Trauma and Tragedy

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Trauma and Tragedy

Posted on Sat, Oct. 01, 2005

Editorial

Trauma and tragedy sear incidents deeper into our memory

By RHETA GRIMSLEY JOHNSON

FISHTRAP HOLLOW

We were comparing our first memories, and, to a person, every one had to do with trauma, or tragedy.

One of my father's first memories is of when they blockaded the South Georgia road in front of a frame house where his father lay dying. Times were more reverent then, and they detoured the scant traffic on the rural route to keep things quiet for a dying man.

My sister remembered her bleeding foot and an early trip to the emergency room.

My own first memory seems silly, but it, too, represents trauma - at least to a 3-year-old. While roaming about a sleeping house looking for a favorite lost ball, I thought I saw a stranger with shining red eyes sitting in my father's recliner.

It's as if our first cohesive thought, our Helen Keller moment at the pump, must involve something startling, frightening or sad. We must be shaken awake, brought into the Real World from the insulation and comfort of the womb.

Consider all the children whose first memories will be of relocation during Katrina. There will be thousands who, many years from now, will point to a sad exodus as the first time they remember being aware of life.

Such a miserable, musical chairs of a hurricane season it has been. Words from that old rock song come to mind: nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide.

No safe ports from the storms

The family staying in our Henderson, La., house after losing their Pass Christian home to Katrina phoned to say now they were fleeing Rita. They were on their way to Gautier, back to the Mississippi Coast whence they came.

You need a road atlas by the phone these days, just to keep up with friends.

Turns out, they would have been safe to stay in Henderson, yet Abbeville, only about 30 minutes south, was under 9 feet of water. The line between safe and wet is critical - and it keeps moving.

Nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide.

During the Rita scare, other Louisiana friends evacuated this way, to North Mississippi, and first asked if there was anything I wanted from our Henderson house.

One of two things I asked them to bring was a piece of pottery from the late Walter Anderson's Shearwater in Ocean Springs, Miss. I'd heard Shearwater was destroyed by Katrina. Suddenly a blue pitcher seemed especially dear.

Every night before I go to sleep, I look at an old bedside lamp that came from a junk shop in Bay St. Louis, Miss. For all practical purposes, at least for now, Bay St. Louis is gone.

Pieces of Shearwater and the Bay

Now my seaside souvenirs are more than lovely reminders of gentle breezes and carefree days. They are the flotsam and jetsam of a shipwrecked place that no longer exists.

And yet, amidst all the terrible loss and pervasive sadness, there is a spirit of generosity abroad that I don't ever remember seeing before. Almost everyone you talk to has found some way to contribute to recovery.

The touching stories are endless, and not just on CNN. A local stylist is housing a dozen Katrina victims. Two Iuka brothers, between European tours, are performing their blues program as a benefit to raise money for the Red Cross. An old college buddy is camping out in rural South Mississippi at night while she rewires houses during the day. Countless people you run into are on their way, or just back from the Coast.

The ill wind has blown some good, a reminder that we are our brother's keeper.

Katrina is not the first hurricane for many of us, nor a first memory.

But the tragedy with the pretty name has the power of a memory of demarcation. It will forever divide our conscious lives. We will remember ourselves before this perfectly horrible storm, and we will know ourselves better afterward.

Rheta Grimsley Johnson is a columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, P.O. Box 4689, Atlanta, GA 30302. E-mail, rhetagrimsley@aol.com.

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