A Hurricane Katrina Reflection
I couldn’t believe my eyes. Before me stood the orange brick skeleton of the house I grew up in, the house that held every moment of my childhood memories. Windows were knocked out. Drapes and blinds were gone. Doors gaped open. Random pieces of our things were scattered about. A colorful aquarium that once held tropical fish was beached on the crackly, ash-gray lawn. A plastic, yellow trashcan from the back bathroom decorated the decimated flowerbed. An unmarked CD, probably from my teenage daughter’s room, glinted at the curb.
Inside, only the two glass-block columns that formed the base remained of the huge, apple-red Formica kitchen table and its booth-style seats where we had shared hundreds of family dinners. My sister and I had crawled under that table to hide or play as children. As proof, our names were scrawled in lead on its underside, as were our brothers’ before us, my niece’s and nephew’s after us, and my daughter’s after them. The antique Chambers® stove, upon which my maternal grandmother had prepared gallons of creamy red beans, dozens of stewed chickens, pounds of fried catfish, pots of collard greens — virtually every meal of my young life — was gone. We had planned to have the iconic stove refurbished. It had lasted one lifetime; we thought it would last another.
The piano we all learned to play, the clarinets I played in elementary through high school, and the violin my daddy played every Sunday at church were all missing. Dozens of classic vinyl jazz and gospel albums were gone. Hundreds of books kept on the built-in library shelves were nowhere in sight. Even the shelves had been removed. Over the previous eight months, I had painstakingly sorted, reorganized, and restored that literary treasury from which I had learned to read and my mother had read to us. It contained hundred-year-old volumes that once belonged to my paternal grandmother, novels, collections, and professional volumes from my daddy’s counseling practice. All were gone. The front door was wide open and I could see daylight clear to the back of what once was a home so roomy, visitors often declared they could get lost in it, and whose façade was so distinctive, tourists stopped to take photographs standing in front of it.
No longer filled with the familiar traces of our family’s life, the house’s vacancy shook me. I stared, trying to be sure this was our house, hoping that, somehow, I had stopped in the wrong block, in front of the wrong house, disoriented by the uniformity of the devastation blanketing our beloved neighborhood. On street after street in block after block, house after house stood equally vacant, equally exposed, equally ruined, representing lives equally as shaken as ours. But this was our house and, not only was it destroyed, it was empty. The accumulation of forty-six years of family life — clothes, photos, books, furniture, documents, jewelry, music — every representation of our lives, treasured or forgotten, was gone. Someone had gutted our home to the rafters and cleared out its contents without our knowledge or permission. We didn’t know who had done it, nor when. The entire contents of our home had been carted away and there was nothing we could do about it.
I had been to the house before. A couple of months after hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans in August 2005, my eighty-four year old mother and I had made the pilgrimage from central Louisiana back home to survey the damage first-hand. Before then, we had seen photos of the house, taken by our neighbor’s son when he had gone back. We had been warned of the smell, the mess, the danger, and the stillness. Nothing was living or moving except swarms of gnats. What we found on that trip, a week before Thanksgiving, was bad (really bad), smelly (really smelly), wet, slippery, and horrifying — but expected. We had seen the photos. The floodwaters that filled the city in the aftermath of the storm had steeped in our home, roof-high, for two and a half weeks, saturating the walls, ceilings, floors, woodwork and everything within them, down to the framework. Our neighborhood had been among the last areas drained.
On that first trip, my mother and I retrieved what we could from the rubble over three days. Debris barred access to some of the rooms we knew held salvageable items, so we knew we’d need to come back when we had some help, plus we learned that we’d be required to have the house cleared and gutted. Some outfits were charging thousands of dollars to do the job, others a hundred dollars per room. Grants finally became available for some organizations to offer the service free of charge and, three months after our initial visit, we began trying to make arrangements for our house to be cleaned out. We emphasized to each group we contacted that we needed to be on hand when they gutted. There were things we still wanted to retrieve, items we still needed to sort and salvage. The drive from Alexandria was only three hours, so we could drop everything and get there with just a few hours notice. Every one of the organizations maintained it would be at least five weeks before they could get to our house and agreed that they would call us ahead of time. What I couldn’t fully express to them at the time was that, buried in the muck with the ruined furniture, melted photos, and mildewed clothes, were memories we still needed to recapture before we could throw our things away.
In March, two weeks after contacting the first organizations, I visited New Orleans to see a friend in a play. I did not plan to stop by the house on that trip, but on a whim, I had a friend take me by there. No one had called us. No one had emailed us. No one had sent us a message. We hadn’t heard from any of the organizations, yet there stood our house, not the soggy wreck we had left it a few months before, but stripped bare and naked. There was no telltale sign of who had tramped through our house and disposed of our things. No evidence that our things ever existed, save a random piece of this or that. In shock, I entered the house and walked through what used to be walls, saw daylight through what used to be ceilings, followed the outline of what used to be rooms.
Gutted is the appropriate term. The house, without the flesh of walls and ceilings seemed smaller somehow, eviscerated. Without the substance of bedrooms, kitchen, den, living, dining, and other rooms, it lacked vital organs. Without us, my mother, my daughter, and me — the portion of our family coursing its hallways at the time of the storm — it had no life.
There is a place near hopelessness to where your spirit can plummet when you feel utterly helpless, when it feels like your feet have been knocked out from under you and even the ground you expected to hit is not there. You just keep falling. I came dangerously close to that place, standing on the curb in front of our house that day. For weeks afterward, I found myself weepy, randomly, for no apparent reason. Even now, not a day goes by that I don’t remember something or someone that I will never see again, touch, or hold. Just a few months before, standing amid the damp wreckage of our home with my mother, decked out in our hazmat gear, boots, gloves, and face masks, I had not felt this.
Here is what many may not understand and what I didn’t understand myself, at first: It is not the things themselves that I mourn. I mourn the moments of my life they represented and the memories that will fade faster without those things in sight or reach. I mourn the stories that my grandchildren will not know because a photo, memento, or reminder no longer exists. I mourn the tangible history embodied in those things carted away from us by people who, for a bit of cash, thought no more of them than water-soaked rubbish. Ecclesiastes 3 speaks of a time to keep and a time to throw away. I mourn having neither the chance to keep my memories nor the opportunity to throw my own things away.
Nothing in that house was more valuable than the health and lives of my family and me. I am enormously grateful for our safety. But standing on the curb in front of our desolate home, I felt the violation of being robbed of something irreplaceable. Psalm 103 describes our days as grass — we flourish like flowers, then we are gone. James 4 likens our lives to mist that appears for only a little while, then vanishes. Our things — my things — were markers in the mist along the journey of my life. Some things should be discarded. Other things we do well to keep. Memories fade. Yet our things, our “stuff,” can remind us where we have been and what we learned there, where we are going and why, whom we have loved and how. Surrounded by those things, those markers, we can see our way through the mist a little more clearly.
The third chapter of Ecclesiastes reminds us also that weeping and mourning have their own time. There is even a time for tearing down. That time for me began on that day in March on the curb in front of our dismantled home. But the wisdom in Ecclesiastes points us also to laughter, dancing, and rebuilding.
In recent weeks I gathered with groups of friends and family from New Orleans, now scattered across the country. Together we cried and we prayed. We shared and mourned each other’s losses. We held each other tightly. We laughed and sang and celebrated each other’s blessings. Through conversations, stories, and bits and pieces of salvaged things, we accompanied each other to places where memory someday will cease to go, and began building new ones. We danced.
The journey from Katrina has brought me to the depths and heights of emotion. Standing before our empty house, I felt like I was freefalling into oblivion, to find only later that, that wide-open space with no walls or boundaries was really God’s limitless grace. The losses still hurt and the road ahead still appears endless, without a clear destination. But through God’s grace, his mercy, his provision, and his providence, I have learned that the times for weeping and dancing are sometimes one and the same. I always felt God’s hand guiding and directing me in the midst of the storm. Now, I’m also learning to follow his lead and dance in the midst of my tears.
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Author’s Note:
For the occasion of the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Angelia Stone, publisher of Hope Magazine, asked me to write about my experience and reflections, one year later. It was a difficult article to write. Much of the loss was still so raw. Nineteen years have passed since I penned the article “Dancing While Weeping.” Much has changed. Many things have happened. My daughter, a teenager then, has grown into a beautiful woman. My mother, then in her mid-80s, is now a beloved ancestor. Our home in New Orleans, then gutted and ruined, has been rebuilt and restored and serves often as a haven for others needing safety and comfort. I have explored my creative passions through a variety of endeavors, built relationships and, since our evacuation there, made a home in Alexandria, Louisiana.
Now twenty years later, even as then, amid the continued ache of indescribable loss — the loss of home, the loss of community, the loss of family and friends now scattered and passed on — the overarching emotion is gratitude: for the immeasurable blessings of life, of health, of new friendships, of new community, of new opportunities, of growth. For the myriad ways God has kept me and my family, I am grateful. Though the loss remains palpable and the tears still fall, I am STILL DANCING!
Published in Hope Magazine, September/October 2006 for the occasion of the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Reposted here on the occasion of Katrina’s 20th anniversary
By: Karen Riley Simmons
