My sister and father came through Hurricane Ida unscathed. There was one tree that fell near the house, but its fall was broken by another tree, so not a ton of damage that we can tell at this point.
They are currently without power, and because Dad is in a rural part of St. Tammany Parish, he likely won’t see power restored for another week or two. Linemen are heroes, for sure, but their focus is getting power back to the larger population centers first. Side streets are not seen as a priority.
Dad doesn’t complain about the heat, though my sister feels like she is melting. I know I’d feel like I was melting too.
For those of you following me, I will, at some point, change the layout of this blog. . .I just haven’t spent a lot of time navigating WordPress and went for a simple theme.
Sixteen years ago, Hurricane Katrina made landfall, and we all know the devastation it wrought on the city of New Orleans, my hometown.
Two and a half weeks prior to Katrina making landfall, I moved from Houston, Texas to Calgary, Alberta Canada for a new job, and was all of a sudden many thousands of miles away. Sitting in my office on Monday, the 29th of August, I kept tabs on the progression of the storm and tried not to worry about my family, who were still in Louisiana.
I felt helpless.
My parents lived north of New Orleans by about an hour and a half, while my sister lived west of New Orleans proper. She sheltered at Mom and Dad’s, so at least they were all together. In addition to my sister, Mom and Dad also provided shelter to a former neighbor’s adult daughter.
We don’t worry so much about flooding where my parents’ house is, but the property is six acres of beautiful land with big trees. Wind damage was (and is) the primary concern.
As events in the city unfolded once the storm passed, I could not reach my parents by phone or email. I tried not to let worry get the better of me and felt a huge sense of relief when the adult daughter’s parents called and let me know that my parents had no phone service, but they were ok. (I am not sure how she got through to her parents…perhaps she had cell service.)
Three days later, I finally got a call from Dad as he and his neighbor Jim made it to Baton Rouge to get gasoline to run chain saws. It took them nearly three days to clear the road to the main highway. No one had power unless they had a generator.
Mom and Dad lost 70% of their roof and had some water damage due to rain falling through the roof and ceiling. They lost a lot of massive hardwood trees. One tree grazed the corner of their house, but aside from that, every single other felled tree missed the house, barn and shop.
Compared to those in New Orleans proper? Mom and Dad were virtually unscathed. They came out of the storm with their lives.
August 2020
Hurricane Laura barreled through Lake Charles on August 27th. I’ve driven past Lake Charles countless times on my way between my parents’ and Houston. When she made landfall, she was a Category 4 hurricane.
The weekend after Laura hit, my friend and I went to Lake Charles to volunteer with Rescue Houston (who were helping the Cajun Navy) and help with clean-up. As we approached Orange, Texas, we started to see the impact of the storm. As we drew closer, the impact became more and more obvious. Trees were stripped bare of leaves. Many trees were snapped in half.
Instead of the lush green of late summer, it looked like the middle of winter unless you looked too closely, then it looked more like a war zone. Downtown Lake Charles did look like a war zone, with glass everywhere, and the remnants of a large antenna crumpled across a city block. The main high-rise building, primarily made of glass, looked as if a bomb had gone off at its base, as all the lower windows looked to be blown out.
We arrived at the meeting point at about 10 am, and it was already hot and humid. It took nearly two hours to get groups and gear organized, but then we were sent out with a list of addresses, food, and beverages (for us and residents), and one task: help clear debris, tarp roofs and aid people as best we could.
I don’t remember how many houses we stopped off at that day, but only a couple had anyone there when we arrived. No matter where we went, there was the stench of death. I didn’t look too hard for the source. . .I had no desire to make that kind of discovery.
Thunderstorms were moving in, so everyone was called back to base at about 5 pm. We headed back to Houston.
One year on, Lake Charles is still a mess.
August 2021
On the anniversary of Katrina, Louisiana is facing another monster of a storm: Hurricane Ida. My sister and her friend Wayne are sheltering with Dad at the same house he was in during Katrina. I am in Houston. Again, I’m watching from afar.
I didn’t live through the storm of Katrina, but I certainly was hit with massive amounts of anxiety. I don’t often have anxiety attacks, but one hit last night. I tried breathing exercises. I tried spinning poi (old hobby of mine). I tried playing video games. It took ages for me to try and center. I’m not sure I ever really did, as I barely managed to sleep last night.
The first thing I did this morning (after maybe 3 hours of sleep), was check the Storm Radar app to see where Ida was, and then going to the National Hurricane Center (https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/) to see how big of a beast Ida became overnight. No surprise: it was a cat 4.
Queue up the anxiety express once again. Perhaps I should have avoided coffee, though it’s allowed me to put words to paper, and work through some of the anxiousness.
Throughout the day, I’ve watched the seemingly slow progress of Ida. At 9 PM tonight, the NHC was reporting maximum sustained winds of 110, which is still significant.
Power is out to all of Orleans Parish due to catastrophic damage to transfer systems for Entergy. It may well take weeks to get power restored to the city.
News stations are primarily focused on New Orleans, and maybe Baton Rouge, but it is Houma and Thibodaux (and nearby towns)that very likely took the hardest hit of the storm.
Power was out at Dad’s by late this afternoon. Fortunately, he has a generator that is connected to his home, and a very large propane tank. I have no idea how long the generator can run, because his home may well be without proper power for days, if not weeks.
Looking at the radar, the worst is yet to come for my family. I don’t think I’ll sleep much tonight. My anxiety is pegged, and I’m already working from a sleep deficit thanks to only 3 hours of sleep last night.
I very much dislike uncertainty. Tonight is filled with uncertainty.
August 28, 2021. It has been eighty-seven days since my mom passed away.
I told myself I’d write about my journey through grief, but up to this point, I haven’t been able to make myself sit down and write, or if I did, nothing came to me. Even this attempt has had several false starts.
I found myself writing about the facts of what happened, but not about what I’ve felt or experienced in the days since. Am I trying to avoid facing my emotions? I honestly don’t know. I don’t feel like I’m running from my feelings, but nor am I dwelling in them.
My Mom in Alberta
The Facts Please
Mom had advanced COPD. Technically, she was in pulmonary failure. By about April, Mom had been in the hospital more than she’d been home, each time because of significant difficulty breathing. In the middle of a pandemic, Mom was not fighting Covid, but fighting her own dying lungs.
To complicate things, Mom broke her hip.
Dad had his own health issues, and we were in the process of getting him diagnosed and treated for Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (NPH). He had surgery to help alleviate its symptoms, and at one point, both my parents were in different hospitals at the same time. In fact, I spent most of Mother’s Day with Dad in the ER to follow up with complications from his surgery.
There is a part of me that wonders if I knew how little time we had if I would have changed my plans. The key words? ‘If I only knew.’
Fast forward a couple of weeks.
The afternoon of Mom’s passing, in early June, I was in Oregon, visiting my partner. Mom was recovering from her broken hip, and had been admitted to the hospital a few days earlier for a blood clot. She was on the mend from the clot when she had a bowel obstruction. It seemed she was on the mend from that, but then I got a text from my sister that something was up with Mom.
I called her nurse. Mom was unresponsive. Her glucose levels had plummeted. They had given her glucose, and we were going to wait and see what happened. Oh and she had changed her mind from the previous month when she’d said she wanted them to do everything they could so that she would live.
Mom had a DNR. I was asked if I wanted to honor it.. That Mom had a DNR was news to me given the conversation we’d had at the end of March.
Holy shit. Her nurse asked me if I wanted them to keep Mom alive.
Did I want to honor the DNR?
If she’d absolutely changed her mind, then yes. I felt uncertainty because it wasn’t what she’d discussed with Dad and me. .I wanted to honor her wishes, but at the same time, I didn’t want to lose my mom. She’d always been a fighter. Had she really decided it was time?
Uncertainty and anxiety came crashing in on me, but I knew I wanted to honor her wishes. I needed to be certain. She was unresponsive, so the only person we could check with was the hospital minister, who also happened to be standing in for our family’s regular minister, who was on vacation. The nurse was going to track him down for me.
After I got off the phone with the nurse, a call came in from the rehab facility. Could Dad’s friend take him to visit Mom?
I understand why facilities need to get that kind of permission, but for fuck’s sake. . .Mom was dying and asking for Dad. YES. For the love of EVERYTHING, YES.
The nurse called. The glucose worked, and Mom was lucid. The hospital minister confirmed she had changed her mind and was at peace with the DNR. She asked for Dad.
Part of me thought we were out of the woods. I thought Mom was still a fighter, and she was going to be ok. Another part of me, though, had a feeling that this time was different.
In the midst of everything, I was trying to figure out how to get home. My partner was by my side, talking things out with me. I booked a flight home the very next morning: it was the best I could do.
I don’t know how much time had passed since the first call where she was unresponsive. An hour may have passed, perhaps more? The afternoon was a blur. Sometime after I booked my return flight, my phone rang again.
Mom was gone.
My world closed in on me. I remember looking to my partner and telling her I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to leave. I knew, though, that I had to . . .I needed to be there for Dad and my sister.
I knew everything was going to be different. I had no idea how different.
Notice how I still focused on facts more so than emotions?
The truth is, my emotions were a jumble that Wednesday, and in the aftermath, I struggle recalling exactly what I felt, though I do know I felt fear, sadness and love.
Making Sense of Emotions
I think part of me struggles with the fact that I was a couple of thousand miles away when Mom died, but at the same time. . .I was not alone. In fact, I think it was the first time I wasn’t alone when receiving such heavy news.
I was held with such love throughout the afternoon by my partner. She simply held me in the moments after receiving the news of Mom’s passing. She’d been the voice of logic and reason when trying to sort out travel to Louisiana. In the days and weeks since, she has been a rock for me, even when she’s walked a hard and heavy path of her own. For her unwavering love, I am so very grateful.
Just about thirteen hours after Mom passed away, I was waiting for a flight to take me to New Orleans to be with my family.
But how did I feel?
A mix of numbness and sadness. The numbness was perhaps shock. Perhaps not. Disbelief? Though, to me, disbelief is akin to shock, in a way.
Travel from Oregon to Louisiana was a blur. The next several days were a blur with everything that we needed to sort out for Mom’s funeral. Thankfully, she and Dad had taken care of almost everything in terms of funeral arrangements.
I know I dreaded the day of her funeral. There were times where I felt like a cartoon character digging my heels in to avoid going off a cliff, yet momentum and cartoon physics were against me.
I dreaded the funeral because I knew the hardest times would come in the days and months after.
I wanted to write about the grieving process as I was going through it, but I couldn’t bring myself to write about it until eighty-some-odd days after Mom passed. And even now, I find it hard to actually write about what I feel beyond deep sadness. Coupled with that, though, is a sense of relief that Mom is no longer struggling to breathe and she is at peace.
Perhaps next time, I will tell you more about my Mom and her fierce spirit and contagious smile.
Perhaps next time, I’ll even tell you a bit more about me.
No guarantees on how often I will post here. No guarantees on how often I will change the way this site looks, or what content I put here. Right now? It’s just where I randomly ramble.
Random Ramblings of a Wandering Mind 