Karen Clark came home from work to take a quick nap. She set an alarm to avoid oversleeping.

The beeping that woke her up was the smoke alarm. When she opened her eyes, the bedroom was full of smoke. Instinctively, she ran downstairs and out the front door.

It was the dead of winter -- February of 1988 -- when she ran barefoot to a neighbor’s house and screamed for them to call 911. Within a few minutes, she heard sirens in the distance.

She stood outside watching the flames engulf her home.

“It felt like forever,” she said. She had recently begun working as a Mary Kay consultant. In the era before widespread computer use, all her records were on paper.

“My business is gone,” she remembers thinking.

For most of her career, she had worked as an insurance claims adjuster, having visited multiple fire claim sites. Now, she was on the other side -- a survivor of a catastrophic fire that destroyed her home and nearly all its contents. She had had the foresight to use a camcorder to make a video of each of the rooms in her house, but that tape was never stored in a fireproof safe. It melted in the fire.

The cause of the fire was either an incubator for her pet parakeet, Teddy, who perished that day, or a nearby lamp. When she walked into her home after the fire was extinguished, she couldn’t recognize it. The family room was in ashes -- blobs of plastic where a phone used to be, remnants of her life under her feet.

Clark, now 71, moved back in with her parents while her home was rebuilt. Like anyone else who files an insurance claim, she had to create lists of all her belongings. Other survivors describe the difficulty of trying to recall every single possession inside a home, when each item was purchased and the cost, especially while still trying to process the shock from such a devastating event.

“As an adjuster, you’re having people make lists,” Clark said. “But as a victim, they’re not just lists. You can’t put a dollar amount on memories.”

She realized she was underinsured on the contents of her home. It was impossible to remember everything in every room, along with the irreplaceable heirlooms and mementos.

This December, Clark was driving around, doing some Christmas shopping, when she spotted smoke. She pulled over as soon as she heard the sirens. Clark sat in her car and bawled.

Nearly 37 years later, the feelings from that February day hit her hard.

Other survivors of natural disasters describe similar emotions watching the coverage of the fires raging in L.A. that have killed at least 27 people and destroyed thousands of structures. More than 88,000 residents are still under evacuation orders.

So many of the victims in L.A. lost more than their homes. When entire communities are destroyed, all those systems of support -- family members, churches, community centers -- are also lost.

“My church came over and helped me. My neighbors rallied around me. I still had support and help,” Clark said of her long-ago fire. She remembers vividly the ways people showed up for her: Her mom found wet documents in her former office and hung them on a clothesline, so Clark would have some way to file her taxes. Her neighbor brought boots and a coat and physically put them on her while Clark stood outside that winter day. Her brother took photos of burned-out rooms to help her create the lists of possessions.

Clark wonders how many of the recent victims lacked insurance and have no way to recover their losses. How many have also lost jobs because the businesses where they worked burned down?

“I don’t know how these communities will even rebuild,” she said. It infuriates her to see comments that minimize the losses people have suffered. Yes, people are lucky to be alive and yes, it’s a blessing to have insurance, but there is still grief and mourning for things that can’t be replaced.

She is donating to relief efforts and encouraging others to help. Natural disasters bring people together because they force us to contemplate how vulnerable we all are.

Suffering her own losses deepened Clark’s empathy.

But you shouldn't have to walk through a fire to feel others’ pain.

TAP-IN -- Trauma Assistance Program-International -- is offering anyone impacted by the fires in California five free therapy sessions with licensed mental health professionals who are trained in trauma first aid and stabilization for ongoing traumatic events. They have clinicians who can treat children and adults. To learn how to access sessions, visit traumaassistanceprogram-international.org.

Three-year-old Rahaf Saed wore a Belle princess costume over her chunky pink sweater and blue jeans. She scampered on her hands and one knee across the decorated living room toward a small pile of gifts, her empty pant legs trailing behind her.

She’s excited by the prospect of new toys, eager to play with other kids at her birthday party. She briefly squabbles with a new friend who snatched a toy from her. She immediately forgets the skirmish when handed a lollipop.

Her mom, Israa Saed, 30, tries to get Rahaf to wear her prosthetics -- the artificial right leg goes up to her hip and the left one attaches below her knee -- but Rahaf refuses. The prosthetics don’t have any bendable joints, so she can’t sit or get up easily in them.

Right now, she wants to sit directly in front of the white and pink sheet cake with three candles on it.

“Sing to me,” she urges the crowd of children and women surrounding her. This is the first time many of them, myself included, are meeting this spirited child, plucked from a ravaged war zone and delivered to St. Louis because of the catastrophic injuries she’s endured.

Her journey is rare. Since October 2023, America has allowed fewer than 100 critically wounded or sick children from Gaza into the country when aid organizations have offered to pay for their travel and medical care. An interpreter, the local Muslim community and Shriners Hospital are helping the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund, which brought Rahaf and Israa here.

Rahaf won’t talk about the day she lost her legs. Her mother recalls that moment on Aug. 1. She woke up to the sound of her baby screaming. An Israeli attack hit their home. Her 6-year-old son’s hand and face were bleeding, and Rahaf seemed to be floating in a lake of blood. Both of Israa’s arms were broken. There were no ambulances, so they rode in a car to one of the few hospitals still standing.

At al Aqsa Hospital, they spent an entire day waiting in a hallway. The place was packed with the wounded. Doctors amputated Rahaf’s right leg above the knee, and her left leg below it, to save her life.

When she saw herself after the surgery, Rahaf wailed.

She cried when she saw other children running nearby. She began wetting the bed again. When any visitor came to see her, she made her mother cover her legs. A journalist took a photo of this 2-year-old, who had lost her legs so soon after learning to run, jump and skip.

PCRF saw the photo and began negotiating to try to get Rahaf out of Gaza for treatment.

Lisa Doughten, a senior United Nations official, told the U.N. General Assembly in October that the Gaza Strip “is home to the largest cohort of child amputees in modern history.” Israeli attacks have killed more than 46,000 Palestinians since the war broke out, with nearly 70% of the victims being women and children. Thousands of children have lost their limbs.

To give her daughter a chance in St. Louis, Israa had to leave behind her two young sons, ages 6 and 8, in a place where children are starving and freezing to death.

When Rahaf heard she would be able to walk again, she asked to get her feet back. She gets an hour of therapy each day to learn how to navigate flat and uneven surfaces on the prosthetics.

“In Gaza, there are no flat surfaces left,” their interpreter said.

It’s jarring to live as a spectator to this: Half of my social media feeds are images of people’s destroyed homes, either in L.A. or Gaza, and the other half reflect the mundane concerns of those untouched -- in places where fires and bombings are someone else’s nightmare.

The United States spent $17.9 billion on military aid to Israel from October 2023 to October 2024. The guests at Rahaf’s birthday party must deal with the cognitive dissonance of knowing their tax dollars are funding the deaths and injuries of so many while trying to create a moment of joy for one of its victims.

The birthday girl is oblivious to these internal tensions. She is focused on taking a bite of a large slice of cake covered in frosting.

Her mother watches her daughter with a look of joy and longing. When she talks to her sons, they always ask when she and Rahaf are coming back. She’s not sure how soon they will return. Her wish on her baby’s birthday was that when they go back, the bombs and missiles will have stopped.

That one day soon, her children will have a safe place to grow up.

There wasn’t another living soul as far as she could see, in front of her or behind her, when Fatema Rangwala spotted the boulder perched over the glacier she had to cross.

The rest of the trekkers in her group had moved far ahead. They were still days away from the base camp of K2, the second-highest mountain in the world -- and the most dangerous.

Rangwala looked at the boulder balanced atop a peak and wondered if it would come tumbling down and crush her as she tried to pass under it. She sobbed as she trudged across the harsh, barren terrain -- cold, exhausted and alone.

What had drawn this 54-year-old Pakistani American mother of three on such an inexplicable adventure?

She has run a Kumon tutoring center in Clayton, Missouri, for more than three decades and is far more adept at coaching math facts than scaling mountains. In fact, she had never climbed a single mountain -- nor hiked for more than a couple of hours -- before embarking on this 20-day excursion toward K2's base camp, a destination 16,896 feet above sea level.

“It was not on my bucket list. I’d never even thought about it,” Rangwala, now 62, said.

One of her childhood friends was arranging a trekking trip for a group of Pakistani physicians from California, and she convinced three of her friends to join them. The adventure went far beyond what Rangwala could have imagined when she agreed to it.

Getting to the starting point required a treacherous eight-hour drive at night, in an open Jeep, cutting tight corners around steep ledges. There was no rescue or phone service along that route, where just days earlier, a bus had fallen over an edge. The group started out with 18 hikers, 40 sherpas and several horses, mules and goats. The day they arrived, an avalanche fell, bringing down camping gear and sleeping bags -- likely from unlucky visitors who had been buried under the snow.

They faced unpredictable weather and difficult, rocky terrain with the Indus River raging through the area surrounding the mountain. One night, a horse lost its footing and plunged to its death. One of the experienced trekkers didn’t use a hiking pole, and he slid and fell. He had to be carried away on a stretcher. Rangwala hiked eight to 12 hours a day and slept in a tent in below-freezing temperatures. The other women held a shawl around her for privacy when she had to use the restroom. They did not bathe for 14 days.

Every day, Rangwala said she faced numerous challenges that could have easily resulted in her death.

“After a while, you leave it up to God,” she said. “If you’re not supposed to make it, you’re not going to make it.”

“What am I leaving behind in this world?” she asked herself. Beyond her successful adult children and business, she wondered what her legacy would be.

As they got closer to the base camp, the weather worsened. A blizzard created whiteout conditions. Rangwala was nearly ready to give up when the skies cleared. On the last morning of their ascent, they could not get out of their tents because the zippers had frozen overnight. When they finally got to Concordia, she saw the entirety of the spectacular and savage mountain in front of her.

“You suddenly see it,” she said. “It was really stunning.”

The adventure pushed her beyond what she believed she was capable of doing.

Sometimes, we deliberately choose the path we want to travel. Other times, we go with the flow, and the path chooses us.

Rangwala made a poster about her trip for her Kumon students. She couldn’t resist sharing a lesson with them: No matter how daunting a task is at first, if taken one step at a time, it will surely lead to success, she wrote. More importantly, she told them, achieving one goal makes the next one easier to attain.

Three years later, Rangwala decided she wanted to trek to Everest's base camp. Her friends had no desire to repeat such an arduous experience.

So, at 57, she joined another expedition.