Hurricane Katrina left a lot of damage and destruction in its wake. I love New Orleans, there is something about that city that feels like home to me, and my career took a very different trajectory as a direct result of the storm that devastated it so. I started working for funeral directors while the flood waters were rising, working at the national association, watching firsthand how funeral service responded, immediately, on the ground before federal operations had even really gotten a foothold. Being a part of that response is the kind of thing that changes how you look at the world, as clichéd as that sounds. The national association mobilized trucks of supplies, sent in teams of funeral directors to relieve the local men and women who were struggling to serve their communities when many of them had lost everything themselves, and I was really proud to be a part of that in some small way.
Eighty-five of the dead were left in morgues, long after the waters receded, and the rebuilding had begun. Unidentifiable or unclaimed, they seemed to me to be a testament to everything we promised we would do and failed. Plans were made to build a permanent memorial, a place to remember all who had lost in the storm and its aftermath, a place to finally lay the dead to rest. Fundraising was slow to start, until funeral service stepped in via the Foundation and became the largest single private contributor to the effort. The first large donor, it enabled the project to secure the site on the grounds of the former Charity Hospital Cemetery, and to pursue other funding. This is what funeral directors do, you see. Honor the dead while caring for the living.
Five years ago, as New Orleans was battening down the hatches to prepare for Gustav, I flew into a city still shell-shocked but fighting back to entomb the dead. Plans for a full jazz funeral were scrapped because of the oncoming storm, but there was something equally powerful about the lone trumpeter, who sang the bodies home. At 9:38, the time the levies had been breached in 2005, bells rang out in the cemetery, in the city. It was all you could hear.
It didn’t get much media coverage outside of the region. Why would it? The nation tried really hard to bury memories of Katrina, of a disaster made unspeakably worse because of human failure, not the wrath of Mother Nature. These were the abandoned dead, anyway, unwanted by family, or without any of their own or centuries old, thrown from their crypts by flood waters surging out of control. Funeral service didn’t forget. They put blood and sweat and hundreds of thousands of dollars into making that memorial a reality because they understand what it means to have a place to go to mourn. A place to go to remember.
Hallowed ground. If you’re ever in New Orleans, take a cab down Canal Street to where it ends at the old Calvary Hospital Cemetery. The city’s scars are still raw in places, pink in others, but this is a place of healing. I’ve seen it. I’ve felt it.
For the full gallery of pictures I took that day, you can find the Flickr stream here.
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