Burying Katrina's Dead

I read in the paper this morning that the New Orleans city cemeteries are still not digging graves or lowering coffins into graves; any families wishing to bury loved ones need to take care of those little details themselves.

The article brought back painful memories of the death of my Aunt Clair last fall. Aunt Clair was 94, but she was still in good shape before the storm. She evacuated to Shreveport with my cousin Robert and his family three days before the storm, then spent about a month after Katrina living in a motel room with my Uncle Jiggs, his wife Lillian, Lillian’s sister, four cats and two dogs. It sounds hellish, but I understand she took it well, enjoyed the animals, and loved going out to eat every night. What she didn’t take well was the daily news reports of what was happening to the city she loved. When Lillian drove home in early October, she had to take Aunt Clair straight to the emergency room of the only hospital then functioning in the city. She was dying.

I remember sitting next to her hospital bed one day when a member of the staff stopped by to chat and apologize for the orange blanket on my aunt's bed. It seems their regular laundry service had been knocked out by the storm, so they were forced to get their blankets from FEMA. I looked at my dying aunt lying under that orange FEMA blanket, and thought, I didn’t need to know this!

Amongst all the other problems, worries, and sorrows we were dealing with in those days was the concern of what we would do with Aunt Clair when she died. At first, the cemetery where she had her plot was underwater. But even when the water went down, the cemetery was still closed (what the flood did to the area cemeteries was nasty). Aunt Clair held on for more weeks than any one expected her to, but not long enough. When she died, the family had to bury her in a country cemetery in a parish up the river.

So it was quite a shock for me to realize that people are still having to deal with this. Families are hiring their own laborers to dig the graves, with the pallbearers lowering the coffins themselves. And because the state only requires coffins to be buried 14 inches deep, that’s the depth they’re digging to.

I don’t want to think about what’s going to happen if we get another hurricane.