On 3rd anniversary of Lahaina fire, survivors still deal with heartbreak but have hope as town recovers

LAHAINA — Every morning at 6 a.m., Luz Bernabe would call Happy Nicolas to check in on her and her kids. Nicolas especially knew to expect a call if she’d been absent from church.

“Aunty Luz is very close to my heart. She’s like my second mom,” Nicolas said. 

But for the past three years, Nicolas’ mornings have been sadly silent, after Bernabe was one of at least 102 people to perish in the Aug. 8, 2023 wildfire that ripped through Lahaina town.

As Maui marks the three-year anniversary of the deadly blaze today, Lahaina’s recovery is a mix of hope and heartbreak for the survivors. They have watched hundreds of homes rise from the razed landscape, but they still carry a heavy sense of grief for the people and things that can never be replaced. 

“Part of me, it’s still lost and heartbroken,” said Chamille Serrano, whose multigenerational family of eight lost their home in the fire. “I just cannot move on for some reason.”

The mental health of Lahaina’s fire survivors is a top concern for researchers three years after the blaze, as housing and employment improve but overall social support declines. And meeting people where they’re at is extra tough when the recovery has been different for everyone in Lahaina. 

Kamaile Luke, the clinic site supervisor for the Department of Health’s Lahaina Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic, said grief is complex and unpredictable in the ways it shows up. Three years after the fire, some people who’ve never gotten therapy and never talked to anybody about their trauma are walking into the clinic for the first time.

“I don’t even know if there’s a word that exists to fully describe what we witnessed,” Luke said. “I think devastating is such an understatement.”

For a long time, Serrano said she and her family couldn’t talk about the anguish and suffering from the fire. Life was already so disruptive as they shuffled from one home to the next, with Serrano even living at one point in her Dodge Grand Caravan.

But once they settled into Ka La‘i Ola, the state’s temporary housing project for fire survivors, they finally felt a sense of stability and a readiness to confront the trauma of everything they’d gone through. Now they have regular family meetings, where Serrano’s husband’s humor often breaks the ice and gives way to tears and heartfelt talks.

First Hawaiian Bank, where Serrano works as the service manager, also offers counselors. Serrano makes appointments every now and then to just “let it out.”

After the fire, Serrano felt she had to be the strong one, privately crying herself to sleep but making it a point to never break down in front of her three adult daughters. But the vulnerability has been helpful to her healing. 

“That’s kind of helping me, just voicing it out … what I feel instead of just keeping it to myself,” she said. 

Last August, Serrano said her goal was to spend Christmas in her rebuilt home. But after not getting their permit until September, breaking ground in November and watching the Kona low storms delay construction in March, her new goal is to celebrate this Christmas in their new home.

As families like the Serranos come to terms with displacement and await their return home, others are confronting their grief by talking about the loved ones they lost in the fire.

On Friday evening, the names of the 102 known victims were read aloud at the memorial site above the Lahaina Bypass. Nicolas and her mom Ethel Deleon attended the service, walking the line of crosses where the 64-year-old Bernabe and the eight family members who also died in the fire are pictured side by side. 

Bernabe was a “very loving, sweet and smart person” who adored chickens and dogs, Nicolas recalled. Every time her chickens laid eggs, she’d call her and ask, “Anak ko (my child), can you please pick up the kids’ eggs?”

Bernabe never missed a moment to think of Nicolas and her family, sometimes dropping by Deleon’s workplace to bring food for the kids from the Nagasako General Store where she worked. 

Fifty-three-year-old Adela Villegas, another family member of Bernabe’s who died in the blaze, was Deleon’s best friend and practically like a sister. The last bonding moment they had before the fires was when Villegas treated Deleon to a spa date for Mother’s Day.

Soakai Taufa, who carved the crosses and cleared the haole koa from the hillside above the bypass where the memorial to the fire victims now sits, said he knew “plenty of people here” who died. They were his friends, co-workers, neighbors and fellow paddlers. 

He thinks often of the Tone family, who lost 73-year-old Maluifonua Tone, 70-year-old Fa’aso Tone, 39-year-old Salote Takafua and 7-year-old Tony Takafua in the fire. They were beloved members of Lahaina’s Tongan community, always showing up with their stove and oversized pot to cook lau lau and taro for church events, weddings and funerals. 

Taufa, who also built the giant teardrop figure at the memorial site whose carved-out heart in the center represents the tears of those who are no longer here, said he helped organize the memorial on Friday night as his way of giving back to those who died. 

He said the message he would want to send to the rest of Maui on the anniversary of the fire is to “love each other, keep the community safe, help each other.”

Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen, who attended the memorial service Friday, said that it was a chance “to remember and be joyful of the lives that they lived.”

“When you speak their names, they live, their memories live,” Bissen said. “And so we just can’t forget their names and what they stood for. A family that continues to love them and of course, grieve and miss them.”

Bissen said one of the best ways to honor those who died in the fires “is to have our town rebuilt in a way that this doesn’t ever happen again.” 

Luke said the recovery from the fires has felt like “the most insane” rollercoaster as she’s watched her patients swing from one emotion to the next. She said the best that the behavioral health clinic staff can do is to listen and walk people through whatever they’re feeling in the moment.

“There’s not a linear way to think about trauma and disaster,” Luke said. “And trauma in this disaster is interwoven with grief, which we already know is such a complex journey on its own. We’re just like this beautiful patterned blanket still being made, and I think three years from now, we’ll still be seeing different people and people will still be walking in saying, ‘I’ve never gotten services before,’ and we’ll be here.”

Luke said “one of the most wonderful things about Lahaina that we’ve seen is it almost feels like hope was sprinkled in the soil in different parts.” And just like the mango, banana and lychee trees that once bloomed around town, each member of the community is growing back in their own ways.

“It is this sense of hope,” Luke said. “There’s the seed and it gets watered and it just grows differently for everybody.”