Surfside Now Means Tragedy. For Four Generations of My Family, It’s Meant Home.

Yet this particular name is a shorthand of another kind for me. It means home. My great-grandparents came to Surfside to retire in the sun. My great-grandfather bought a plot on the bay, about half a mile away from where the Towers would later be constructed, and eventually built a house. My grandmother told me he’d bought land in Surfside because, as a Jew in the 1940s, he faced restrictions in more-established nearby communities. From the beginning, Surfside was a refuge.

Many of my earliest memories take place in the town, where my parents brought me, and later my sisters, to visit. They appear in my mind like sun-faded Polaroids: Learning to dunk my head underwater in the community-center pool. Scrambling to climb up on a high stool at the drugstore soda fountain. My great-grandmother rubbing a piece of aloe on my sunburnt shoulders. The sound of a bullfrog croaking loudly as I drift off to sleep.

After my great-grandmother died in 1998, my parents bought the house. My mother, sick with leukemia at the time, craved warmer weather. I lived in New York then, and when I visited, we’d take slow convertible rides at night through sleepy streets named after writers and poets—Byron, Dickens, Emerson, Hawthorne, Irving. We’d point out our favorite houses and marvel over the exotic smells. Surfside smells like the ocean and like fresh rain. But also like gardenia, frangipani and night-blooming jasmine.

This is a small town. It doesn’t preen or strut or shine in neon like Miami Beach or the city of Miami. Most of Surfside doesn’t have sidewalks. Kids set up their basketball hoops in the street, where adults push strollers, ride bikes or stroll. People drive slow in Surfside for this reason.

After my parents moved here, my sisters and I visited regularly, thrilled to escape the busyness of our own lives for a few days, to breathe fresher air, view brighter colors, walk down the street to the beach—right past the still-standing Champlain Towers South. Soon we began celebrating all our holidays, birthdays and special events in Surfside. We held my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary party in their backyard. That’s where both my sisters got married. And it’s where my nephew took some of his first steps.

Surfside also became a place of solace. My mom healed from cancer in Surfside. I spent a long weekend here after Sept. 11 that was so bright and so far removed from the dust, chaos and grief of New York City at the time that I regularly recall the memory now when I feel anxious and want to calm down. I retreated to my parents’ home after my divorce—and eventually bought a house in Miami, about 5 miles away. My sisters and I cried and hugged in my parents’ driveway the day we brought my father home from the hospital after his stroke and months in the hospital, so grateful he’d made it, even though we knew his life would never be the same.

And during the pandemic—a time when home became more important than ever to everyone—I spent much of my time in Surfside. I went there to be close to, and help, my parents. But also to be near the water, which I find to be a source of great comfort.

I learned of the Champlain Towers South collapse when my mom called just before 8 that morning to tell me that she and my father were OK. I was talking to her, and still in shock, when my editor called minutes later to ask me to go to Surfside and start reporting.

I took the back roads in, avoiding streets I knew police would cordon off, then parked two blocks from the building and started walking toward it. It was eerily quiet—rescue-vehicle lights flashing silently through the rain—when I walked up to a police chief from the next town over, who was barring an intersection. I identified myself as a reporter. Then I saw his eyes. “I’m so very sorry,” I blurted out. “Surfside feels like home to me, too.”

The chief told me to walk toward the ocean, out onto the sand behind the building. And that is where, on a stunningly beautiful beach I’d visited since I was a baby, I saw a sight that changed my understanding of home in an instant. The building looked like it had been bombed. A child’s white bunk bed perched on the edge of a bedroom floor now open to the sky.

The sights and smells of those next few days feel burnt on my mind. The man I met crying on the beach that first morning, who said his cousin and the man’s son were missing. A woman praying in the sand in Spanish for her elderly friend. Stunned family members arriving at a makeshift reunification center—inside the community center where I once swam. Search dogs on the pile. Photographs of the missing. The looks on the faces of exhausted rescue workers—a look I’d seen before, on Sept. 11. And, everywhere, the acrid smell of concrete and who-knows-what-else burning and a smokey, orange haze as far as I could see.

Five days after the building collapse, I attended a candlelight vigil on the beach, searching again for solace. It was a balmy night, and several hundred people gathered in a circle, some kneeling, near where someone had written “HOPE” in large letters in the sand. An organizer led us in a guided meditation. There were emotional speeches, chimes and a gong. But what comforted me the most were two things I saw on my walk home: a fresh turtle’s nest roped off in the sand. And the two tired-looking police chaplains pulling collapsible red wagons down an empty street toward resting rescue workers. They were filled with boxes of Rice Krispies Treats.

The following weekend, a holiday one, I stayed with my folks. We spent a quiet few days talking, reflecting, watching the weather because there was a possible hurricane brewing. Then, on the Fourth of July, we learned that the part of Champlain Towers South that was still standing was going to be demolished that night, between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m.

That evening, to distract ourselves, we sat on their patio on the water and somberly watched as people lit fireworks in their yards across the bay. Then we chose a light comedy to watch to distract ourselves. We were complaining about how corny it was when we heard an enormous explosion around 10:30 p.m., and the house shook. “Was that…?” my mom asked. I went outside. Smoke was again spreading over Surfside. I cried, for the first time since the building collapsed, alone in the street.

When I went back inside, we sat in silence for a few minutes. Then, not knowing what else to do, we finished our movie—now wearing N-95 masks because the dust from the debris was seeping inside the house.

The next morning I woke early and took my coffee outside. After several weeks of almost nonstop rain, it was sunny. Suddenly, a great egret landed on the grass about 10 yards from me and slowly walked the length of the yard, looking for breakfast. I watched, mesmerized, until it flew off, to its own Surfside home.

Write to Elizabeth Bernstein at [email protected]