I can't imagine losing my home. As in absolutely everything. I'd just say fuck it and blow my brains out at that point. Holy shit. I don't know what I would do. I'd literally go insane.
About 10 years ago, I lost my entire gaming collection to a house fire, 25 years worth of collecting from the Odyssey 2 my dad got my brother and I when I was 5 up through my 360 collection I was building and everything in between. Some great memories attached to those pickups as well, from the Mortal Kombat II for SNES that I had to get my older cousin pick up because I was 15 and he was 17 and the Toys R' Us employee was enforcing the label on the game, and things like my Snatcher for Sega CD I picked up from a local game store used for $15, or my copies of Shining Force III and Panzer Dragoon Saga for Saturn I purchased from Babbages as the Saturn was going out in style, and the Dreamcast games I had to selectively purchase, because I was a poor college student and it was either a new game or groceries. And then my post-college pick ups to fill the gaps in my "best of" collections, games I had read about in Nintendo Power or EGM and had always wanted to pick up but didn't couldn't at the time.
In my case, insurance gave me a check for 50% of the value of everything I provided a list of and current resale prices. I was able to recover the other 50% if I provided receipts of whatever I re-purchased. And I had 2 years before time was up on recovering the remaining 50% value.
And that's where things got frustrating, trying to rebuild a sizable collection game by game that was built slowly as systems were current or on their way out (Saturn Netlink Game Packs for 1 penny at Toys R Us, bought enough for all my friends so we could Netlink Virtual On), now having to fight eBay and lose over and over for the games I was interested in picking back up. That's when I gave up trying to rebuild the collection that I had. That's where you'll probably go insane, as that's about where I did.
I eventually gave up and just started buying "game lots" on eBay that I could find deals on, and doing that over and over until I hit the total value I attributed to my collection, and then sorted through duplicates, flipped those on eBay and then used those funds to go after some of the harder to find titles that weren't in the lots I was picking up. That's when I started to drive my wife insane with my alarm always going off on my phone to remind me of eBay auctions about to end.
At the end of the day, and after spending way more than I had intended, I ended up with way more than I originally started with.
Then I went totally insane and decided to scan nearly everything, which was definitely probably some sort of PTSD triggered behavior, though that was fairly cathartic:
http://www.ratigators.com/
Sucks that you have to go through this, I wish you the best of luck in rebuilding your own collection, try to remember it's just stuff at the end of the day, hang out with friends in person or online to try and stay sane in dealing with everything:
