The vulnerability of place
Someone wrote they lost their home in Pacific Palisade, and I went online to see about the damage, having only thought of the area as L.A. – a whole swath of Southern California. Most of the Pacific Palisades headlines talked about the dangers of wanting to live in a beautiful place and how insurance was sure to leave the area. It reminded me of the aftermath of Katrina when my cousin’s husband in Florida said, “Well, that’s the price you pay for living there.”
Infuriated, I pulled the car over and yelled, “What??? The price we pay for living here. This is your husband’s response?”
We all live here and there. We are all vulnerable to weather. The appropriate response is not why?
The utter shock of a weather event devastating your home is a state of vulnerability unlike any other. My blog was well underway when Katrina hit, and I managed to write myself through the hell we all went through – but even looking back, I don’t feel as if I cut through to the depth of our trauma.
Ten years later, in 2015, during the commemoration activities in New Orleans, I lay in my bed curled in the fetal position. I had PTSD. I did what I always do – I wrote about it. No one had arrived to address our mental health in 2005 – people came to help rebuild, to help restore, to help renew, but our mental health remained stuck in that one moment when we realized there had come an end to the safety we had assured ourselves was ours.
I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain
I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end
