no such thing as an unimportant toy.”

Friends and colleagues brought toys from their own homes, helping to distract his son from what had happened.

Remember, it’s not the things, it’s the stories.

Personal items matter because of the histories behind them, but they are not the only way to tell those tales.

Associated Press