By: Nicole Roschella
Numerologists speculate that Nov. 11 is the luckiest day of the year. For Brenda Cozzone, that day in 2020 was the complete opposite. That morning, her house went up in flames in a matter of seconds.
Cozzone was at home alone while her daughter Rosie was at elementary school and her husband was at work. Cozzone was preparing to start a new job – her first since moving to the United States from Ireland. Before she logged on to her computer to begin training, she decided to boil a few eggs on her stove, which she would later find out was under recall for sparking fires.
In the next minute, all she could see was smoke.
“It wasn’t like smoke you’d see from a campfire. It was so black. It was like somebody had just set fire to a whole bunch of tires,” Cozzone said.
The smoke stung her eyes. The entire stove was ablaze, along with the side of her refrigerator. The kitchen cabinet where she kept a fire extinguisher was unreachable. When she went to grab a different fire extinguisher, she couldn’t find it through the smoke. Her whole house was a black cloud.
“At this stage, I was choking and choking. I thought, ‘You’re going to die in this house if you don’t get out,’” Cozzone said. She held onto her dog Rebel’s tail as he miraculously led her out of her burning home.
As Cozzone stood in the pouring rain and looked at what was left of her family’s home, Andrea Wright, a Red Cross Disaster Cycle Services Volunteer, approached her. Wright handed Cozzone an envelope with money for a hotel room, food and other essential items. Cozzone told Wright she could not accept it.
“I lost my job that I was supposed to start today because of this fire, so I can’t pay that money back,” Cozzone said, "but she kept pushing the envelope and telling me, ‘Pay it forward.’” The Red Cross volunteers had to explain to Cozzone what ‘pay it forward’ meant.
“In Ireland, we’re very independent,” Cozzone said. She later realized what an amazing gift she had been given.
“Right there in my hand was a step toward rebuilding my family’s life – our first step to get back to normal – because of the Red Cross,” Cozzone said.
In the days after the fire, Red Crossers continued to keep in touch with Cozzone, even sending volunteers from the local food bank to their house with boxes full of food.
“I looked at my daughter, my darling Rosie, and she was eating a bowl of cereal in a frilly pink dress, and I had to catch my breath,” Cozzone said. “Just 48 hours ago we had absolutely nothing. Not even a bowl for her to eat cereal from… but the Red Cross helped us. Without them, we would have nothing. I may not be here without them.”
A neighbor also organized a donation drive to gather furniture and clothes for her family.
“It was the church, my neighbor and the Red Cross. It was that little circle that kept us going,” Cozzone said. “Within two weeks of the fire, we were asking people to stop sending us stuff. We had no room for it.”
Cozzone said Red Crossers worked for weeks to get her family what they needed – from new eyeglasses to prescription medications.
“I told them, there is nothing more you can do for me. The Red Cross has done their part,” Cozzone said. “My family wanted for nothing.”
As Cozzone reflected on Nov. 11, 2020, she remembers the persistent presence of the Red Cross workers.
“The firefighters and police walked away when the fire was out, but the Red Cross stayed,” Cozzone said. “My family mattered that day to somebody. And that somebody was the Red Cross.”
