The events since the Fourmile Canyon fire nearly two years ago have been sad and emotionally overwhelming. That fire not only destroyed my house, but the houses of 168 of my mountain neighbors, including 10 of my most immediate neighbors.

As hundreds of Colorado families start rebuilding their lives after this summer's fires, I'm reminded of the process. It's hard enough shopping for socks, sport coats, shoes, jeans, coats, t-shirts and underwear at the same time. But if you add dishes, silverware, pots and pans, spatulas, lamps, clocks and furniture, it quickly becomes a huge burden. And I'm not even talking about searching for a place to temporarily live, or looking for a new place to buy, which we also had to do. Add to that list replacing bedding, medications, dog food, a computer, driver's license, credit cards — well, you get the idea.

At 20 it would have been challenging but fun. At a later station in life (over 20), it felt like a lot of work, and there was no fun in it at all.

But there was healing in it. Buying a dozen books did not replace my library, but it was a beginning, and it made me feel a little bit more myself, and a little less like a homeless refugee. Same with replacing my eyeglasses, Roni's car (which became a skeleton) and lamps, among other things.

So all of this got me to thinking about how we heal from major loss or calamity. What is it that helps us cope with life's disappointments, lick our wounds and repair our lives?

One of my newspaper readers recently e-mailed me saying that losing your house in a fire is bad, but there are worse things that can happen, such as having someone you deeply love get killed. I would agree, but the healing process is remarkably similar no matter what trauma you're dealing with, and all people who wish to heal from a major loss go through certain steps to heal themselves.

So what are those steps? Imagine a scale that starts at zero and goes to 100. Zero is very wounded. When you reach 100 you will be completely healed. This is your Healing Scale. It is a way you can measure how recovered you are from a wound, trauma, disappointment or setback, and how much healing you still have in front of you.

Assign a realistic number to everything you have done to heal up until now. (I put the number at 75 for myself. That means I'm roughly 75 percent healed from my fire so far.) Your task — and mine — is to climb that scale. To go 5, 10 or 15 points higher. That's what you can do when you're healing from a painful loss. There are no leaps — only steps — and you climb steps one or at the most two at a time.

So what will help you climb that scale? It's clearly different for different people, but for me, finding a permanent place to live and being able to nest again felt very important in the healing process. So did replacing some of the creature comforts I'm used to, such as a couch, a dining table and chairs, warm-weather clothing, some music and some recipes.

Once you begin climbing the scale, you cannot slide backwards. That is, if you get to 25 on your healing scale and then, for instance, have a career reversal, you stay at 25 until something happens that causes you to climb upward again, because the healing scale measures how healed you are about your loss, not about how perfect your life is in all aspects.

What will assist you in climbing the healing scale? Your answers to that question will largely determine how well you bounce back from your trauma, how long it will take you to recover and how damaged you will be when all of this is over.


Next week: The art of bouncing back.