Taking Stock Of Life Since The Storm: The “Healing After Katrina” Series Since August 29, 2005, the lives of New Orleanians have focused on counting their losses. I remember standing on high ground in Jackson, Mississippi, the night of August 28, watching the stream of headlights crawling north, knowing that something of epic proportions had begun but not yet realizing that I was witnessing the beginning of a great diaspora. Technology soon caved to nature, leaving us without power or phones, so it was word of mouth that brought us news that the walls we had believed would save us had instead come toppling down, that mile after mile of our city was under water, that we were refugees, and likely homeless. Lest the reality remain abstract, on our next stop the internet brought the images home: photos from my street posted to a neighborhood website, my house sitting in the middle of a placid, palm-lined sea, looking, as one friend wrote, “almost peaceful, like some eco-tourist destination in a Central American jungle,” except that the top half of my house was protruding from the surface of the water. Conversely, the photos that the news brought in were anything but serene, pictures of those who had remained behind, stifling in attics, searing on rooftops, wading through the streets, parched and vulnerable along the roadside, their anguish so palpable we could only stare in amazement. Over those next few days, the life we knew slipped over some edge and vanished, never to be seen again. We were handed over to images timeless and archetypal: the flight to Egypt, the great diaspora, the crashing walls of Jericho, the great storm, the great flood, the descent into the ruins, the failures of the fathers. Weeks later, when I got up in the night and stepped into a puddle from a spilled jug of water and felt my heart start pounding, I suddenly understood that my life had also been countermanded by these same powerful forces.

In time the city drained, and those of us who could find somewhere to stay went back and went to work, salvaging what we could, replacing, repairing, rebuilding, trying to regroup. We talked, telling our stories over and over, hearing the stories of others. We found ourselves hugging complete strangers on the street, in the line at the store, in our common grief. We learned, piecemeal, who had been spared and who had not, whose home was lost, whose job, who would not return. We all heard the story of someone’s aunt or grandmother or friend who remained behind during the storm and succumbed to the water or heat. And over time we learned the toll that the strain of these months had taken on too many.

My dear friend Stephanie Thibodeaux Braedt, our Society’s secretary and librarian and a member of the New Orleans Jungian Seminar, was fighting breast cancer when Katrina struck. The last time I saw her was some weeks after the storm, in a bed at East Jefferson, where she contemplated her prospects and shook her head. “We had to move three times,” she said. “First from Katrina, then from Rita. Each time I had to find a new oncologist, start back on my chemo.” Words failed her, and she shrugged and shook her head: a heart so gentle, so forgiving, that it could step back and see her own life as so much spilt milk. She just looked up and said, “I want you to know I love you very much.” On December 15, she was gone. On June 10, we learned that the Society’s patron, analyst Ian Baker, whose annual visits over the years had become healing retreats for us all, had died of a heart attack in London. Ian had written in April that he was “planning to come in the fall” but would be going into hospital that week to have his shoulder replaced.

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This surgery followed two earlier hip replacements, and Ian wrote that he had “decided to regard hospitals as upgrade garages where you go to have spare parts installed.” It was the last we heard from him.

The Society’s advisor, analyst Battle Bell, thought he’d hurt his arm after the storm hauling flooded stuff up from his basement and putting a tarp up on his damaged roof, but the lump in his shoulder wasn’t a pulled muscle. It was non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a relentless, wasting strain that reduced his voice to a whisper and left him gaunt and exhausted. Battle kept his analysands’ regular appointments throughout his illness, though when I opened his door, I’d often hear him pulling himself up to a sitting position on the sofa where he’d been resting. Chemo and radiation didn’t seem to faze the cancer’s growth, and on June 26, only days after he returned from his first round of chemotherapy at M.D. Anderson in Houston, the tumors exerted so much pressure that a blood vessel in his head finally snapped, and his life drained away before we even had a chance to tell him goodbye.

The storm has taken so much. In addition to Stephanie, Ian, and Battle’s deaths, we have also lost several of our board members—John Allemand, Bill Axe, Dottie Grandolfi, and Victoria Hippard—due to job changes, illness, or relocation following the storm. Analyst Charlotte Mathes, analytic candidate Marilyn Marshall, who is in the final stages of her training, and Susan and Tom Welsh, our Society’s president and treasurer, respectively, are all now living in Baton Rouge and coming into New Orleans on and off during the week. Former president Joan Harrison and her husband Travis are also in Baton Rouge seeking medical treatment. The list of others who lost homes to the floodwaters—among them local analyst Karen Gibson, Spring Journal editor Nancy Cater, and board member Karen Farley, all still in the city—is too long to be recorded here. It would stretch on, take on the dimensions of a monument to something that sounds too vague to memorialize: the largest civil engineering failure in the history of the United States. Somewhere between the resonance of our tragedies and the flatness of that epitaph lies the loss of something else that cannot be measured, and it is a loss that accrues to us all.

Battle and Ian taught us to look around when we found ourselves tempest-tossed, to try to understand the archetypes and workings of psyche that shape our fates. Battle had spoken since the storm about what we as a Society could do to help the people of New Orleans do likewise. What he and we came up with is our upcoming “Healing After Katrina” series of programs.

The three Jungian analysts who have volunteered to contribute to our series are all native Louisianians who lived in New Orleans for many years. Deldon McNeely, Ph.D., a New Orleans native, author, and Jungian analyst, will open our series in September with a program on the phoenix rising from the ashes, offered to “amplify the experience of hope through stories that carry us beyond despair, while we are experiencing desperation,” a topic that will address the needs of each of us who is overwhelmed by the enormity of the devastation we face each day. Jungian analyst Charlotte Mathes, LCSW, Ph.D., who has practiced in New Orleans for many years and whose book on mourning was published after the storm, will present a program on coping with grief and post-traumatic stress disorder that will offer aids to assist in the process of mourning and exercises for personal and collective healing. For those of us who remain acutely aware that what we lost was so much more than wood, bricks, and mortar, Houston Jungian analyst Karen Magee, MA, LMFT, LPC, a Louisianian who raised her children in New Orleans and who counseled evacuees in the Astrodome after Katrina, will offer a lecture and workshop on the topic of “Finding Home Again,” using film clips from several recent films. We will conclude the fall season with a holiday tissue collage workshop featuring music by local medieval music ensemble Musica da Camera followed by a January screening of the film “Restoration” hosted by Jennifer Standish, LPC. In an effort to reach the widest audience possible, these evening programs will not carry a specific charge for nonmembers but will be free or by donation.

As for what lies ahead, we can only say, “we want to go on.” We want to go on for Battle and Stephanie and Ian as well as for the rest of us who are struggling to make sense of post-apocalyptic life in what used to be The City That Care Forgot. But the board that previously had a dozen active members has been reduced by nearly half, and those who remain, including our newest members, Dr. Gary Thibodeaux-Braedt and Toni Newton, count three homes and one spouse among their losses. If you value what Jungian programming and the Jung Society have brought to your life and can help us continue that tradition, we welcome your contribution.

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