Gerard and the storm

[Guest guest]

Janet, your writing about hating the gulf coast weather, and asking if Gerard had had any damage in Katrina, set me to thinking. As I already knew that Gerard stayed in New Orleans, lost his home and spent time in the Super Dome after the storm and before being evacuated to Texas, I have many times wondered how he, and so many others endured it.

I sat in my house on my tree shaded property in sight of the gulf in the 36 hours after Katrina had blown through and wondered how I was going to draw my next breath. The prospect of going through many days without air conditioning seemed unlivable. Add no running water, no flushing toilets, no lights and five dogs (my three, my brother's and one I had been fostering) panting 24 hours a day and needing water for them as well as for ourselves, and the choice to leave was really no choice. I remember it as a horrible time, yet it was nothing to what Gerard and so many thousands experienced. Gerard has told us that a large part of that time is now a blank, and that he arrived in Texas not remembering a large part of the preceeding days. One does not wonder!! If it was hot and muggy here, I cannot bear to think of how it was in that flooded city. I thought of Gerard as a nice person before the storm. Now he is one of my heroes, having endured that nightmare, and picking up and rebuilding his life.

Another set of heroes are my daughter-in-law's eighty-something grandparents, who had lived their entire lives in New Orleans, and over fifty years in the same house. They lost their home and everything in it. They have picked up and resumed life in Dallas near a son, bought a condo there and fly around the country visiting children, grands and great grands. Grandpa resuming his photography hobby, chronicling a large family as he has for so many years, and not thinking about all the thousands of pictures lost to the storm. Like Gerard, made of stuff I don't think I have.

There are books out there full of photographs and stories of the storm and the aftermath. I am a book addict, but have never bought a single one. Keep thinking that I should, but can't. I have always wondered how people got through disasters. I still do.

W