Melissa Rivers reflects on losing her home in LA wildfires: 'No one has time to wallow'
After losing her home a week ago to the Los Angeles wildfires, Melissa Rivers is falling back on her parents’ determined nature and her own dark sense of humor to weather a “surreal” situation.
“For me and probably most people, we still just can't get our heads around it,” says Rivers, 56, whose house in Santa Monica was among many destroyed by flames in the past seven days. “I do find moments where I am laughing, and then you look around and you see that your life is reduced to a couple of tote bags and a couple of Macy's bags.”
But “I just keep looking forward," she tells Paste BN. "That's what's keeping me sane.”
While the TV personality is one of numerous celebrities who’ve lost their homes to the fires, “it's an entire community, a small city gone. An entire town gone,” Rivers says.
Last week, she and fiancé Steve Mitchel “had started to get organized” when the warnings came about the Palisades fire and they needed to move quickly to evacuate.
“Everyone keeps asking: How long did we have? Honestly, I have no idea. You're just going through your mental checklist: passports, paperwork, medications, dog food, cat food. There's just a lot going on,” says Rivers, who managed to save a few important keepsakes including late mom Joan Rivers’ Emmy, a photo of her late dad Edgar Rosenberg, and a drawing Joan did of Melissa and her son, Cooper Endicott.
She's had to move three times in the last week. The first night, she and Mitchel sheltered at her 24-year-old son's apartment, where he had just started moving in with some school friends but only had a surfboard and a handful of clothes: “Literally, like no towels, no sheets.”
Then the three of them moved into a packed hotel but when that had to be evacuated, they relocated to a business friend’s property (which a tenant had fortuitously just moved out of) that was a safe distance from the fires. Although their cat is with them, Rivers’ dogs are still staying at a friend’s house.
“I truly don't believe that anyone who is not here and who has not gone through this can comprehend what it's like. And I'm fully now hitting angry,” Rivers says. “I have had two cries. One was about five minutes, one was about 40 minutes. I don't have time for it. No one has time to wallow.”
That last bit is a nod to an inspirational quote from her mom which Rivers shared to Instagram on Monday: “You can’t change what happened. So have a little wallow, feel very sorry for yourself, and then get up and move forward.” Rivers is also “relying very heavily” on lessons from her father and taken to heart a family motto inspired by Winston Churchill. “When you find yourself in hell, keep walking,” Rivers says. “And I am my parents' daughter.”
“That is what I am doing. I'm finding that, strangely, comforting other people and checking on other people is helping me. Because I think it doesn't allow me to think about myself. And at one point, I will have to,” she adds with a laugh.
River is “not allowing myself yet to look over my shoulder,” though she realizes “we are going to have to go in and go through the rubble. People have been sort of hiking into the area, but the ground is still so hot you can't get really near anything. So we chose not to do that because my instinct is going to be to run into it and start looking for things. We've decided we're just going to wait.
“We don't need to stand there and cry right now when there's nothing we can do.”