The fire raced up their living room walls, blew out the windows and rained shards of glass onto the couple as they fled their Eagle Rock home for their lives on Feb. 4.
A few weeks later, while staying at a hotel in nearby Pasadena, Renèe Dominique and Brian Smith were walking their dog past an old Baptist church when they noticed a poster about Ash Wednesday — the Lenten journey that culminates on Easter Sunday. The poster read: “Remember you are dust; from dust you shall return.”
“I said that is so apropos for where we are at,” said Dominique. Seeing a connection, Dominique and her partner of 28 years, Brian Smith, began attending First Baptist Church Pasadena, and have gone both Sundays since March 17, St. Patrick’s Day.
Whether it was the church’s poster about dust and ashes, the generosity of congregants and community members, or both, the couple is experiencing a self-described rebirth. It will continue at the central Pasadena church’s Easter Sunday service on March 31, the same day about 200 million Americans celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
“The resurrection is new life,” said Dominique on Tuesday, March 26. “We feel like a Phoenix rising from the ashes. The Hindus say this: ‘You are not your mind, not your body, not your thoughts. Your spirit is more than that.’ That is the message of Easter: A promise of something else.”
Symbolism, whether in poetry, religious texts, or art and architecture, kept surfacing as Dominique, 58, and Smith, 63, pointed out little things that took on bigger meaning at the apartment in Old Pasadena where they’ll be staying for the next year as they pursue rebuilding their home.
Through three, west-facing windows, the sunset’s golden glow illuminated the metal frames, forming a cross in each window. “There are three windows. Three crosses, because Jesus was hung with two other people,” Dominique said.
Out of the ashes
On a foldout table now functioning as her desk, a white lily sports a new bloom. Near it was a birthday card for Dominique that her partner dug out of the ashes, the corners charred black.
“I looked up the symbolism regarding fire. Renewal came to mind,” said Smith. “And there is renewal in our lives. There is a new chapter. We are OK. Fortunately we have a place. We have our health. So, during Easter you have that in the back of your mind.”
Later, wearing clothes donated by neighbors or purchased at thrift stores, the couple walked amidst the burned-out shell of their house. It was Dominique’s family home built by her grandfather, Gideon Dominique, who emigrated from Sweden.
As they gingerly stepped over piles of debris, amid blackened walls and blistered ceilings, they occasionally glanced down and found a charred memento. They think the fire may have started from a power surge that blew through a laptop’s electrical converter which was plugged into a living room wall outlet.
On a backyard table, Dominique flipped through paintings by John Dominique, her great uncle, most of them ruined by fire or water damage. Over the years, the place had become a storage house for her relatives who handed over scrapbooks and photos when family members passed away.
Smith pointed to his Crocs, dug out of the ashes. The heat shrunk them two sizes too small, so he used a knife to carve out the heel backstop so he could wear them again.
“It has been a real lesson in detachment from material things,” Dominique said. “This stuff doesn’t define who you are as a person. The most valuable things in my life are Brian and our dog, Kirby.”
Of angels unaware
The couple was at a Spectrum store replacing a modem and router reduced to molten blobs when out of the corner of his eye Smith saw a woman in line who, after giving Renée a hug, handed her a $100 bill.
It was just a few days after looters had robbed them of valuables the couple had dragged from their home to locked backyard sheds, only to find them broken into, their valuables gone.
“We’ve had people stealing from us at night and we have had complete strangers giving us money,” said Smith, saying it reminded him of a sermon from the church taken from the Bible passage depicting those who wanted to kill Jesus alongside those who loved and worshipped him.
“Human beings are amazing. There is this dichotomy. That’s the way the experience has been,” he said.
First Baptist Pasadena church member Kris Laske invited them to her home and said pick out what you need. Dominique chose four ottomans that are strategically placed in their apartment, one near the couch they bought from the thrift store Out of the Closet in Glassell Park. The store supports the LGBTQ+ community and is owned by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation.
When hiking in the forest a friend of Dominique’s noticed her friend, Paula Weston Solano walking by and the friend introduced her to Solano, whose Mount Washington home had burned to the ground on April 14, 2022.
Solano, who has been living in Tujunga, talked to Dominique and Smith on the trail for an hour. The chance meeting seemed more than chance.
“We feel like that was meant to be,” Solano said on Tuesday, March 26. “Like there were angels all around.”
Solano invited Dominique to a clothes circle, where women swap used clothing items. Solano, who has just begun rebuilding the home she lost, shared tips with the couple about the journey.
“I told them it feels uncomfortable to need, to be in the position where you have no choice but to accept help,” said Solano. “But you are allowing people to feel good by giving them the opportunity to help.”
Dominique has worked to raise money for Hands 4 Hope LA, a North Hollywood-based group providing after school programs for youth and parents from low-income and mostly single-parent minority households. She’s also done event planning work. Both jobs involve helping people or organizations, she said.
“We are usually the helpers,” she said. “This has been a lesson to us that we need help and also to accept it.”
Safe harbor
The couple recently met with an architect about rebuilding. They are dealing with insurance adjusters, demolition companies and others to forge a path toward rebuilding their home on the hillside property they own.
Both talked briefly about how they were fortunate to escape the fire with their dog, and without injury, except for Dominique’s singed hair. “For me it was very surreal,” said Smith. “You see an inferno inside your house and it’s like you can’t process it.”
As Dominique sat on the curb that day calling 911, a woman gave her a cup of tea. A neighbor gave Smith a jacket. “We had great kindness showered on us,” she said.
The Buddhist Tzu Chi Foundation invited them to their headquarters in San Dimas for a lunch of soup and vegetarian curry, after the Red Cross asked — and they accepted — spiritual referrals.
Another friend set up a Go Fund Me website that as of Friday has raised close to $19,000.
But finding the church was like putting them into a protected space.
“Now, we are vulnerable and the church is a safe harbor. It is a place to have community without an ulterior motive,” Dominique said. “Making time to pray, to be introspective is something very important to us right now.”
While rummaging through the burned-out wreckage of her home in Eagle Rock on Wednesday, March 27, 2024, Renee Dominique finds a pair of earrings that she had made amidst the ashes. (photo by Steve Scauzillo, SCNG).
When the couple toured their burned-out home last week, Dominique found a figurine from the Van de Kamp Bakery, where a relative once worked. She wondered aloud why some things survive fire, while mostly everything else is reduced to ashes.
As she clutched the charred figurine a little tighter, she said: “We will end up as ash at some point.”
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