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Most nights for the last year, Darlene Hamilton slept four hours and woke at about 4.30am. She wanted to sleep, but she could not.
Instead the 66-year-old started the day at her Altadena rental home in morning darkness with a familiar routine, scouring through websites of local humane societies and lost animal groups in search of two familiar little faces. For a year, her days often began and ended with this ritual.
When fire came for Hamilton’s community one windy evening in January 2025, it sent countless lives into chaos. Survivors’ loss is felt in large and small ways, from the treasured 80-year-old hardware store, now gone, to the family photos, or a grandmother’s wedding dress, burned up.
Hamilton lost the green Altadena home she shared with her husband, the dragon fruit plants and the cherished Christmas ornaments she had spent a lifetime collecting. And most painfully, she lost her two beloved cats – Merlyn and Kiki.
She had them for 12 years, through the early days of her marriage, her mother’s death and during her career as a graphic designer and art director. While Hamilton worked from home, Merlyn, a 17lb Maine Coon, always sat by her side, and Kiki, a petite shy Calico, was never far.
The fire arrived on her property in the middle of the night, moving impossibly fast, and despite Hamilton’s best efforts, she was forced to flee without her cats. She left the doors open, leaving them an escape route.
After that terrible night, Hamilton refused to give up hope they may have survived. So she kept searching, hanging up posters around the devastated area.
She made a silent commitment to Merlyn and Kiki that she would look for them for a year and a day.
“I still have to look. What if they’re out there?”
‘I was out there every single day’
January 2025 was set to bring what the National Weather Service described as a “life-threatening” windstorm across southern California.
Fire was a known risk in Altadena, the town of 43,000 people where Hamilton had resided with her husband, who works at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, since 2012. Their home was on a slope with a spacious front and back yard, and a collection of roses that her husband carefully tended to. A neighbor grew thick stands of bamboo.
Merlyn, who Hamilton said had the affable and easy-going personality of a surfer, and skittery and sweet Kiki, would get supervised visits in the yard each day, but otherwise stayed indoors.
Hamilton had lived in Los Angeles for decades, always with feline companions. Originally from Massachusetts, she was eager to escape cold winters and became enamored of southern California with its sunshine and Disneyland. Along the way, she’d picked up English country dancing, the kind seen in Pride and Prejudice, becoming an instructor and starting a vibrant historical dance community.
In early January, Hamilton was focused on a planned Jane Austen tea social and putting away Christmas ornaments. She hadn’t seen much about the weather.
But by the evening of 7 January 2025, the winds were impossible to ignore. A fire had already forced thousands of people to evacuate the Pacific Palisades, and another blaze, the Eaton fire, had broken out in the nearby San Gabriel Mountains.
They thought their home in the middle of town would be safe as it always had been.
Hamilton’s husband had been securing the yard, tying umbrellas, and surveying the area every 45 minutes, she remembered. Kiki looked up at her nervously before running off to hide, while Merlyn, freaked out, stayed seated next to her.
Late in the evening she dozed off briefly while sitting upright before waking up to monitor the progress of the blaze. Their home was just outside an evacuation zone.
She was still sitting on the couch when she heard a crackle reminiscent of a fireplace, but far louder, and then something like a firecracker. She went to the door and saw a golden light – the bamboo was in flames. Two men appeared in her driveway with hoses.
Hamilton quickly put Merlyn in his carrier and went to find Kiki, but as she turned he busted out and ran. The alarms in the house rang out. Smoke filled the room. Her husband was fighting the fire outside, and the two men, strangers to her even now, came inside to help her evacuate. She couldn’t find the cats, and the smoke was growing thicker.
“I had Merlyn in the cage, and if I just grabbed him and carried that cage out to the car,” she said, not finishing. “I would never think that he would be able to break out like that.”
She searched amid the chaos. And then she left the doors open and fled. Later she would sometimes think to herself: “I should have just stayed and kept looking.”
As she slowly drove away, flames consumed Altadena in a scene that she thought resembled a war zone.
The couple returned the next day, prepared to see some damage to the property. Instead their home was completely gone and there was no sign of the cats.
They set out food and water. It would become impossible to return to the property in the coming weeks with the area blocked off under strict evacuation orders. Hamilton called every rescue center she could, the local humane society, and others further away after learning that some animals rescued from the fire zone were transported out of the area, she said. An official list of deceased animals found in the area had virtually no descriptions. She installed cameras and hung posters.
Eventually, a volunteer group came to help the couple sort through the rubble. Even in highly destructive fires, animal remains and even cremains can often be recovered. But they never found anything.
Countless others had lost their pets as well, and the community was eager to help.
“People that were driving through the neighborhood – some of them were even putting flyers in their cars,” she recalled. “I was there every single day. I cannot tell you how many people told me stories about how somebody got their cat back six months later.”
She drove to shelters across the region, enlisted friends across the state to look at their local shelters, and undertook detective work. Once, after getting a potential lead, she drove into the valley to catch a glimpse of a cat that she thought could have been Merlyn.
Altadena, a year later
A year on from the fire, Hamilton and her husband have returned to Altadena. They live in a rental home in a neighborhood untouched by the flames. She’s avoided pet food aisles, and is reminded of her cats when she sees people cuddled up with their own pets on Zoom calls.
As the deadline she’d privately committed to came and went, Hamilton is preparing to step back from her search.
“I promised my babies,” she said. “I imagine I’ll still always kind of look.”
When the holidays came around, the couple hung up posters around Altadena’s Christmas Tree Lane, where thousands of people flock each year to watch the illumination of a mile of cedar trees, a local tradition that has lasted for more than a century.
As dense crowds moved through the street on 6 December, many passed Merlyn and Kiki, their faces frozen in time on missing posters dotting telephone poles. Kiki was smart, yet bashful, but Merlyn was friendly – he especially could have ended up with someone, Hamilton thought.
“At this point even if somebody said, ‘well, he’s a beloved family member now,’ I’d rather know he’s alive and let him live his happy life,” she said.
The passage of time has softened the pain, she said. But she can’t help thinking about what they might have endured. “One of the things is like, those poor cats, they went through that trauma. If they did escape, then they come back and they go, ‘where’s my house? Where are my people?’,” she said.
She wishes they could see her new life now. Last month, Hamilton’s husband strung Christmas lights outside their burned property. The roses there survived. Their new home is temporary, but beautiful, she said.
“There’s a lot of times I come to my new house and I think, ‘oh, they would have liked it so much.’ I wish they could have been here.”
