The Mississippi on her Knees Chapter 4
By fleurdelivre
- 554 reads
August 23, 2005:
I am one massive wad of conflicting emotions right now. I'm going through the normal "Holy crap, I'm moving out and starting college" set of emotions at the same time as the "By finals week of my first semester, my Dad will probably be dead" emotions. And I can't help but feel like I'm not strong enough to handle both of them simultaneously.
I made some snide comment about how unexcited I am to be moving out Saturday (which was only half true) and Grace said, "It seems to me that you've been working toward college your whole life."
Which is true. Starting in the 5th grade, I had teachers telling me that I would go on to great and surprising things and they would all start with me getting into a stellar college. I love to learn and I always have and so being able to do nothing but learn for an extra four years is like a special treat for me. I just resent that when it's my turn to shine, to grow up, at this point where the only thing I should be nervous about is whether or not my roommate will like me, I'm worrying about asking for too much stuff that costs too much for my family to handle right now and I'm worried about my Dad and I'm worried about my mom and I'm worried about Will and Grace and I'm worried about a freaking hurricane heading for the gulf. I can't be a kid anymore and I resent that.
A little part of me is totally psyched to be moving out and away. Finally away from my mother's omniscience and my dad's heavy-handed channel-surfing. But the thing that worries me is that an immeasurably larger part of me is relieved to be getting away from the illness and the doctor's appointments and all the craziness. And that part makes me feel like an asshole and a substandard daughter. But the truth is that I have no idea what to do or how to help him. And that, again, makes me feel like poop.
Growing up, I saw my dad as the stuff that fairy tales are made of. He was larger than life (and death) and he was strong and like one of those gentle giants or knights with hearts of gold. He was my protector and he always made me feel safe. I just can't stand to watch my Daddy, my defender, so incredibly helpless. I've never ever seen him like this and I never ever expected to see him like this. He wasn't supposed to get here. He was supposed to be devoured by a grizzly.
I went to my first and only oncologist appointment with him today. I sat there, watching my Dad hooked up to an IV and dozing in a plastic recliner. I was confronted by a room full of people anguishing because cancer is running rampant. It seemed so painful and scary. Was this really the best thing we could come up with? Is this really the way we treat illness? We can’t cure it? Cancer is too horrifying and too commonplace a diagnosis to not have a solution. My Dad should have had thirty more years in him and now we're lucky if he has thirty more days.
My Dad peered at me from his wheelchair in the lobby of the hospital today and whispered simply, "cancer sucks." I would have given anything at that moment, and still in this moment, to never have him find that knowledge firsthand.
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The thing that went pretty much unquestioned during this summer of craziness was that Grace and I would stay in school for the Fall semester. The bottom line was that we didn’t know what was going to happen. None of the doctors would give us a timeline. They give pregnant ladies due dates. They want to pinpoint the exact moment you’ll take your first breath. Doctors never want to tell you when you’ll likely take your last.
The one thing our parents always valued more than anything else—more than nutrition, more than religion, more than peer socialization—was our education. How do I know that’s true? They didn’t pay us for satisfactory grades on our report cards. They didn’t make us sit at the table in the afternoons until our homework was finished. They didn’t dictate which colleges we applied to. They let us choose our own paths and set our own timetables. If I wanted to sneak into Will’s room and play Mario Brothers for two hours every afternoon when I was a high school freshman, I could. As long as I maintained my mostly A average.
We didn’t have jobs when school was in session. The way they saw it, school was our job. They had high expectations for us. Meeting those expectations was our responsibility as students, so it would not gain a reward. Failing to meet them repeatedly could garner punishment. They talked more, worried more, were more serious about our education than anything else in our upbringing. When Grace was having trouble in high school, they held meetings with teachers and principals. When that didn’t satisfy my sister or them, they sent her to a private school.
They were our first and greatest teachers. They cultivated our minds. Taught us to weigh facts and opinions. I asked my mom, “didn’t that make your job as parents harder? When we were equipped with the skills to challenge what you were telling us?”
“Oh, God, yes,” she said. “All three of you were little Philadelphia lawyers.”
But they also taught us respect and obedience. So it couldn’t have been that terrible.
So, when my dad got sick, deferring school was a thought, but a fleeting one. Not one to really pursue. I didn’t think I wanted to wait on school. My dad was saying he didn’t want me to wait. Mom was happy to not have to make a decision about just one thing. Probably.
It was happening. On Saturday August 27, I was moving to New Orleans. The closer the date marched, the faster my dad’s health deteriorated. And the glazed shell of my cognitive dissonance did not crack.
I did not feel guilty as I packed my clothes back into those shitty suitcases and into boxes my brother procured for free from Walmart. A few books and some tshirts in cardboard marked Huggies. My granny had taken me on a Bed, Bath, and Beyond splurge earlier that month for dorm essentials in a strange approximation of a Nickelodeon Super Toy Run ten years too late. My sister had given me extra long twin sheets and a matching duvet cover as a graduation gift. They were polka-dotted and brightly colored. Granny made sure I brought the pillow sham with us so we could match the colors of everything we bought perfectly. She bought me everything I needed, every recommended item. Now almost six years later, I’m still using the duvet she bought me that day and I still sleep on the sheets. But packing all of it into the SUV weeks later, I felt annoyed, mostly.
By this point, my dad was too sick to come. That much was clear. And I wanted to understand that. Rationally, I knew that I couldn’t hold that against him. But I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that if he weren’t sick, he would have been packing the car and surreptitiously slipping me pocket money and telling me he believes in my abilities and mitigating my mother's insanity. But he was sick. And getting sicker. And unable to do anything for me. And all anyone could do for him was put in a catheter and give him morphine.
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My mother knew about the hurricane early that week. She’s a worrier by nature and a news junkie by habit, so it was probably Thursday, when the category 1 Katrina skipped like a stone across the atmosphere above Florida when she heard about it. And she was watching it.
My mom had her misgivings about me going to school in New Orleans for four years. The city scares her. She was always afraid of the high violent crime rates, the decades of stories she’d heard from other people of muggings and car theft, the ubiquity of underage drinking. But also chief among her concerns when I chose Tulane University in the Spring of that year was the flooding risk. She told me repeatedly that at the first news of gulf activity, she was coming to get me. Flooding was not the remote possibility that everyone thought it was. It was almost assured in the face of a weather event. I grew up hearing that New Orleans was a geological bowl. Everyone knew it. We watched a video in elementary school about the Mississippi River that I remember because it told us lots of terrifying things: the River has been trying to switch its course for years, it wants to jump over the Atchafalaya basin, the levees in New Orleans are not as strong as they need to be.
Growing up in South Louisiana, you learn to accept a certain, ever-present element of risk in your daily life. You know that you are not terribly safe, but you ignore it anyway. Cognitive dissonance.
My mom was watching. She kept calling the Tulane emergency number starting early in the evening on Friday. Katrina was in the Gulf and tracking to the Louisiana coast. She called over and over again. The pre-recorded voice on the phone kept telling her to check back later for more updated information.
My brother and I packed our SUV with my stuff on a slick, steamy night that Friday. Going outside felt like standing in a mouthful of Lucifer’s breath. Hurricane season.
We set out early the next morning, my brother drove us Eastward on I-10 and my mom called the emergency hotline every half hour from the passenger seat on the drive. Over the Atchafalaya swamp she tried, but we didn’t have reception. On the Mississippi River Bridge, the recording said the university leaders were in a meeting and to call again at 11:30 for a new message. My mom called every five minutes starting at 11:20. When we turned onto a campus, a left from Freret Street onto the foot of McAlister drive, at 11:50, the message was that orientation was cancelled. The banner stretched between the tops of oak trees said WELCOME TO TULANE. The message we actually received was: everyone find your way out.
We spoke to a Tulane police officer who chided us for forgetting to print out a parking pass, but let us through into the queue of family cars waiting to get close enough to the first year dorms to dump stuff on the ground and post a family member to guard it until the cars could be stashed in the campus parking garage. The official policy was that freshmen were to check in at their dorms, fill out a card with their evacuation plan on it, stash their belongings in the dorms, and then get out. The storm was a category three in the Gulf. My R.A. told us we’d be back on campus by Wednesday, which was the scheduled first day of classes. It might sound crazy when you hear it now, but I agreed with the assessment at the time. For all the meteorology, hurricanes remain unpredictable. They have a habit of veering at the last moment before landfall. And even if it did hit directly, at a cat three on the Saffir-Simpson scale there was little reason to think that there would be more than the normal amount of wind damage.
We didn’t want to think that we’d wasted a day’s trip, and so we hauled my stuff up seven cinderblock stairwells in Butler Hall. The elevators were off limits, except for heavy cargo. It was scorching hot and so sunny it leeched moisture out of everyone’s armpits and crotches. Inside, upstairs, I met my roommate Kate for the first time, if you don’t count emails and facebook friendship as meeting someone. We were brief. Her mom was in the room, trying to book a flight out of New Orleans back home to Pittsburgh. Kate was going to be following the evacuation plan the university provided students with no other options. She would be getting on a charter bus and going to Jackson State University in Mississippi. Most of the freshman class would end up in Jackson, sleeping on the gym floor for a week after their arrival. Kate would go from Jackson State to Atlanta, where she would be interviewed on CNN before flying home for a semester at Carnegie Mellon. But that was coming in the future. At the moment, she was focused on the questions of immediate importance. Should she bring her laptop? (Yes.) Would it be of any use? (No.) Would it get stolen if she left it behind? (Yes. She did leave it and it did get stolen by the restoration contractors that Tulane hired to ready the campus for re-opening.)
I remember my mom telling her that if things at home had been any different, we would have offered to take her to the safety of Lafayette. But then there were assurances that they understood. And that Kate would have the opportunity to visit later in the year. I told her to put her stuff in the closet in case the wind broke our seventh floor window. I put my suitcases in my closet and left everything else on my dorm mattress. I took with me some changes of underwear and some pajamas, a pair of shorts, random clothes. Before we embarked on our evacuation, my brother asked me to grab my big binder full of my cd collection for the drive back.
We went back downstairs, ready to get back on the road going the other way. There were parents on phones all over the place. There was a student travel agency in an office on the ground floor of Butler Hall and they were all searching for planes and rental cars. We walked back to our car and prepared to hit the road.
We only made one stop on the way out of town, at a discount gas station on Carrollton Avenue to fill up. Grace and I went inside to acquire car snacks, a move that would pay off in short order.
We crawled through traffic. It took us two hours to get from the Carrollton I-10 on ramp to the 310 exit: a total of about 10 miles traveled. My brother couldn’t stand it anymore, so he followed a sign’s suggestion and headed south on interstate 310 to Airline Drive. We took Airline Drive to Perkins Road in Baton Rouge, another hour and forty five minutes in fits and spurts of movement. At Perkins, we re-joined the packed Interstate 10 all the way home. The trip we’d taken that morning in a little over two hours took five and half hours in reverse. Arriving back home, we were exhausted.
I went to sleep that Saturday night. When I woke up on Sunday, Katrina was a behemoth category 5 storm occupying the entire Gulf of Mexico, unavoidably tracking towards New Orleans. Hurricanes are unpredictable, all right.
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I am keeping up with this
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