Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Lives were changed 10 years ago

Ten years ago at this time, I was completing a cover story for one of the New Orleans newspapers' high school preseason football edition on a team from the downtown edition of the newspaper.
        It was to run the Thursday before the regular season began. I thought it was a really fine piece of work. It never ran. Because 10 days after I finished the piece, all heck broke loose in New Orleans.
        A little distraction called Hurricane Katrina happened.
       Katrina became a Cat 2 hurricane, near Cat 3 in late August 2005. It entered the Gulf, stirring up fear and surf all along the Gulf Coast. I didn't take much notice because I had been through this before and the hurricanes always turned. I was covering a high school jamboree, an exhibition of sorts, on a Friday night, August 27, when I first heard the word Katrina. I was told that it was coming towards us.
     The next morning, like so many, we left for what I assumed would be a few days at most.     We didn't take clothing or such. Katrina made shore August 29.
It had seemed we had dodged a bullet perhaps because it had weakened right before shore.
Then came the levee breeches.
Then came the flooding.
We wound up being gone for a month.
         In some ways, we never went back. Our lives were without question changed.
         I had a Katrina moment recently after reading a story in the paper. Those of us who lived through Katrina, and then Rita, still do, you know, have those moments.
         It only takes a bit to bring back the edge of grief. It really doesn’t take much.We didn't lose a house, at least immediately. We didn't flood. We lost a fence, had trees blown into our above-ground pool, but our roof remained, the only one on our street to do so.
         But we lost the closeness of our family, and with grandchildren everywhere, we only see them now by driving five hours instead of a few miles. Because of Katrina. That hated witch.
For a year afterwards, we were literal victims. Though I loved what I did and where I wound up after we sold our house and moved, I didn't choose to leave my friends or my church. Katrina did that for me. It always hurts when decisions are taken out of your hands.
Obviously there were people with much, much greater losses. But we've all had to live with this for a  decade.It weighed on all of us in one way or another for quite a while. Concern for loved ones or for ourselves doubled and tripled and eventually crippled some. Debris, trees still down without being cut, houses still not gutted, houses lying on their sides, businesses gone, all that weighed on us.It did not go away, fast or otherwise.
Ten years ago, Katrina had come and gone and things were not that bad. Then, suddenly, the levees broke and things were worse than anyone thought they could be. It isn't often that a person can pinpoint a day that their life changed forever. I can. It was this date.
A bit more than nine years ago on the first anniversary of the storm, I wrote this for a New Orleans newspaper:
Today I will journey into the city. I will head directly into areas that have few people still. I will go to a high school that is a shell of itself, though it has certainly fared better than most. I will talk to persons who were forced into exile a year ago. I will talk to them about their return, about what they lost and what they will never regain.      
It disturbs me daily that people have to meet to make a plan to make a plan. It disturbs me that there is no one who will simply step up to the plate and say, this isn't cutting it. We need to rebuild. Or this isn't worth it, we're not rebuilding, we're bulldozing.   
It's been a year. People are dying from stress, literally. People are not dealing with the pain and the loss and they're taking their own lives in some instances.
And we talk, seriously, about comedy shows and fireworks.
My Utmost for His Highest says: Faith must be tested because it can be turned into a personal possession only through conflict...Faith is unutterable trust in God, trust which never dreams that He will not stand by us.
Friends, we (in all shapes and sizes) made it through. Some of us were lost, lives and/or souls. 
We went charging into the valley of the shadow of death, which was flooded by the way, and we swam out the other side.
 I trust we are better for it. I trust that our faith, all of us no matter our circumstances, has been tested and it is now our personal possession to fall back upon when the next storm, big or small, comes blowing into our lives.

The Book of Nehemiah ends sort of weirdly. There is no end, really. Life just goes on.
 Maybe that's the real secret to be found here, the real answer.
 Life goes on. Storms come and go, but life, even hard life, must go on.This decade has come and gone, the most adventuresome of our married life of 30 years. We have moved on and on and on. But what I've finally figured out, really figured out, is that we follow a God who can and does.
I have come to learn a few things, only a few, but one of them is the fact is I will always be in grieving for a lost life that maybe wouldn't have been any better than the one we eventually have lived. Now, I understand intellectually that God has placed me where He wanted me. But my heart, my heart?
         As I write, I'm listening to a cut of one of my son's CD, Too Old Now, and I can't get those words out of my mind. I was, in many, many ways too old to start over, too old to wander and probably too old to wonder.
         But I lived through a hurricane that killed others and missed by just mere miles being affected by a flood that galvanized a nation and shrunk a great America city by thousands.
         What can the next decade possibly bring?


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