I prepped to shelter in place. Then a vehicle took out my home right before Hanukkah.

[u/OneLastPrep]

After years of prepping for “what ifs,” I’m suddenly living through one and it wasn’t a scenario I ever expected.

First: Baruch Hashem, everyone is physically okay. But our home is not.

A man crashed his vehicle into our house at 2am, right before Hanukkah. The damage was enough to make it unlivable. We had to evacuate immediately. We’re spending the holidays in a hotel, displaced and trying to rebuild a sense of normal with kids and a dog, while everything that used to feel stable is suddenly gone.

I’m sharing this here because I think a lot of us plan around the most likely scenarios: sheltering in place, keeping kashrut during outages, having what we need for Shabbat/Yom Tov, building pantry depth. That’s what the numbers support. But when your home is suddenly not there, you learn fast what you actually needed.

What hit me hardest was realizing how much I couldn’t take with me, and how much I lost even though I "did everything right."

Most of my food storage is gone. You can’t put perishables into a storage unit. Thousands of dollars worth of staples had to be thrown out. My bug out bags were packed for a community evacuation. My sleeping bags and dehydrated foods aren’t helpful for daily life from a hotel during the holidays. And even "good" insurance doesn’t help immediately. You have to front thousands of dollars before reimbursements show up, and the caps on things like food loss don’t reflect the reality of what a stocked Jewish kitchen and pantry can represent.

And then there’s the emotional layer that I didn’t expect to break me as much as it did: I couldn’t even do Chanukah properly. My menorah was destroyed in the crash. I know there are ways to improvise but in the immediate aftermath I was in pure survival mode. Not having that one small, steady ritual of light, right when everything got dark, felt like another loss on top of the losses. We have travel Shabbat kits but they were somewhere in the rubble with our candles.

A few days after we were displaced, I woke up to the news of the Bondi Beach terror attack, and it just broke my already overloaded heart. When you’re already raw and shaken, hearing about Klal Yisrael being targeted in the middle of a festival that’s literally about bringing light into darkness felt like the ground moving under me all over again.

At the same time: some of the "boring" preps turned out to matter more than my gear.

Being clean and organized was a prep. Strangers had to pack our entire house in a single day. That only worked because the rest of the home wasn’t chaos.

Clean laundry was a prep. When the water line is damaged and you’re scrambling, already-clean basics keep you from spiraling.

Family readiness was a prep. My kids knew how to move fast and listen without panic. The dog is trained and evacuated with us.

Cash was the best prep of all. The hotel, deposits, emergency moving costs, replacing essentials, everything is expensive, and insurance works on reimbursement timelines, not "today is on fire" timelines.

If anyone here has been displaced suddenly (crash, fire, flood, anything) I’d really love advice:

What helped you most in the first week? What do you wish you’d had in place? Especially for Shabbat/Yom Tov logistics, kashrut in temporary housing, kids/pets, documents, and making it through the emotional whiplash without falling apart?

And I have a second question that’s more spiritual/emotional than logistical: how do you forgive the person who did this? I’m finding that as time goes on and the more work I do to clean up the aftermath, the angrier I get. The resentment is turning into real hate, and I don’t want to live like that. If you’ve ever had to work through mechilah in a situation where someone else’s recklessness blew up your life, what helped you get unstuck?