In the spring of 1917, Hotochee, my grandmother’s 14-year-old sister, stood barefoot in the spongy soil on the north shore of Lake Ochochobee and married Davis, an 18-year-old farmer’s son. Three months later, just before his own son was born, Davis enlisted in the Army. In October, he was shipped to France. Nobody knows if he got to Paris. By Christmas he had disappeared during an artillery barrage a couple of hundred yards from the German trenches. Gone. Never seen again.
Hotochee never remarried. Until she died in 1966, she spent a half-century waiting for Davis to come home. It wasn’t that she didn’t know in her head that he had probably been turned to fleshy shrapnel by the Kaiser’s guns. But her heart made her look hopefully every time a man came into her line of sight.
My stepfather’s youngest brother, Raymond, was an Army translator on the border between East and West Germany. From his Cold War perch, he monitored radio traffic from the east, listening for something useful or alarming to tell his superiors. In the spring of 1965, he and his wife went swimming in a cold mountain lake just a day before they were to fly to the States. He got a cramp and sank out of sight. They never found his body. On her deathbed 30 years later, his mother told all around her to keep a lookout for Raymond, whom she always had refused to believe had drowned.
In autumn of 1983, during a court-ordered visit, my wife’s ex-husband stole away with their two toddlers, and, traveling on phony passports easily acquired from anti-Soviet Afghan fund-raisers in San Francisco, took them to Libya, where they lived the next 15 years, kept from a single minute’s conversation with their mother. For the three-and-a-half weeks she didn’t know where they were, my wife says she frantically looked for and “saw” them everywhere. In fact, as I witnessed until their reunion seven years ago, even though she knew they were in Libya, she still half-expected to see them appear from behind some corner.
Six months after Katrina swept away lives and livelihood (as well as the last shred of doubt that the Bush Administration cares about anything other than money and power) 1926 people are still missing. More than 120 are children. Although the numbers have gone steadily down – 10 more names came off the list Tuesday – as many as half or more of these missing people may never be found. I can imagine 1000 mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, husbands and wives, looking up expectantly for the next five or 50 years, waiting, waiting, for that person who will never come. Without seeing the body, the glimmer of hope can’t be extinguished, the wound remains raw.
I spoke Monday with Robert Johannessen, Communications Director for the Louisiana Department of Health & Hospitals, where the Find Family National Call Center is keeping the tally:
MB: How many of those still missing do you think will turn up?
RJ: That’s impossible to say for certain. But if you’re asking me how many of them are dead, I would have to say several hundred. Easily several hundred.
MB: So the official death toll [1,103 bodies found as of today] could possibly double before you’re done?
RJ: Well, sir, yes, it could.
MB: Are you still finding bodies?
RJ: Yes. I expect when the lower Ninth Ward gets dug out completely, we may find quite a few there.
MB: And the rest?
RJ: Some were washed out to sea, some were buried where we are never going to find them.
MB: Several people have speculated that the government is covering up the real death toll, that many thousands of people actually died as a consequence of Katrina. You work for the government. Any idea where people would get such an idea?
RJ: Sir, I don’t know. I believe we have the most accurate count of any large death toll ever. To tell the truth, I think rampant speculation by many people, and I have to say, speculation fueled by mayors and other government officials, probably helped spread those rumors. Our agency got charged with reporting accurate numbers. We never speculated. We counted. But, sir, you have to remember that we had … have … so much displacement of victims. Victims who survived but were displaced. Rumors can take root in that and grow.
MB: When will you make a final tally?
RJ: There are no plans to shut down the call center. I expect it could be another six or even 18 months before we identify all the bodies as well as find those who are displaced but [still listed as] missing.
Even for the most resilient person who lost family because of Katrina or the government screw-ups surrounding that disaster, Mardi Gras can’t be quite as joyously raucous this year. Knowing your spouse or parent or child is dead because a body has been definitively identified is tough enough. But, not knowing for sure, and not knowing if you’ll ever know for sure, must be ten thousand times harder. Only one who has lived with that special pain can fully comprehend it.
An acquaintance of mine was recently involved in an exhumation of massacre victims in Guatemala. As with most of these recently begun operations, there are two goals in mind: bringing peace, or as popular psychology puts it, “closure,” to the victim’s kin; and if the forensics pan out to their fullest, bringing justice to their murderers.
I can rage at the unlikelihood of the latter and yet be so glad to see the succor that victims’ families gain just from knowing, knowing for sure that those bones with that bracelet were those of a missing daughter or aunt, and now she’s found.
We didn’t need The Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina: Lessons Learned or Failure of Initiative to tell us how the who-me? boneheads in charge of our security couldn’t find their ass with both hands and a flashlight. We watched it unfold thanks to an astonishingly out-of-character media that decided not to be embedded in the Administration’s propaganda apparatus for a few days.
Of course, Gulf Coast dwellers saw all this firsthand. And they still see the impact of it every day, as they gut their houses and dig out their lawns or sit wondering where they’ll live once FEMA kicks them out of their trailers. Eventually, for most, memories of Katrina will fade, though I suspect the sour taste of betrayal and bungling will last longer.
For the kin of the missing, however, every day from now until forever will be one of pain and hope. My heart goes out to you.
