When I glanced up into the mirror, what I saw broke me. I didn’t recognize the thing staring back. It wasn’t a face. And in that moment, I understood Chrissi’s words from that afternoon six months before. “That’s not Pat. That can’t be my husband!”

When doctors finally cut pinholes in the skin grafts covering my eyes, it was the first time I’d seen anything since the day of the fire. I was at my house, not paying attention, and walked in front of a mirror and looked up. No ears. No lips. No nose. No eyebrows or eyelids, or hair. Just shiny, puckered skin. Like melted wax pulled from a campfire.

I had no idea how bad everything was until that moment. Not the weeks in the burn unit, not the doctors’ words that offered little hope, not the torturous skin grafts. It was what I saw in the mirror that truly told me how deep the injuries actually went. My God, Pat, what have you done to yourself?

You don’t realize how much of your identity lives in your face. In the tilt of your smile. The way your eyes squint when you laugh. The nose that makes you look like your dad. The jawline that reminds him of your grandpa.

Until it is gone.

And it was all gone, lost in the smoke and flames of that fire on Wheeler Road. Yet, it was just the beginning of all I had to lose, and the decades-long fight to try and get it back.