Katrina Reminds Us There Are No Guarantees

By Russell Friedman and John W. James

Almost without exception, the 300,000,000 residents of the United States have been emotionally impacted by the devastation left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Yet only a small percentage of our vast population has a personal link to any of the people whose lives were torn asunder and will be even more fractured in the lingering aftermath.

It's parallel to our cumulative emotional response to the events of 9/11, when even fewer of us actually knew any of the victims or their surviving family members. Our collective grief, then and now, is made up of many factors, the most obvious of which is our membership in the family of humankind. But it is so much more than that.

Watching the news footage of New Orleans and elsewhere, and imagining the death toll that is now only hinted at, our hearts go out to the people who've had everything ripped away. The graphic images of destruction depict a litany of grief that only begins with the death toll that is yet to be revealed. What we see makes us realize that grief is not limited to death.

If we shift from the word grief to loss, we add loss of property, jobs, businesses, and careers. Hopefully most of those losses will be rebuilt and regained, if not where they were, then in a safer place. With effort and help, new possessions will replace those that are gone. But the loss of irreplaceable memorabilia, in the form of pictures, china and silverware and other mementoes that connect us to our heritage, are gone forever. We instinctively realize what it would mean to have every physical trace of our family's past evaporate. That's another element of the collective emotion that binds us to so many people we don't know.

So far, we've only mentioned some of the tangible, physical losses. We must add the losses of trust and safety, as well as the breech of faith that many have suffered but may be unwilling to voice in public. Those intangible losses are not so easily replaced.

For those directly affected, everything familiar in their lives has ended or changed. Change in the familiar defines grief and loss and brings with it a gamut of emotions. Sheer terror, overwhelming sadness, boiling anger, frustration, pain — are just a few of the feelings assaulting the survivors. Those feelings and many others are within the range of normal reactions to change. Ultimately grief is about change, and change is the most difficult thing for all of us to accommodate.

For those of us on the outside looking in, we may feel compassion, kindness, and concern along with a sense of impotence that we can't do more than send checks or supplies. We may not understand why we feel so deeply for people we don't know. Part is explained by our membership in the community of humanity; and part is explained by our capacity to empathize with the victims and to recognize the multiple layers of loss that affect them.

But there's something else at play here. Human compassion and empathy aside, we still may not understand why we're so affected by events and people that are remote from our day-to-day lives. What we don't realize is that our unconscious minds are busy searching through our own life experiences to find out what we believe and how we feel about dealing with loss and change. In that process, we go over every sad or painful event that has affected our lives. We remember people who have died. We recall relationships that have ended. We think about disappointments and hurts, large and small. It is the accumulation of our own lifetime of feelings that causes us to have so much emotional concern for others.

As that review unfolds, we are sometimes reminded that we didn't always take the time to tell each person who affected our lives exactly what they meant to us. This catastrophe reminds us that we have no guarantees that we will have those chances. We must use the emotional awareness created by this event to make sure we find the time to communicate what we feel, out loud and directly to the people we love. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Russell Friedman and John W. James are the principals of The Grief Recovery Institute in Sherman Oaks, CA [ www.grief.net ] and co-authors of The Grief Recovery Handbook and When Children Grieve.

© 2005 Russell P. Friedman, John W. James and The Grief Recovery Institute.
All rights reserved. For permission to reprint this and other articles please contact The Grief Recovery Institute at Editor@grief.net or by phone USA (818) 907-9600 Canada (519) 586-8825

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