The three Evelyns are bound by blood, by duty and by obvious beauty.

The first Evelyn was a stalwart educator in Los Angeles, born of a Texas family that moved to California in 1879. Her daughter made community her life’s work, raising six children on her own in Altadena.

The third Evelyn in this family’s line was brilliant and opinionated, a lover of horror films and probing into conspiracies.

It is she her mother mourns this Mother’s Day.

Evelyn Cathirell, 85, lost her daughter, Evelyn McClendon, 59, on the night the deadly Eaton Fire rampaged through their town. Their last sight of her was outside East Las Flores Drive. She was packing up her car, almost ready to drive away from the firestorm with the rest of her family. What made her go back into her home no one knows. McClendon, a Loyola Marymount graduate and retired bus driver, was found in her room the next day.

“I’m always surprised when I wake up in the morning,” Cathirell said from her room in a senior living complex in Glendale. “Thank the protector for the people around me, for my son, for my children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”

The extended family will gather in Glendale to celebrate Cathirell and make her feel special and loved this Sunday, her youngest child Zaire Calvin said. They had just celebrated her 85th birthday on April 15.

“I am a tax baby,” Cathirell said with a smile. “I collect on everybody.”

“Every moment means so much because there has been and there continues to be so much uncertainty,” Calvin said.

Of Cathirell’s six children: Dartanion Cathirell; Dana Cathirell; Dawn McClendon; Evelyn McClendon; Guidie Yates and Zaire Calvin, three are gone.

Guydie Yates died in a 1996 shooting, his brother said, months after the family matriarch died from illness. It was a horrible year. The family thought it was its worst until 2025. Another son, Dana, died from complications from Type 2 diabetes in 2019.

And still, her children say, she rises.

Evelyn Gratts was the oldest of five children of Evelyn Thurman Gratts, a  tireless education volunteer for whom an elementary school in downtown Los Angeles is named. By the time this first Evelyn died in 1996, she was known for fighting for schools and not taking no for an answer. People called her “Mrs. Belmont” because of her advocacy for Belmont High.

Her daughter remembers a woman who wanted to help everyone, to share what she had. At one point, she owned 15 properties in the Westlake district, but lost them when tenants couldn’t pay and Gratts allowed them to stay.

“She cared about people,” Cathirell said.

She brought that civic sense and pride in community values to Altadena, where the extended family would eventually own five homes. Four burned in the Eaton Fire.

Cathirell established a karate program at Jackie Robinson Center. Rodney King was her student. So was Ed Neil, who played the green Power Ranger. She can still bust out her kata, hands graceful in choreography. She also served as a chef for celebrities such as Spike Lee.

“She’s lived a lot of lives, and always worked in the community,” Calvin said. “I admire her resilience. She’s been through tough times and she just always uplifted us and gave us hope. She is so strong.”

Cathirell helped establish Masjid Al-Taqwa, the mosque in Altadena, which opened in the 1970s, finding in the Moslem faith what the rest of her family cherished in their Christianity.

“Live well and obey the creator, protect what is yours to support, your babies, your town,” she said.

While her tribe is scattered now, her youngest son finds himself the keeper of Black Altadena’s spirit. Calvin, who is a coach at Oaks Christian School in Westlake Village and founder of the nonprofit Xtreme Athletics, is mobilizing support to make sure the Altadena of his youth is rebuilt. For now, he drives hours to visit his mother in Glendale and his own family in Jurupa Valley. He returns to his hometown often, too, marking the first of the family’s lots to be cleared by the Army Corps of Engineers this week.

The family were among the first to sue Southern California Edison, one of more than 100 lawsuits blaming the utility’s equipment for igniting the devastating blaze that destroyed more than 9,000 structures and killed at least 18 people. SCE has said it is conducting a “comprehensive review” of the data collected from the system, in coordination with third-party experts, and “will move forward as quickly as possible in analyzing results.”

In Altadena, the family lived steps from one another. His mother has never been separated from him, Calvin said.

“We’re not okay, this is insane,” he said of the months, “which feels like 10 years,” since the fire. “We will only start to be okay when we build our own community back the way we want. None of this will be normal until we get back home.”

His mother nods as he recounts how she would point to Altadena’s mountains and talk about how life has its hills and valleys, peaks and drops “and you have to be prepared for both,” Calvin said. “It doesn’t matter who you are, you have to live through them.”

For her part, Evelyn’s eyes light up when she talks about karate, or her beautiful Altadena or her daughter, whose nickname was “Petey,” although an aunt says she can’t remember why.

Evelyn reminds her son about watching Gene Wilder in “Young Frankenstein” and how they laughed, just like they did at their home on Las Flores Drive.  It is a little thing that isn’t so little. And on days meant to be special like Mother’s Day, it’s everything.

“I survived a lot and it was no joke,” Cathirell said. “But the creator has his plans and you just have to be open.”