Daughter to Carry Out a Last Wish

In accord with her dying wishes, today the remains of Delia Holloway will be placed in a family plot in New Orleans’ Mount Olivet Cemetery -- the same cemetery where her parents and grandparents are buried.

It will be a final act of dignity for a woman whose remains were accorded precious little dignity in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Holloway, 82, and her sister, Deborah Fisher, 85, made what turned out to be a fatal decision to stay in their family home, a stately Victorian in downtown New Orleans, as the hurricane descended on the city.

Delia Holloway’s body would end up being found three times over a two-month period before ultimately being collected -- a story reported in The Times on Nov. 18. Each time, her body was found in the same place: her own bed.

Deborah Holloway, Delia’s daughter, will hold a graveside service for her mother and aunt nearly four months after their deaths.

“It’s a sense of relief in that I will finally be able to put them to rest,” said Holloway, 52, an elementary school speech therapist from Claremont. “I know they’re in a better place.”

When levees in the city broke after the hurricane hit Aug. 29, the sisters were trapped by rising waters. By the time help arrived, Holloway was dead. Fisher was rescued Sept. 2, but her heart stopped four days later.

On the day of the rescue, Holloway’s body was left in an upstairs bedroom to await a collection team. Then, on Sept. 13, rescuers searching for stranded animals again came upon her body. The house was marked as containing a corpse, but it had not been recovered. On Nov. 2, a family member discovered Holloway’s remains a final time. Her body was taken to the federal morgue for storm victims set up in St. Gabriel, La., and later transferred to nearby Carville.

Despite there being almost no chance of confusion about her mother’s identity when her body was picked up, her paperwork and the paperwork for another body picked up the same day were apparently involved in a mix-up.

By early December, Deborah Holloway was still unable to claim her mother’s body because, she was told, it must be positively identified through DNA testing. On Sept. 10, Holloway had provided a DNA sample to forensic specialists from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

But DNA testing of Katrina victims did not begin until Dec. 8, according to officials from the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals. It took that long for state and federal officials to figure out how to get the money to hire a contractor to do the testing. Holloway said she offered to pay for the DNA test to expedite the release of her mother’s remains.

Despite the months-long emphasis placed on the importance of DNA matches before remains could be released, in the end, the identification of the badly decomposed body was based on what the eyes could see.

On Dec. 5, Holloway was asked in a phone call to describe her mother’s jewelry -- a yellow- and white-gold band still on her finger -- and to e-mail a photograph. Later that day, the morgue called to say her mother’s body had been positively identified.

“I can only hope and pray that it really is my mother,” Holloway said. “As much as they have messed up, I can’t focus on that, because I really will lose my mind if I thought it wasn’t Mom.”

As of last week, 375 bodies were still awaiting release from the main morgue, state records showed. Officials say every effort is being made to return remains to families.

Holloway’s mother’s body was cremated at a funeral home in Baton Rouge and her ashes were being transferred to the cemetery in New Orleans. Earlier, Holloway had received the ashes of her aunt; without the remains of either woman, she held a memorial service in September.

During Thanksgiving week, Holloway made the trip to New Orleans to collect personal items from the family home. There, she found a note her mother had written to her on Aug. 28, on what she realized might be her last day.

Delia Holloway’s note to her only child was written on monogrammed paper and left in a red leather tote bag the senior Holloway treasured and had hung on a doorknob.

The note was dated “Sunday A.M.”

“Baby,” the letter began, “All I can say is that I hope we didn’t make a mistake by staying.”

The note went on to tell her daughter what she would like done if they did not survive -- details on the undertaker to be contacted, the separate churches where memorial services should be held.

It described where the sisters’ private papers could be found -- and that the house insurance policy was in a china cabinet. Contact FEMA, she wrote, for house repairs.

But most importantly, the note instructed that the sisters’ final resting place should be at Mount Olivet, in a plot under the name of Eva J. Allen, their grandmother, who died in 1956.

Knowing she will be precisely fulfilling her mother’s last wishes has brought Deborah Holloway a measure of peace.

“They are going to be where they wanted to be,” she said. “It will be a great deal of closure.”