A Different Attitude Toward Life and Death

One of my hobbies is genealogy. I don’t have much time for it these days, but a chance cyber meeting with a distant relative in Germany motivated me to spend a few hours this weekend rummaging around old nineteenth-century New Orleans birth and death records. It was a sobering experience.

I’m a historian. I know the death rate in New Orleans was twice as high as that of other American cities, thanks to yellow fever and malaria and all the other nasties that used to flourish in subtropical cities. But nothing quite beats reading actual cemetery records. Consider this run from St. Joseph’s Cemetery from a random stretch in 1871:

1 Jan, Joseph Dudley, 1yr5mo, spasms; Charles Weber, 18m, cerebral inflammation; 2 Jan, male child of Annie Gerdes, 1 day, debility; 3 Jan, son of Judge Daly, still born; Joseph Hall, 6 days, tris. noscentium; Joseph Blake, 37 yrs, gunshot wound…

After reading a few years of this, anyone with any empathy is left gasping with agony for those who buried all these babies, all these children, all these young wives and young men. (The gunshot wound is actually a rarity.) One is left wondering, how did anyone survive? And then the inevitable sequel to that thought is, How did those left alive cope will all this death?

As someone who writes historical novels, it was a sobering experience. I found myself looking at the marriage record of a young woman and then her death record some 16 months later in childbirth, and thinking, How many mothers watched their daughters get married and trembled, knowing how easily they might soon lose them to death in childbirth? Or what about the anxious new mother, holding her baby and knowing how easily every little sniffle, every little tummy ache could lead to another trip to the family tomb?

Some causes of death were familiar—lockjaw, burns, consumption, meningitis, pneumonia, gastro enteritis, scarlet fever; others were strange 19th diagnoses—pthisis pulmonalis, pyasmia, marasmus, albuminaria, congestion of the brain, acute nephrotes. A thousand different ways to die. But the question is still, How did those who survived managed to go on living and laughing and making love? How did they create this city that became know as “the city that care forgot” and “the Big Easy”? The obvious answer is, That’s how they coped with all that suffering and sorrow and death. They threw themselves back into life with an abandonment that lingers in their descendents today.

I have a picture of a stern-faced old woman sitting on an old-fashioned couch. Her name is Caroline Holderith Wegmann, and she immigrated from the Bas Rhin region to New Orleans in 1870 at the age of 16. She raised seven children but buried another four. I keep her picture by my desk as a reminder. Whenever I’m tempted to feel sorry for my self or to wine that life is sooo hard, she sits there and tells me I’m her great-granddaughter, and I’m made of sterner stuff.

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.