Remembering Hurricane Katrina 13 years later (The Abridged Version)
*Ya'll Know how I do love a multi-sensory experience, so if you're inclined, press play before you read.
The day was hot as a Mississippi summer afternoon can get. A heat so intense your clothes and hair clung to you in damp desperation and the air felt like you were peeking at a pie in the oven. I stood on my toes and reached for the overnight bag on the top shelf of my walk-in closet. A closet so big I had placed a vintage pink vinyl button-tufted settee plumb in the middle of, just so that I might sit and admire all of my shoes and pretty things. My fingers found the bag and pulled it down to the floor. What should I pack? A pretty dress, of course and Jimmy Choo black strappy heels. A bathing suit because I planned to spend my time lounging at the pool, and one regular outfit. I hastily added a couple of magazines and costume necklaces, walking past the journal I had been keeping since I was 18. Walking past my wedding album, walking past my birth certificate and my wedding certificate and my social security card because I didn't need those. I would be back the next day after this had all blown over, of course.
Of course. I see myself there now, 25 and filled up to overflowing with certainty and naivete, I KNEW I was coming right back home. This storm would be just like all of the others we had that summer. All bark and no bite and so many of them we packed everything up and left and nothing happened, not even rain. And so we, or me, called nature's bluff. I'm coming right back. I'll be back tomorrow. If only I knew then that there would be no tomorrow, not in the way I would ever know tomorrow again anyway. This day would be the benchmark for the rest of my life. Human civilization has BC and AD and I would have Before Katrina and After Katrina. Nothing would ever be the same.
Two dogs and one overnight bag all packed into a red VW station wagon and I reluctantly headed north against my will. I had said I was staying, I stomped my foot and threw a fit and insisted on staying. "NOTHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN!" I cried.
"You have to leave, this isn't up for debate," said my husband who had to remain behind on base as part of the emergency medical team. Pets weren't allowed on the base shelters so I took my Pomeranian, Fairway and my Italian Greyhound, Magnum and my friend and myself along with her cat said goodbye to our beachfront homes and headed north to her parent's house in Brandon, Mississippi. I left behind my cat, Richard Parker and my Canary, Peep Twain and a large salt water aquarium, because I was coming right back. Oh my heart! If only I could do that one thing all over again, I would spare the few lives that I could amidst the massive death toll that was to come. But don't we all have those moments in life? The sometimes excruciating clarity of hindsight pierces our heart with the I should have's or I wish I would have's. We all have those moments, but they aren't always a matter of life and death for each of us. Sometimes you never know. I know now and I wish I would have...
We drank sodas and played loud music with the windows down singing to strangers in cars beside us on the congested road north full of other evacuees. When we finally made it to Brandon and my friend's parent's house, we let the dogs out to run and play. It was a beautiful afternoon, the kind of beautiful caused by a heat that gives birth to the most amazing clouds that give birth to relieving, pop-up thunderstorms. One such storm had just passed by and as I stood watching the clouds I noticed the largest double rainbow I had ever seen and at that very moment, a butterfly landed on my hand and I heard the voice of my God say, "remember my promise. This is a covenant that I will never flood the Earth again."
Oh my twenty-something self didn't know what to make of all that. "Ok. Whatever. I don't know what that has to do with me although it is quite beautiful. All these pretty things you made, I do love them so.' The creator has such a talent for foreshadowing, if only we could always see it. Little did I know what was coming in less than 24 hours.
We watched the destruction unfold on the TV until we lost power and then we turned on a battery-powered radio and listened by candlelight. I remember staring at the screen with my mouth agape before it went black and thinking, "that thing is covering the entire state at once. Holy shit. Jeremy was right." It was the biggest storm I had ever seen, the biggest any of us had ever seen. That night, in the dark, by the light of a candle, in the stifling Mississippi heat, I went to sleep with my high school friend making shadow puppets dance on the wall to candle light. I learned in those moments, like I have learned so many times since, that sometimes laughter really is the medicine you need to keep the dark at bay.
This was the view from the back side (facing away from the water) of our apartment.
The days that followed were spent without power and gasoline and with my ear glued to that battery radio, listening for any shred of information that would let me know if Jeremy was alive or dead because for days I didn't know. The public radio station in the town we had left gave disparaging descriptions of once familiar landmarks. All were lost, complete devastation had occurred and the collective heartache was palpable through the airwaves. We cooked all of our meals over a flame and we played cards and drank beer by candlelight at night, waiting for the world to be put right again.
An arial view of our little beach town. The ocean came and took most of it back with it, leaving little more than piles of debris and concrete slabs.
On the third day after the storm I got a phone call from a number I didn't recognize and upon answering I heard a wavering, obviously elderly voice on the other end. "Is this Jill?"
"It is," I cautiously replied.
"This is your husband's commander, Dan Regan's father, I just want to tell you that he is OK. They're living in the dental clinic and they're all alive."
There are moments in your life that are seared into your memory for the rest of your days. That phone call was one of them for me. I exhaled for what felt like the first time in days, releasing a burden I didn't even know I was carrying. He was alive! It would be years before I heard the full measure of his Katrina story, but what story it is! If I ever doubted that my husband was a hero, I am now certain of it.
A survivor walks through the rubble. This shot may have been weeks or months after the storm. Normalcy took years to resume.
When I was finally able to get a few moments through on the phone to him, I desperately asked, "when can I come home?"
"There is no home anymore. You need to go to your parents for now." He replied sadly.
And so I did. It would be months before we would see each other's faces again, he living out of his dental clinic office by light powered by generators and food provided by a ransacked commissary and me in my old bedroom in my parent's house, once again under their roof though by such unexpected circumstances.
Eventually we found an apartment north of where the worst of the damage had occurred and some time after that, as the world began to be put to right again with the speed of paint-drying in a rainstorm, we found ourselves a house and bought it, leaving behind the concrete slab of memories Katrina had bequeathed us.
Sometimes I would go to the beach after the largest of the debris had been cleared from the reachable sea and stare at the water asking it why. WHY. In the line of foam and debris that the waves left behind there would be tiny bones for months on end. Thousands upon thousands of little bones, likely belonging to animals but some big enough to be human, laying there like some tragic kind of flotsam, remnants and reminders of the tragedy we had all endured. A tragedy that many of us didn't survive.
I only cried once and then I was done. It was nine months after the storm, the day we found out my husband's 19 year old brother had been killed in a terrible car accident. I was pregnant, having decided I'd seen enough death for one lifetime and needing to bring life into this world. I had lost both of my remaining grandparents only a few months before and I didn't think I could take any more hurt. And then that news. I held my husband in our empty kitchen as he cried and I felt myself shattering somewhere deep and fragile.
"HELP ME! I cannot bear it!" I cried out to God in my heart.
And then I remembered the rainbow and the promise I had seen the day before the storm. It meaning nothing to me in those blissfully ignorant moments. I wasn't even the same person then as I was standing in that kitchen, having gained the wisdom and maturity only certain kinds of pain can forge.
"Remember my promise," He spoke to my heart.
And, through the tears, I understood the thing that has come to mean more to me than any other lesson I have learned in my nearly 40 years on this Earth. My dearest friend, my most cherished teacher, is the pain that I endure. Every trial produces fruit if our hearts are full of fertile soil. Does that mean it doesn't HURT LIKE HECK?! No way! You are allowed to feel that pain, be IN it, accept it, and then LET IT GO and look for the lesson. Life is always teaching us if we are looking for it.
And now, here I sit, on an island surrounded by another sea, in a house filled with children and animals and more love than I ever imagined and I thank God every day for the pain He allowed me to endure. I stand on the other side of that great storm and count it as one of my most dear blessings in life. I learned at that tender and silly age what really matters in life and it wasn't Jimmy Choo shoes or overnight bags packed with pretty things. It is the precious people we are blessed to know and gifted with a finite amount of time to spend together. I have stared down death and it doesn't frighten me in the way it once did. I know how to love and let go, and for those painful lessons my broken heart remains forever grateful and eternally blessed.
And here we are, all these years later, stronger than ever, our characters having been forged through trials of the soul-piercing kind.