Residents Return to See What the Fire Left Behind, and to Say Goodbye

For two weeks, Leslie Miller was desperate to recover only one thing: the urn that held the ashes of her daughter who died in early adulthood.

She wondered for days if it had survived the blaze that destroyed much of Altadena, Calif. What if, she feared, she couldn’t get back into her home before the rains came and washed her daughter’s ashes into an indistinguishable heap of debris and dust?

On Tuesday, Ms. Miller returned to her house for the first time since the Eaton fire consumed it two weeks ago. She rushed out of her car and immediately looked through the gaping hole where her stained-glass front door had once stood. She peered across a yawning pile of gray debris and saw it: the white urn, still sitting on the back patio atop a metal table that had also had survived.

A bonsai tree that had sat atop the urn was gone, and the ceramic vessel cracked when Ms. Miller picked it up. But the ashes of her daughter, Allison, who died four years ago at age 20 of congenital heart failure, were still there. Ms. Miller placed the urn in a cardboard box and prepared to load it into her car.