BREAK UP: MOVING ON AND GETTING OVER IT

A personal "after the fire" story with an important message for all. 

Some years ago, I went through the worst breakup of my life. I lost weight without trying, sleep without noticing and perspective entirely. Friends invited me out, sent me memes, told me I was “better off.” But what really helped me get over her, in the end, were three things.

I moved to a house in the Pacific Palisades of L.A. with ocean views—real, uninterrupted ones, where the sea was always doing something vaguely cinematic in the background. Water, it turns out, is wildly therapeutic. Try sobbing about your ex while whales are breaching.

I started writing a new novel—comedic, which felt both risky and necessary.

I threw myself into a new hobby: wine collecting. Or more accurately, wine accumulating with good intentions. Basically, I was amassing bottles I just couldn’t bring myself to open. A breakup inspires some people to hold on to grudges. I wanted to hold on to Bordeaux.

I never thought I’d be that guy—the one who talked about tannins, subtle aromas and the seductive limestone of some riverbank like it had personally shaped his soul. But there I was, nodding thoughtfully at words like angular to describe an amusing white, pretending my front, mid or back palate could detect anything beyond grape and alcohol, then—eventually—understanding it could. I was like a man falling down a well and discovering, to his surprise, he really likes wells.

It wasn’t too long before I found myself buying pricey bottles of, say, 2005 Château Troplong Mondot and saving them for that special meal…the one I imagined I’d one day have with some new woman in my life, to accompany the perfectly marbled steak I’d just tonged off the grill. It helped me get over the breakup and filled me with a kind of Dickinsonian hope—that thing with feathers or, in my case, corks.

Then, about two years later, wildfires broke out in the Palisades and consumed $250 billion worth of property, including my home. Everything I ever owned, gone. Pencil manuscripts from Leonard Bernstein. Artwork by friends. A handmade baby book from my mother. Every music manuscript I’d ever written or owned. Mementos that had been stuffed in drawers and forgotten until their absence announced their worth, like a song I hadn’t realized was playing until someone turns it off—and the silence hurts.

And all those expensive bottles unopened, gone.

Loss on this scale gets you rethinking everything. Priorities shift like passengers on a sinking ship—scrambling for meaning, shedding weight, clinging to whatever might float. Wine, I decided, would no longer be something I collected and held on to for some future dinner with someone worthy of such a vintage.

Oh, no. From now on, if I decided to plunk down real money on a bottle, it would have to be consumed alongside a meal I’d be cooking that very day.

No more saving things for some imagined “someday” that might never show up. I decided that if I bought a bottle of Château Margaux, I’d be drinking it that very evening. Or sooner. Honestly, if a corkscrew was handy, I might start right there at the register—offering a toast to impermanence under the humming glow of fluorescent lights.

Now I drink my best bottles on the most ordinary nights. Tuesdays, mostly. With takeout. Or after a long rehearsal, standing at the kitchen counter in sweatpants, swirling something vaguely figgy and $50 too expensive in a chipped glass that I got at a recent blood drive—technically for “participation,” though I’m pretty sure I passed out.

There’s no ceremony, no occasion, only the quiet understanding that life is short and things burn. And if you wait too long for the perfect moment, you just might miss the perfectly imperfect one standing right in front of you.

So I raise my glass to that instead—to grilled cheese, to good friends, to whoever I might love next…and to whatever else, besides hope and humor, that may have survived the fire.

By David K. Israel

 This feature was originally published in the Wall Street Journal. We're sharing with a free gift link that may ask you to enter your email. There are pictures of the author and his house online.