Hurricane Katrina smashed into Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama in the early morning hours of August 29, 2005, causing untold losses. She has affected hundreds of thousands of lives, and those lives will never again be the same.

Losses

Losses - all kinds of losses - will eventually have to be grieved.

When Elizabeth Kubler-Ross wrote her book "On Death and Dying", she outlined five stages of acceptace that a dying patient goes through. They are: Denial and Isolation, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. These stages are the ones that have become the standards in dealing with death. These stages are experienced, though not necessarily in the order listed, as Kugler-Ross later said after her book was published.

These five stages of grieving have been adapted as ways that people who have lost loved ones deal with their loss. Death is one of the greatest losses. People who have lost loved ones due to Katrina will have to grieve, and will go through these stages.

These five stages have also been adapted as stages that people going through a divorce must go through in order to heal. These same stages will have to be experiences with other types of losses. A loss, whether great or small, must be grieved in order for a person to eventually move on with their life in a healthy manner.
Worse yet, with each new loss a person experiences, the brain is triggered to remember other losses, and sometimes bring up the grief associated with past losses. People who went through Camille, or other storms and had serious losses will again be affected by them to a certain extent.

Other stages have been identified that people who suffer a loss will go through. Those stages are shock, numbness, guilt, forgiveness, and letting go, and moving on.

Types of Losses

There are many other types of loss. The people affected by Katrina are going to have to deal with a multitude of different types of losses in their lives. Some people will be able to deal with their losses better than others. It is important to be aware of what they have lost, and be aware of the improtance of properly grieving those losses.

Of the losses almost too numerous to list, these are some of the losses that people are going through at this moment:

Loss of loved ones, loss of homes, loss of jobs, loss of places of business, loss of neighborhoods, loss of community, loss of pets, loss of clothing, loss of personal possessions and momentos of their lives, loss of computers stored with important information, loss of whose houses of furnitire, loss of clothing and shoes, loss of freezers of food, loss of vehicles and ways to get about, separation from loved ones, loss of important papers and documentation, loss of tools and supplies used to make a living and to produce arts and crafts, and loss of schools. Children will have to deal with departed teachers, and college students will have to deal with changing colleges in order to graduate, especially in New Orleans. There are other losses that anyone could add to this list. Children will be affected in ways that will make them different from what they would have been had they not gone through this trauma.
People have had to deal with closed businesses, shortages of goods, crowded stores, fewer and more crowded restaurants, long waits, all of which shorten their fuses and ability to deal with everything.

In addition, there are losses that affect daily routines and loss of a way of life. One of the biggest losses is the loss of security, knowing that we will wake up tomorrow the same way that we woke up before Katrina, with the knowledge that our life had a basic kind of order. We no longer have that order, that routine, or that security.

Many people right now are merely existing. Right now they have their lives, and for that they are thankful. But they don't have a life. Their lives are on hold. They are waiting. They are waiting for help, waiting for water, waiting for electricity, waithing for housing, waiting for financial help, waiting for a lease car, waiting to be united with family members. People have waited in long lines for gas, long lines for water and for ice and for food, long lines for Red Cross help, and long lines for FEMA help. People have gone without food or water for days. people have not had bathrooms to use. People have stayed in unsanitary and unsafe surroundings. People have gone for days in the same clothes they were wearing during the storm only to find that they have no more clothes to change into. A trivial but not unimportant factor is that many without homes are dealing with late summer heat, making life miserable. People doing cleanup are having to deal with the heat.

People have had to learn to accept that they can't provide everything they need for themselves; they have had to learn to accept help and acknowledge that their very survival, for now, depends on others.n many cases they have lost control of their lives because officials are telling them what they can and cannot do. This, in itself, is a loss.

Shock and Numbness

We are now at Day 16 after Katrina sturck. For the most part, people have been stoic. They are holding up and hanging on and doing what they have to do to survive. They have cried very little.
For the most part, people still are basically numb and in shock.

The Shock is that something like this has happened - that something more terrible than Hurricane Camille has happened. Nobody ever believed that it could be worse than Camille. People are shocked that Katrina didn't downgrade, didn't stay on its track, and that they underestimated her fury and her potential damage. The shock is that they don't know what to do with their lives. Everything that they knew about their lives is no longer true. Life has changed forever.

People are still Numb. It hasn't fully registered. This is nature's protective mechanism. The numbness allows us to do what has to be done immediately after the disaster. They have had to deal with no shelter, finding shelter, finding food to eat, missing family members, finding family members, missing pets, no water, no electricity, no means of communication, not knowing what is coming next, and total feeling of helplessness.

Some have cried. but others haven't cried. When our body will allow us, we need to let ourselves cry. Crying is a major way of relieving stress. People can't keep feelings of stress and frustration and hlpelessness bottled up foreverthose feelings have to come out. If they don't, people will start experiencing major health problems. Some will experience them, anyway, after things start to settle down and their body starts to register feelings again.

Anger

Anger, as well as frustration, are normal emotions during a catastrophy such as Katrina. People will eventually have to find a way to express their anger at the unfairness of what has happened to them and to their lives and the lives of loved ones.

Anger has been expressed over the handling of this disaster, and about the lack of response. People have been outspoken - not only those affected by the storm, but people who see that things could have been handled better, more quickly and more efficiently.

Different kinds of anger will surface. People are angry that they weren't rescued sooner. People have gotten angry in long lines. In Hattiesburg, someone was shot over a bag of ice. They will be angry at insurance companies for not covering their losses like they expected. They will be angry at losing their jobs.

People might be angry at themselves for not evacuating, for not insuring their homes for flood, at Mother Nature for dealing us such a rotten blow, or for not putting a little money aside in case of such a hardship. There are any number of reasons for anger at a time like this.

Anger is a normal reaction to the stress of things not going our way. To hold anger inside is detrimental to our health. Hopefully, people will chose to express their anger in appropriate ways, not by lashing out and doing destructive things. Gentle confrontation, expressing how you feel to others, or how you feel when they do what they do, rather than shouting blame and accusations will go a long way in dealing appropriately with anger. Talking about your anger and frustrations to someone who will listen and understand will also help. Knowing that someone relates to your feelings and understands and validates your feelings goes a long way in helping you realize your feelings are valid and normal.

To be continued...