At Death’s Door

Losing her mother and aunt in the tumult of Hurricane Katrina has been tough for Deborah Holloway to accept. That her mother’s body would end up having to be found three times before being recovered has felt intolerably cruel.

Holloway’s mother, Delia, 82, and aunt Deborah Fisher, 85, did not leave before the hurricane because, like so many others, they were confident their house could withstand the storm.

Essentially, it did.

But when levees surrounding New Orleans broke after the Aug. 29 storm, the sisters were trapped by rising waters. They used lipstick to scrawl “help” on the upstairs windows. They hung a red scarf to attract attention. Relatives and friends called on their behalf. Help did arrive Sept. 2, but not before Delia Holloway had died. Fisher was rescued but died four days later.

Yet -- in a saga that underscores the separate disaster of how bodies were handled -- two months later, Holloway’s remains were still in the upstairs bedroom of the home she shared with her sister. Now her body lies, officially unidentified, in the special morgue in St. Gabriel, La., for hurricane victims.

Holloway’s daughter, a 52-year-old elementary school speech therapist in Southern California, is struggling to understand what happened to her mother and her aunt -- before their deaths and after.

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Delia Holloway and Fisher lived in their childhood home, a classic two-story Victorian, white with green shutters, in the city’s downtown business district. The home was stately, with a fireplace in every room and a stained-glass window in the dining room.

Holloway, a retired social worker, had high blood pressure. Fisher, a former librarian, was a colon cancer survivor. But the women, who had lived together the last 23 years, were “still chugging along,” Deborah Holloway said.

On the morning Katrina hit, Fisher had called Frankie Walker, a longtime family friend in Baton Rouge, La.

“I’m just letting you know we’re OK,” Walker recalled Fisher saying. “We have food and supplies and the house seems to be OK.” But, said Walker, Fisher also said: “I don’t think we made the best decision this time.”

When water started to engulf the downstairs of the house, the sisters took refuge in bedrooms upstairs.

Two thousand miles away, from her home in Claremont, Holloway’s daughter tried to help.

She called the Red Cross, the Louisiana State Police and the Louisiana governor’s office. She said she sent e-mails to Louisiana state senators and the Coast Guard, giving them her mother’s home address, the cross street, the color of the building.

John Gaines, who considered the elderly women his sisters and is Deborah Holloway’s godfather, had begged Delia Holloway and Fisher to leave New Orleans with him. “They were adamant they didn’t want to go,” said Gaines, 58.

As Gaines watched TV coverage of the hurricane from Houston, he heard a reporter mention that two elderly ladies had been trapped in a house on Cleveland Avenue in downtown New Orleans.

“I couldn’t move. I knew it was them,” Gaines said. Then the reporter named Deborah Fisher.

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Word that rescuers had saved her aunt but had arrived after her mother died reached Deborah Holloway through a family friend.

“I don’t know when my mother died,” said Holloway, who is named after her aunt. “Who knows what they endured?”

Her aunt was taken to a hospital in San Antonio, and Holloway arrived at her bedside the afternoon of Sept. 6. That evening, the elderly woman’s heart stopped. “I hadn’t even processed my mother’s death,” said Holloway, an only child.

Holloway arranged for her aunt’s body to be taken to Baton Rouge, where Fisher had lived for more than 40 years.

In Baton Rouge, forensics specialists from the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team took DNA samples from Deborah Holloway. She was told it was so that her mother’s remains could be identified; she assumed that meant they believed they had her body in the morgue at St. Gabriel.

Holloway planned a memorial service for her aunt and mother on Sept. 17 -- although she did not have the body of either.

While still in Baton Rouge, Holloway called her home answering machine to check for messages.

There was a call from Steven Pacheco of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals of Los Angeles. When Holloway returned his call, she was stunned.

“He told me that my mother’s body had just been found in the house,” Holloway recalled. “I just lost it.”

Pacheco was a member of a California animal rescue team and came upon Holloway’s body during a Sept. 13 search of her home.

The house was marked as containing a body, and the searchers assumed, as did Holloway, that this time the remains would be quickly collected.

When Holloway inquired about getting a death certificate, the funeral home told her the body had not been released.

She said officials at the family assistance center run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency told her that her mother’s body was probably still being processed at St. Gabriel. A death certificate would not be issued, they said, until her mother’s identity had been officially confirmed through DNA testing and an autopsy had been performed.

Holloway returned to Claremont. There was little she could do but wait.

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On Nov. 2, Holloway’s godfather, Gaines, went to the home of the elderly sisters to meet a claims adjuster.

Stacey Martin, a young woman who used to help clean the house, accompanied Gaines.

The stench was overpowering.

Gaines presumed that it was because the house had been closed up for weeks without proper ventilation and because sewage and debris had been left behind by the flood.

Then came a shriek from upstairs. It was Martin.

She had come upon Holloway’s body.

“I thought she must have been hallucinating, you know, seeing what she wants to see,” he said.

But there on the bed was the decomposing body of Delia Holloway. Her head rested on a pillow; one leg dangled to the floor.

“There’s no words that can describe this. It’s just unbelievable,” Gaines said. “It’s like you’re in a ‘Twilight Zone.’ ”

He dialed 911 and a team of FEMA officials, New Orleans coroner’s office personnel and police arrived.

They cordoned off the street. A police chaplain offered comfort and said a prayer over Holloway’s body.

Some curious onlookers gathered near the house.

“My mother and aunt were elegant Southern women,” Deborah Holloway said. “They were private. They would never have wanted a spectacle like this.”

Holloway has taken a leave of absence from work to deal with her grief.

“I don’t know where to turn at this stage. I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I can’t function. I’m not sleeping well.” She said her mood shifts from crying, to despair, to indignation, to weeping again.

And the ordeal is not over.

Her aunt’s ashes have been returned to her, but her mother’s body is presumably one of the hundreds in limbo awaiting a DNA match.

It turns out that no testing of DNA samples of victims and relatives has occurred at the morgue for more than two months. Federal officials said this week that they had figured out a way to pay for the testing of the samples. But it could take months before the work is completed.

Most of all, Holloway wants closure.

“It’s a nightmare on top of a nightmare on top of a nightmare,” she said.

In New Orleans, the house that had been the family home for more than 70 years stands prominently on a street of battered and abandoned houses.

Upstairs, in a room next to Holloway’s mother’s room, a loaf of bread lies on the floor. A half-empty jar of peanut butter and a quarter-full bottle of water are perched on a windowsill. “Help” is scrawled not once but three times on the windows.

The red silk scarf, meant to attract attention, still hangs from the window.