Chapter Text
I used to think the only way to write about my life was to explain what happened to it.
That’s what professors expect when they see my name at the top of the paper: May Grant-Nash. My last name holds some sort of power. They brace for the trauma essay, the inspirational comeback, the survivor narrative. They prep their facial expressions, the ones that are supposed to look empathetic but somehow always come out like they’ve rehearsed it in the mirror. The fire becomes my origin story, whether they asked for it or not. Fire in this case means every single traumatic chaos that has come from being the daughter of two first responders.
I could have leaned into that. I could have written about post-traumatic memory, intergenerational resilience, or the ethics of storytelling after tragedy. After all, those broad topics can lead to the fundamental things that have shaped me to be who I am today. My advisor even encouraged it “you have lived experience,” as if I won some sort of scholarship. I could have analyzed public safety communications, or first responder culture, or the difference between grief as a personal reality and grief as a headline.
All of that could have been an easy grade. Clean.
But every time I tried to outline those topics, I got stuck. I never know how to get past the first sentence. Not because they’re unimportant, in fact they matter deeply. It’s because I have spent a long time dealing with this inevitable question of who I am. Who am I outside of the fire, the trauma, even my family.
So I did what every student does when they have no idea what to write about: I tried to run from the obvious.
My first idea was to write about media literacy. Then that changed to generational identity which changed to online parasociality, then to crisis coverage… With more topic changes after that. All those topics have changed someone fundamentally. I'm positive about that. But none of those drafts got past page six. They felt like costumes, like I was trying to on topics that might impress someone instead of telling the truth I actually live with.
The truth is, this capstone began as something I considered taking a zero in. Then it became something very different once I realized the thing I have been studying my whole life isn’t my trauma or running away from it, it’s love.
Not the loud, dramatic version that shows up on television or in breaking news. Not the kind that exists as a single climactic moment. It’s the love that happens when no one is watching. The love that sits down at the table with you in the early hours of the morning because you can’t sleep or there’s something on your mind. The love that calls your phone just to remind you to eat. The love that inevitably stays.
I grew up with four parents. My mom, dad, and two step dads. However, I was primarily raised by my mother, Athena Grant and my step-father [although, I don’t really call him that], Bobby Nash. I didn’t grow up with grand philosophies. They’re terrible at speeches and better at showing than telling. Athena Grant is a sergeant with the Los Angeles Police Department, the person most likely to command a room and stare down anyone who disrespects someone she loves. My mother is also the person who will hand you a cup of tea or coffee when she notices your shoulders are tense or raise her eyebrow at you when she notices your silence. One of my three dads, Captain Bobby Nash of Station 118 with the Los Angeles Fire Department carries kindness like a quiet second language. He doesn’t force it or performs it. It’s the way he checks if the staff at a charity event has eaten yet or how he remembers the names at a shop he frequents often or how he listens to anyone with his undivided attention as if you were stating something so important.
Neither one of them sat me down with a chalkboard and defined what love is. It wasn’t until I experienced heartbreak of my own that I thought about what love meant to me. They showed it to me in one hundred tiny ways: in arguments that ended with understanding, in long drives with no talking, in the way they looked at each other after a rough call at work. Sometimes love was loud. The kind that comes from shouting instructions in a crisis or laughing in the kitchen. Most of the time it was quiet. A hand on the shoulder, a nod across the room, a yes that wasn’t spoken out loud.
So I have changed my topic to this. Instead of writing about the incident that shaped us, I chose to write about the people who built something after all the terrible parts had happened. I decided to interview the ones who know my parents best: the colleagues who turned friends that serve beside them, the people who folded themselves into our lives, the ones who became family without needing to be asked. I gave them a microphone and turned on the camera. My main thesis or questions are:
How do you love someone when your job is to run toward danger? Does love really change who you are fundamentally?
Somewhere along the way with all this writing and in between all the interviews, this capstone stopped being about a profession or a tragedy. It became a map of the ways love reveals itself when you aren’t looking for it. I thought I was writing something I had to do for university. Instead, I ended up uncovering the one lesson my parents taught me quietly and consistently.
Love is universal because it sees you. It sees you when you’re loud and sure and burning bright, and it sees you when you are fragile, quiet and barely holding yourself together. It meets you in chaos and it meets you in silence.
This is a study of that kind of love. The kind that has changed me fundamentally as a person. The kind that outlasts every fire.