Katrina, 19 Years Later
THIS BLOG started in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. I was browsing the web in October 2005 (on America Online, if you can believe it) and there was an ongoing chat on the question, “Is Katrina fatigue setting in for donors?” I looked at the chat, and most of the posters were in the affirmative. I was shocked to see such sentiment so soon. Katrina had hit New Orleans only ten weeks earlier, and I was still living in the living room of my mother-in-law’s house because my home was destroyed and I was out of both job and home. I posted a comment to the effect of, “New Orleans is still empty! Most of its citizens haven’t come back yet!”
Someone answered me directly. It’s been two months, you guys have gotten plenty of money, it’s time for everyone to move on. You’re on your own. But hey, have a good day.
People who have weathered life-altering events know you don’t just “move on.” It’s been 19 years, and I will freely admit that I have recovered, financially and emotionally, but that doesn’t mean the pain has gone away. Pain from such things never goes away, and it is absurd that anyone would expect that it should. My grandfather died in 1995 and I miss him still. My mother recently told me she thinks about her mother every day without fail, even though she died in 1966. Trauma fades, but it never goes away.
Everyone knows this, but most people don’t act like they know it. We have all had terrible moments that we will never forget. Cancer scares, unexpected deaths. Divorces, personal failures. They know what they carry around, what they mourn. But they still expect other people to just move on from their suffering as if nothing happened. It is a human prejudice: what happens to me is serious, but what happens to others is just life and they need to buck up and get over it.
When I read the posts, I didn’t expect unlimited money to keep flowing into the city of New Orleans. But empathy from people who know what personal trauma feels like (and that is everyone) is not too much is not too much to expect.
So in response to that post, all those years ago, I started this blog. I haven’t kept up with it as religiously as I did in the early years, but it’s still here, and I still keep it alive, out of empathy for the more than a million people who were displaced by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the 1390 people who died in its wake. Some of those dead I knew personally. My neighbor across the street in Meraux, Louisiana, a number of my clinic patients, one patient who died in the hospital, an uncle of a good friend. Even when my posts stray far from the storm (as they almost always do now), I am still thinking of them.
Trauma should never be forgotten. It is a significant part of what it means to be human. To “just move on” is to move on from being human.
You can find photos of my neighborhood of the aftermath of Katrina here.
