During a conversation about her parents’ wedding, junior Nicole Svendsen’s mother said she would show Svendsen her wedding dress once they returned to their Pacific Palisades home in April 2025. The interaction was cut short by a reminder: Their home had burned down months earlier in the Los Angeles wildfires in January 2025. Nearly all of their belongings were destroyed, including the dress Svendsen’s mother wore on her wedding night.

Multiple Archer families experience moments like this, where they suddenly recall the impact of the fires. Archer Parent Bruce Waxman overheard his daughter, Sana Waxman (’31), say that her favorite stuffed animal “died” in the fires. He was heartbroken that he didn’t have time to grab it while they were evacuating.

The Palisades and Eaton fires burned from Jan. 7-31, 2025 — one year ago. The fires took at least 30 lives and caused more than 180,000 people to flee their homes, displacing 111 Archer families. Of those Archer families, 40 homes were lost.

Svendsen said seeing videos of her neighborhood being affected by the fires felt surreal. Eventually, the reality of her childhood home burning settled in.

“I was very, very sad for, literally, four months,” Svendsen said. “Seeing everyone move past it so quickly, forgetting that I had gone through that, was definitely very hard. Seeing everyone move on with their lives, knowing that I’m still stuck behind in January.”

Bruce Waxman said realizing that his home was gone truly hit him while traveling in Hawaii with his family over the recent winter break. He recalls going on a walk early in the morning and beginning to cry.

“It was one of those first times that I was allowing myself to start feeling the grief and the mourning of the loss,” Bruce Waxman said. “It hit me hard in Maui because that’s the first time — because I’ve been so busy with work and so busy making sure that I’m taking care of my family and my wife and I are taking care of Sana — that it was the first time where I had the time to decompress and process some of this.”

Svendsen said she is often reminded of her home in little ways —  accidentally ordering a package to her home in the Palisades, for example. She is also reminded of her former neighborhood when she visits her grandparents, whose home in the Palisades survived the fire. She said if she closes her eyes, she can still see the Palisades community intact.

“It’s hard to remember the little things that you’ve lost, and you can’t go back to it,” Svendsen said. “But with time, you create new little things that you can go back to. So it’ll lessen with time.”

Jaya Srinivasan (’28) and her family moved to their new neighborhood in Encino shortly after the fires. Her mother, Kavita Srinivasan, said the shift in commutes to school for her three kids was a challenging part of adjusting. She said her family not only lost their physical home, but also the community that was the Palisades. Because her kids grew up participating in local activities and consistently visiting the same places in their neighborhood, she said losing those opportunities can be emotionally difficult.

“You build a community, right? And I think that’s really hard when you don’t have that anymore,” Kavita Srinivasan said. “It becomes harder to see neighbors every day … it’s a lot more effort to see people in your community.”

Jaya Srinivasan said losing her home required the following months to be focused on rebuilding aspects of her life, although she felt unmotivated at times due to the “aftershock” of the fires.

“It’s the biggest change we’ve ever undergone. And it just felt very distorting because it didn’t feel like real,” Jaya Srinivasan said. “It caused, for a while, a bit of a lack of motivation … not to the point where I didn’t want to do anything, but just where I felt like it was hard to like complete things to the best of my ability.”

Bruce Waxman said recovering from the emotional impacts of the fires is an ongoing process. In the beginning, he said, it was hard to process what had happened because there were many essential tasks to do at the time — finding a place to stay, calling insurance companies and wondering if the Palisades would survive the fire.

“It’s so hard for people that aren’t from the Palisades to understand the psycho drama that we’ve gone through and the trauma that we’ve gone through,” Bruce Waxman said. “People are very empathetic, and there’s been tremendous humanity, but when you sit still for a moment, or more than a moment, and you really start to take in the full impact of what’s not there anymore — it’s pretty monumental.”

Both Bruce Waxman and Kavita Srinivasan said having Archer as a constant in their daughters’ lives was crucial, considering how much was changing around them. After Jaya Srinivasan’s softball gear was lost in the fire, Archer provided her with softball equipment so she would still be able to try out for the team.

“There was a lot of warmth and acknowledgement. If you asked, people would respond and … even if I didn’t feel comfortable asking, I would ask another Archer parent, and they would reach out, and they were always responsive,” Kavita Srinivasan said. “We feel so supported by the school. In a quiet way, they’ve helped us all.”

According to Bruce Waxman, one of his family’s greatest blessings is that his daughter attends Archer.

“She was still being really active, and we made sure that she had places and spaces to go to be with her friends, so that we could go out and do what we needed to do to take care of just putting our lives back together,” Bruce Waxman said. “Archer was a huge, huge piece of that, putting [our] life back together — and allowing her to be at Night of Dance right after this happened, and to be with all the girls, and just to feel like, ‘Wow, I’m part of all this community again.'”

Jaya Srinivasan said she is grateful that she could continue attending Archer when the fires happened. Her two siblings attended local Palisades schools and were required to switch to another school when the Palisades were lost. She said losing the constancy of her neighborhood in the Palisades was difficult.

“The Palisades was the first house we had ever lived in, because we’d previously just lived all over the place, always in apartments, and nothing ever felt super permanent,” Jaya Srinivasan said. “The Palisades was actually a stable, permanent home for us. So I think having that part of my life taken away was obviously a big change, and we’re all excited for the opportunity to have it back. Even if it’s a little different, it’s the best that we can get out of the situation. So I’m excited for that.”

The Svendsen and the Srinivasan families are keen on rebuilding their original homes in the Palisades. Bruce Waxman is focusing on the new bonds he and his family have made in their new neighborhood and has found some newfound gratitude for the little things in life.

“We’re going to have a great life, we have a house, we have our lives together,” Bruce Waxman said. “I would walk in the mornings, and I’d see the sun — I’d be like, ‘Man, I am grateful.’ I’m just grateful to be alive. It’s another day, and this too shall pass.”