After Katrina, a crisis of loss

Steven Lipp keeps insisting that he’s one of the lucky ones. He, his wife Nancy and their two children, Josh and Felicia, loaded two cars with standard survival gear -- food and water for three days, blankets and pillows -- and left their Lake Vista neighborhood in New Orleans ahead of the storm. They made it out together, to the safety of his sister’s house in a Houston suburb.

As they packed to leave, he remembers picking up a book here, a photograph there, and thinking, “No, we can’t afford to pack that. It’s trivial. It’s not going to help us survive.” He fully expected to return.

Their home, books, clothing, the piano he played -- all gone. And then there was something else: his doctoral dissertation, untouched for years, which was sitting on the living room bookshelf.

“I know it’s absolutely useless in the greater world, but I put many years of my life into that book. It’s gone,” he says. “We may have lost everything. It’s heartbreaking.”

In some ways, all the hurricane victims are about to begin a parallel odyssey. They have all left their community, and life as they knew it will never be the same. They all are suffering through a crisis of loss as they glance in the rearview mirror, and a crisis of overload as they stare ahead through the windshield, says Ruben G. Rumbaut, a sociologist at UC Irvine.

Even their ability to return when they want to is beyond their control, says Rumbaut, who himself fled Cuba in 1960. “They’re strangers in a strange place, trying to figure out which arrow to follow.”

Americans have suffered through disasters -- California earthquakes, Midwestern floods and previous Gulf Coast hurricanes -- but the displacement of virtually everyone from a major U.S. city is unprecedented. As the victims begin their recovery and resettlement, they are in uncharted emotional territory. They’ve lost many of the things that help hold a human life together. They’ve lost basic necessities like homes, cars, beds, refrigerators. They’ve lost the institutions that anchor them: jobs, churches, schools, neighborhoods. They’ve lost personal treasures: the toolbox passed down from a grandfather, the plaster handprint of a 5-year-old. Worst of all, some have lost family members and friends.

“We’ll find out what it does to people. This is something the country has not experienced before,” says C. Scott Saunders, director of the UCLA Trauma Psychiatry Service.

“A sense of reality and personal identity is directly linked to the people and familiar objects around you,” says Dr. Robert L. Pyles, a Boston psychoanalyst. “If those are lost, people come under enormous stress.”

It seems likely that many of those who have evacuated New Orleans will never return. Of those, some will find comfort in the new places where they have taken refuge. Others may struggle for years to feel at home.

“For the more resilient, that means an opportunity to start over,” says Marta Tienda, a Princeton University sociologist. “What people can’t take away from you is education, training, drive, persistence. It can be worn out but not taken away.”

Some victims had little more than the shirt on their back even before the hurricane hit. “That’s the real devastation: asking people to put their lives back together when they had very little to begin with,” says Tienda.

At first, many people will feel shock, numbness and detachment after the disaster. But for some, there may be an initial rush of euphoria. “They were able to get out, they’re all in one piece, they’re alive and they’re hopeful,” says Rumbaut.

The worst mental health consequences -- depression, anxiety, flashbacks, panic attacks and, in rare cases, psychosis -- may not set in until after the first year, according to Rumbaut’s research. Depression can deepen before people rebound and stabilize.

Surveys have shown that a loss of familiarity leads to psychological distress, which can worsen as people experience more traumatic events. Extensive research on children, from Germany’s bombing of London during World War II to more recent disasters, shows that separation from their parents is more traumatic than exposure to the destruction. The shared experience of crisis is better for families than even well-intentioned separation, Rumbaut says.

As the old reality slips away, people will begin drawing on the essence of who they are to navigate their new reality. Chaos is about the worst thing for the psyche. As the victims reunite with family members and as order and routine once again take over, people can begin to heal in their multitude of new places. The core of who they are is not their home or their possessions. It is what has been forming within since each was a child.

Studies have shown that by about age 5, children have a good sense of who they are. With good parenting, they internalize values and spend the rest of their lives adding to that accumulation. It is what they take with them, wherever they land.

For many, however, their new homes -- temporary or not -- cannot replace what was lost. Joel A. Devine, chair of the department of sociology at Tulane University, hopes to return to New Orleans -- surely one of the most distinct cultures in the United States -- to restart his life. His department’s faculty members have scattered, to California, New York, Rhode Island, Illinois, New Mexico, Texas.

“I’d feel terrible if I didn’t [return] ... ,” he says. “I’m very committed to rebuilding the community, the university.” But he hesitates at the unknowns: the environmental hurdles to make his city once again livable; the time without work that may force him to look elsewhere.

Ten days after the hurricane, he was, after all, still finding his path out of harm’s way.