Disaster Fatigue

We saw off our hurricane guests today. Thanks to the fact that things in New Orleans will, at best, improve only after several more weeks, they are headed to Ohio to stay with family rather than going home to begin rebuilding.

The storm affected us, but less directly. My wife, who moved a lot growing up, considers New Orleans her home town. I proposed to her there and that is where we got married. Her parents hoped, or had hoped, to retire there and own a house in New Orleans near the lake. It is probably flooding as I write this. But still, we were safe in Houston and they in Chicago: We didn't lose everything.

I, too, grieve for New Orleans, which now lies perhaps mortally wounded and will probably never be the same again. But I can't bring myself to write much about it now. I lost only a few memories while friends and lots of very good people I know are now homeless. Between dealing with that realization, comforting my wife, and the constant, overwhelming flood of horrible news about New Orleans and the coast of my home state, writing about my own sense of loss at this moment is difficult for me to do and strikes me as terribly unimportant.

Today, I plan to immerse myself in work, and pay only as much attention to hurricane news as necessary. This is a truly overwhelming tragedy. It even seems indulgent to partake of the luxury of tuning this mess out for awhile after seeing how it has so dominated the lives of so many people and will do so for months and years down the road. To say that I am emotionally spent would be a gross understatement.

-- CAV