GH’s Cameron Mathison Speaks Out After Losing ‘Everything I Own’
In a heartfelt interview with his former colleagues on Good Morning America, where he used to serve as a contributor, Cameron Mathison (Drew, General Hospital) shared the harrowing story of losing his home in the Eaton fire, one of several deadly wildfires currently burning in California’s Los Angeles County.
A Devastating Loss
Mathison’s home burned down on January 8, and after an understandably sleepless night, he spoke to GMA. After expressing his gratitude that he and his family were physically safe, he acknowledged “the unbelievable amount of people going through the same thing [that] we’re going through as a family…. I’ve lost my home and everything that I own. I have this hoodie [which Mathison was wearing] and a pair of pants and two pairs of sneakers left. That’s it.”
The actor noted that it was hard to stop ruminating about the sentimental items lost in the fire. “Unless you’ve gone through it, it’s hard to get your head out of that,” he observed, describing himself as “kind of stuck and reeling and thinking and every few minutes, you’re thinking about things that were in there that are irreplaceable. There’s a lot of things that are replaceable, but the kids’ [son Lucas and daughter Leila, both of whom are in college] projects, their baby photos were only film, my childhood [photos]…. Of course, that’s just stuff — and at the same time, it is still very unsettling and so surreal.”
The night the fire began, Mathison left the house, located in Altadena, in his car to have dinner in nearby Pasadena. He recalled, “I’m going down the hill and I see — we’re right up in the mountains — and I see on the hill, I see this little bright spot. I literally, I think, saw that Eaton Canyon fire begin.” At the time, said Mathison, it was “a tiny little blip.” But when he got to Pasadena, “My phone started blowing up and obviously it caught and spread so quickly with the winds… I raced back home and I put a bag together [with some clothing items] and I left to come and stay at an apartment here in Pasadena with my daughter and her mom.”
From watching the news, Mathison continued, “I realized this could be bad and so I went back up into the smoke and the fire and I got passports and birth certificates and whatever photo albums I could get and came back down [to Pasadena], and then later in the morning, around 5 in the morning, we saw the reports, literally from our block, watching houses around [ours] that we recognized burning to the ground, but couldn’t see if our house was one of them.”
The actor ended up driving back into Altadena, and Mathison fought back tears as GMA played video footage he had taken at the time. “That video is when I pull up to the property, and realizing that, you know, there’s no home there, [the home] that we raised our kids in.” He then returned to Pasadena “and sat in disbelief.”
The fire wreaked unimaginable destruction on Altadena, which Mathison described as “completely decimated, like completely, as if nothing’s been built. It’s so outrageous — so, so many people with so much loss.”
The hearts of everyone at Soap Opera Digest go out to Mathison and all those affected by the fires.
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