when they ring those golden bells for you and me

It was in the shadow of Katrina that I started working in funeral service, stumbled my way into a position because I had a skill set that filled a need and I was available yesterday. In those days and weeks that followed, I witnessed incredible acts of kindness and caring from death care professionals who stepped into crisis and did what they do best: tending to the living while caring for the dead.

I saw the the caliber of men and women they are, time and again. In ways large and small, I watched them do extraordinary things for the communities they served.

See, when the waters receded in New Orleans, they left behind the dead. Some of those dead were never claimed, took up space in a warehouse-turned-halfway-house between this world and the next. It was funeral service that said oh no, this cannot be. It was funeral directors in New Orleans, along the Gulf Coast, throughout the country who pushed for a place for those dead to rest. They organized and fundraised and pressed and pushed, made plans for a memorial that reflected the same swirling lines of the hurricane that brought them all together.

In August 2008, just weeks into a new role, I watched funeral directors step up to the plate again. In the shadow of Gustav they gathered at the end of Canal Street, dark suits and white gloves, pristine despite the bright sun and heat that shimmered off the paths leading into the old Charity Hospital Cemetery.

It was supposed to be a full jazz funeral, but with the threat of another big storm the service was scaled back. At one point there was talk of canceling altogether, but these souls had waited long enough. From the warehouse that held them to the memorial where they'd rest, a solemn procession. At the gates of Charity Hospital Cemetery, funeral directors and first responders, priests and politicians, a jazz trumpeter and a few curious onlookers gathered together to lay to rest the remains of 86 of Katrina’s dead who had nowhere else to call home.

When the last casket had been placed, the politicians spoke. I don't remember what they said.

At 9:28 a.m. the bells of the city rang out, call-response, marking the moment when the levees failed. A man-made tragedy that only seemed to spiral in the days and weeks and months ahead.

August 2008, three years after the waters receded, and the wounds left behind were still angry and raw. Ken Ferdinand played “Amazing Grace,” a lone trumpeter's song carried off in the wind. We held our breath, how sweet the sound, and hung on to hope and prayed for healing for the city and her people. Hope and heartache so often go hand in hand, it seems, and the city knows both too well. But you can't keep New Orleans down.

When I think of the horror and devastation of 10 years ago, I can't help but also think of the power and beauty of that service now seven years past. A chance for closure, a healing, grace manifested because the men and women who worked with death on an intimate basis understood how important it was for those souls to have a place to rest. How important it was for the rest of us to have a means, an outlet, for our grief.

For who and what we lost, in the storm and in the days after, for the men and women who created a communal space to give voice to that loss, for ten years of healing and so much work left to be done - for all this, I pray.

I remember.