Rising From the Ashes
Phoenix by Lisa Congdon
In my home hangs an art print by Lisa Congdon entitled Phoenix. I purchased it for the first home I made for myself and my daughters after separating from my co-parent. Always rising in her portrait of upward flight, Phoenix moved with me three years later to my next home in Pacific Palisades. That lovely cottage of a structure represented a more steady, practiced version of our two-household family.
Just over two years later, Phoenix struggled in the thick smoke of that winter’s Palisades Fire. She hung over the ashy freeze frame of my life after I evacuated on the morning of January 7, 2025.
A few days later, when I hitchhiked past a national guard checkpoint and begged my way into a precious ten-minute police-supervised visit to my home, I raced to fill a large suitcase with precious artifacts. Phoenix was piled into that bag along with a few of my children and my other personal treasures.
Although the house I was renting remained standing, the structure was uninhabitable, and the contents were significantly smoke-damaged. What I had painstakingly made a home for my daughters and me was undone overnight. We were displaced for five months before I was able to secure a new lease. Offering more day-to-day comfort than hotels, most of my daughters’ time was spent at their father’s house. The fraction of time I shared with them was relegated to hotel rooms and restaurants. In the midst of this, only three weeks after the fire, my father died.
Such was the state of my life as I was thrust into navigating an insurance claim for my smoke-damaged belongings. My process was plagued by rotating adjusters, shifting requirements, and delays that felt tactical. The constellation of loss and uncertainty, coupled with the gruesome dehumanization of the insurance company’s practices, coalesced in me as sustained rage and hopelessness.
Phoenix waited in a paper bag in a corner of my partner’s apartment. I crumbled and stumbled in every direction, and my nervous system channeled a deep grove of fight mode in the insurance matter. My fight was so loud that I deafened myself. The less I could hear, the less I understood about my circumstances, and the lonelier I felt.
As a divorce coach and mediator, I work with people with profound losses to grieve – their idea of a person they trusted or of the durability of marriage, a sense of home cultivated for their children, or a wide net of connections that might shrink. However, my ability to support could not be turned inward to illuminate the darkness of my own grief. Its layers distorted my listening and lens for problem-solving in the manner I needed for my personal life.
The practical burdens were immense — hotel arrangements in a city filled with displaced families, a dozen rejected rental applications, keeping my coaching practice alive, and at the heart of everything, parenting my children in whatever small way the circumstances would allow. While I was “handling it,” inside of me, something dark was happening. My nervous system was inflamed. My thinking was narrowed. My lifeforce was eroding.
On an evening in March, I reached a breaking point. Before the fire, I had bought tickets to take my daughter to a sports event. When the date arrived, we kept the plan, and I collected her at my co-parent’s house. I was a bundle of frayed nerves covered with human skin. Desperate to savor the few hours I would have with her, my anxiety hijacked my brain. Ultimately, my desperation interfered with the engaged, connected presence I strive for as a mother. When I dropped her off after, I was flooded with a deep sense of inadequacy and sadness. After returning to where I was staying, the sadness shifted from heavy to black. I was losing any glimmer of a path out of my personal darkness.
Just when I became unsure of the source of my next breath, an oxygen mask arrived. It was in the form of help with the defeating burden of my insurance dispute.
I was connected with a man-shaped hero named Ross Auslander. Ross is a public insurance adjuster. He helps insureds in situations like mine with the procedural weight and nuance of navigating the system. I engaged Ross for practical help and found the heart, mind, and guiding partnership of the very best kind of coach.
Ross began with empathy and continued to employ it tirelessly. He validated my frustration without escalating it. He normalized the insurer’s approach without excusing it. He matched my no-nonsense, profanity-laced cadence, making our talks the antidote to my possibly feeling hysterical or ignorant.
Working with Ross did not eliminate the challenge. Progress was slow. A settlement only began to trickle toward me more than a year after the fire. What mattered was that I was no longer alone inside a maze.
Initially, in my intense fear and frustration, slowing down felt counterintuitive. However, I had been rushing for months and getting nowhere. In my collaboration with Ross, slowing created steadiness. Steadiness created strategy. Strategy created movement.
A year later, my family is settled into our current home. Phoenix has taken her place high on a wall visible throughout much of the house. I’ve always seen Phoenix as triumphant, even defiant. Now her reliable rising also feels accurate.
Rising is not explosive. It is incremental. It listens before it launches. It looks wide and considers its goal, its focus. It moves with intention and measures out its unstoppable power. It might require the shoulders of others to steady itself as it looks for a path up and out.
As a mother, professional, and woman who has rebuilt more than once, I see this: we are not meant to navigate stern systems, deep grief, and unsettling fear alone. The rise benefits from the support of trusted partners.
- This one’s for you, Ross.
- And thank you, Lisa Congdon, for generously allowing me to publish your work with this piece.