Chapter 5: The Stages of Grief

Amy sat on the unstable antique chair that had come with the apartment on Magazine Street, looking at  the small plastic suitcase and the medium-sized cardboard box she had rescued from her parents flooded home.  The two flood survivors had been occupying a dark corner of the room since she moved back to New Orleans a little over a year ago.   It actually didn’t take her that long to get her things together.  But the move had taken up a lot of her psychic energy.  She needed to focus on the present.

  There weren't too many people who had returned yet, and the only livable area was the "sliva by the riva", the area of town that stretched from the French Quarter along the Mississippi River levee and that wound its way through the lower Garden District and Uptown to the River Bend, on the river side of St. Charles.  The lonely For Rent sign was a small one bedroom that was just a few inches and a slender wallboard beyond what would have been an efficiency apartment.  She found a job at a health club in a downtown hotel and was able to sell the Saturn, which made it possible for her to afford the high rent.  The out-of-desperation $1000 sign-on bonus the hotel offered and which was in fact offered everywhere in town from McDonalds to the Ritz,  covered her moving costs and security deposit.
 
The late evening February sun was scattering spots of light on the hardwood floor of the virtually bare room, barely warming the damp cold air finding its way through the old wavy glass window panes. She had had the suitcase and box since she had emptied her grandparent's attic, but had not yet explored their contents. Not even the words “Anna’s Journals” written in her grandmother’s handwriting on the wrinkled box were strong enough to pull her from her drowning  grief.

Amy thought she knew what it meant to grieve. What could be a greater loss than the loss of her own mother? Or of not knowing her own father? Her mother had died when she was barely two. Her father, she had never met. He was a brief sentence, an aside, something she overheard as she passed by the bedroom door of her grandparent’s room. “He wasn’t ready to be a father,” was the most common portrait her grandmother would paint of him. He seemed to exist inside parentheses, an afterthought. She had also heard some sketchy words “jerk,” “narcissus”, “self-centered”, words whispered when the adults didn’t see her behind Aunt Adele’s newly upholstered (for the fifth time in five years) chair or under Aunt Concha’s heavy black dining room table where Spanish diplomats sat eating inky black squid.

Of course, much more than a sentence or even a paragraph was spoken about her mother Anna. There were stories, short ones and long ones and ones with punch lines and some that seemed almost mythical. Her grandmother told funny stories about her mother, stories that made her laugh. Or she told her stories with a moral at the end, lessons Amy was to learn so that she would not repeat her mother's mistakes. She heard tales of her mother’s energy, her accomplishments, her rebelliousness from all things Southern and gentile, and her bad choices when it came to boyfriends. Her grandfather described Anna differently, like a poet might describe a person admired from a distance. He told Amy about Anna’s dreams, about what she had longed for in her life, about the books she read, the poets she read over and over again, and the music she’d dance to alone out on the patio. Amy knew about cummings and Eliot, about Mozart, about The Nancy Drew Mystery series—all the things Anna loved and cherished.

Amy realized, came to terms with actually, that what she thought had been grieving was as ephemeral as her mother was to her—a notion, a fiction, a reconstruction of fragments of photos and stories. The grief she felt about her mother's death was that of an unrequited lover’s.

The grief she felt when she saw her destroyed home and city, and the deaths of her grandparents a few months later was  different. It was concrete. Physical. A bulldozer that razed her entire being. She sat on the floor recalling a litany of events that had been occupying her thoughts for the past year: Katrina destroyed her home.  Two months later, Mignon died. Then a month later Carlos died, heartbroken and too frail to face the loss of his wife, his home, his city. The day her grandfather died, Amy felt all over again and with twice as much force what she felt the day she had returned to New Orleans after Katrina. She felt deafened by the silence, suffocated by the stench of death, hopeless in the scope of what was gone. She had loved her grandparents as deeply as she had known them. She had loved her city as deeply as she had known it. And she knew them all so very well.

This grief brought with it the hard truth that she had not really grieved her mother’s death. The hard truth that she had not known her mother at all. She knew the photos and the stories. She had lost only what she herself had created in her imagination. A fiction. A fragment. A photo.

And now Amy sat with the box of her mother’s journals, taped, sealed how long ago she doesn’t know. Next to it lay the small plastic suitcase. What she thought she knew, not only about her mother and father, but about her grandfather and his father as well, was about to change in a way as unfathomable as Katrina’s destruction.