Hurricane Katrina Survivor Story: 10 years later

"What comes to mind when you hear August 2005?" asked the CBC news reporter
"Panic, horror sometimes I can still hear people screaming and crying around me" I reply
¨Did you lose any friends, neighbors or family members during the hurricane?¨ The reporter asked. I looked down and shed a small tear before looking at her again and saying
¨Yes, I lost my father."
¨What happened, if you don't mind sharing?¨ 
¨While we were running to find cover, a piece of guardrail ripped off and came flying at us and decapitated him right in front of us!" She looks at me and all I could see is sorrow in her eyes. She swallows as she looks down at her notes before looking back at me. 
¨Have you been back to New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina?¨ she asked
I shake my head and say 
¨No, and I don't think I ever will again as it was a very traumatic experience for me."  She shakes her head as if she understands.
¨When did you realize there was a hurricane coming?¨ She asks.  I close my eyes and start to think about the day I try to forget.

It's 7 am on a Friday morning, my family and I are still sleeping in our room at the Sheraton New Orleans Hotel. My mom and dad brought me and my brother Jonny to New Orleans to celebrate my fifteenth birthday. I'm curled up in bed sleeping when the sound of pouring rain breaks through the silence I once had, I pull my blanket high above my head to try and block it out again but now I can hear the whistling of the wind and what may or may not be a palm tree banging on the side of the hotel. The severe winds blew out the hotel room windows. My entire family jumped out of bed, we could hear screaming from other hotel rooms, my dad told us to get dressed and put on some shoes that we were leaving the hotel in five minutes.

I'm full-on crying now, I haven't thought about Hurricane Katrina since my dad's funeral. I put all my emotions in a box and threw it into the ocean. I start looking around the room trying to calm myself. Memorize everything, the five different shades of brown in the carpet, the mahogany wood round table with two leather chairs on each side of the table. The painting by Leonardo da Vinci on the wall opposite the large floor to ceiling windows. It's in two hands, I can see so many lines on the piece of artwork. I see how he has two hands with great detail that look almost three-D and then as you go along up to the arms it's no longer three-D its just lines, that alone don't show you anything, but put together and looked at in the right way it started to make a bigger picture. One that not everyone will see right away but is always there you just have to dig deeper and look with your heart, not your eyes. I look back at the reporter and she's smiling at me, and I can feel her silently telling me to take my time. I inhale for 4 seconds then exhale for 4 seconds the way my therapist taught me, then I look at her and urge her to continue with the next question. She nods at me and opens her mouth to speak
¨Where did you finally find shelter?¨ I inhaled again and closed my eyes

I was running with everything I had in me, my brother is a little ahead of me and my father ahead of him, and my mom is about a foot behind me. I turn to make sure she's still there. My mom yells at me to keep running so I turn back around, and I'm looking for a safe place for us to take cover. Everyone is running up the hill trying to get to the high ground. There are dead bodies everywhere, people crying and saying goodbye to their now-dead family members. When another wind gust hits we drop to the ground seeking safe coverage. That's when the piece of guardrail came flying through the air and decapitated my father right in front of us. I hear screaming and crying but my brain is frozen. I can feel tears streaming down my face as I see my father's headless body laying on the ground in front of me. My mom comes up behind me and my brother with tears streaming down her face and tells us that we have to keep moving. We keep walking and crying together. We keep walking for another half hour before we reach the Superdome, where we stay for days before we are able to go home.

¨We were ushered into the Superdome along with hundreds of other people.¨ I finished with a little squeak as I picked up my head to look back at the young reporter, who is not more than twenty-five years old herself. She has her hair up in a tight bun stuck together with chopsticks, but as I look closer at her I realize they aren't chopsticks they are pencils. She's wearing a pencil skirt and matching jacket with an intricate shirt on. I can see so many colors and shapes in her shirt, and at first glance, I feel the shirt hurts my eyes as I try to focus on only one color or one shape. The more I look and the more I see, and the more I like it. I can hear she is wearing high heels as there is a slight click on the floor every now and then signaling she moved her feet.
¨How did your father's death affect your family?¨ she asked. I looked up and stared at her thinking, wondering what type of question that is because we were all so heartbroken. You never expect that something like this could happen to you. You hear about it on TV or the radio about people losing their family members and friends, but even though you know it has happened to other people, you can never fathom the fact that it actually can happen to you.
    "Going through something as significant as Katrina with your loved ones and friends," I tell her, "Those bonds, you know, those are the things that are gonna last forever. It was a heartbreaking moment for us, but I definitely think that it brought my family closer together because we had to protect each other now. Because of Hurricane Katrina, my brother walked me down the aisle, not my father. When my brother had his kid last year my dad didn't get to meet his first grandchild. MY dad missed my brother and I when we graduated from high school when we went off to college, our college graduation, when I became a doctor, or when we bought our first houses. My father will never get to see the lives that my brother and I built for ourselves and that truly breaks my heart.¨ The reporter shakes her head as if she's trying to give herself a couple of extra seconds before asking her next question.
¨Are you surprised by how much press Hurricane Katrina has gotten over the years?¨
¨You wouldn't think 10 years later that people would still be dealing with Katrina issues, in fact, while we were there I didn't think anyone even knew about what was happening. When my family and I arrived back home we did not expect the welcome home we would get. There were hundreds of people searching for their loved ones hoping they were on the plane, hoping they were okay and crying about the loss of their loved ones. When we found my family I was shocked to see so many of my family members were there. They cheered and hollered when they saw us and that we were okay. They ran to us and gave us a lot of hugs, then my grandma asked  ¨Where's your dad?¨ I started to cry and my brother hugged me, while my mom rubbed my back and shed a few tears of her own.  Nobody said anything else for at least five minutes, they just came in for a group hug. As a Hurricane Katrina survivor, what everyone is calling us these days, we were bombarded with reporters at the airport. My brother and I never spoke to them but my mother did for a short moment and when she returned I asked her why everyone wants to ask us questions about what we went through there and she replied
¨Because they want to know how bad it truly was over there, they can never know the pain and suffering that we went through and are going through because of that Hurricane and so the closest they can get is by asking us questions.¨
¨How were you brought to safety?¨ she asks, still writing on her notepad.