Two years after the storm, Katrina survivors struggle to “get over it,” yet many discover something called Post-Traumatic Growth taking place in their lives.
- by Ellis Anderson Part 10 in a series of excerpts from the award-winning book that follows Bay St. Louis through the very heart of Hurricane Katrina – and three years of grinding aftermath. The Shoofly Magazine is publishing one excerpt from the book each week through the storm's 20th anniversary on August 29. 
Door in Bay St. Louis post-Katrina, by Ellis Anderson
When I moved full-time to Bay St. Louis in 1995 and began to meet older residents who’d spent their lives in the town, I was often amused at the frequency with which Hurricane Camille was mentioned. I’d try not to yawn when someone would suddenly veer off any given topic and launch into a story about their narrow escape from death, or the incredible hardships of the aftermath. Jeez, I’d think to myself, that happened twenty-five years ago, why on earth are they still talking about Camille? Get over it already!
In 2008, I found myself sitting at a kitchen table with family in South Carolina. Midway through lunch, I realized that I’d mentioned Katrina at least a dozen times. I only caught the trend when my nephew stifled a yawn and narrowed his eyes as if assessing me for mental illness.
I pinched my own arm under the table, furious at myself for dragging my muddy mental baggage into a holiday gathering. Yet a few moments later, “Katrina” popped out of my mouth again, as distracting as a belch in the middle of a Sunday sermon. Eyebrows were raised. My nephew gave his young wife a significant glance. I could read his silent message: Why on earth is she still talking about Katrina? It happened almost three years ago. Get over it already! I was beginning to understand that humans never quite get over a significant tragedy. Like dye in water, the event colors every fiber of a life. And the pigment of pain seems especially vivid when an entire community experiences a common calamity. Individual misfortunes usually elicit support from those unaffected by the tragedy. After a death in the family, neighbors will ring the doorbell, bearing casseroles and condolences. A house fire will inspire fellow church members to take up a collection and provide temporary housing. Yet after Katrina, no person in the community had escaped the consequences of catastrophe. Those crippled by anguish were forced to lean on other limping souls. Like a beaten brigade after a losing battle, we staggered off the field in our comrades’ arms, the weak supporting the wounded. The combat comparison is more than a metaphor to Dr. Raymond Scurfield, who served on an army psychiatric team in Vietnam. Now a professor of social work, Scurfield teaches at the University of Southern Mississippi Gulf Coast. He lives in Long Beach, a coastal town about ten miles east of Bay St. Louis.
Long Beach was mauled by the storm, as was the beachside university. When Scurfield hiked to his office the next day, he found a lifetime of painstaking research ruined and spread willy-nilly across the campus. Scurfield’s personal Katrina experience and his extensive expertise in post-traumatic stress led him to draw several parallels between combat veterans and hurricane survivors.
According to Scurfield, both groups often undergo a loss of faith, wondering how God could permit something so dreadful to happen. Or they lose confidence in government when a bureaucracy “that doesn’t function well in normal times” becomes gnarled and tangled during crisis. Survivors commonly became disoriented when they returned to a home that suddenly seemed an alien place. A sense of feeling forgotten is another similarity—one frequently encountered by Gulf Coast residents who’d been through the storm. Scurfield recounted attending a Katrina conference at a prestigious university that drew hundreds of experts from around the country. “During the thirty-minute opening speech, Mississippi was not mentioned a single time,” he said. Physical triggers can set off anxiety. Some veterans abhor the sound of firecrackers that remind them of gunfire, while hurricane survivors may become jittery during a bad thunderstorm. Amazingly, even emotions—brought on by an event with no connection to the original trauma—can induce stronger than normal reactions. For instance, losing a loved one has the power to bring up every loss a hurricane survivor experienced, magnifying the grief exponentially. The full catalog of post-traumatic stress symptoms is a large one. Once while researching the subject, I printed out a list of thirty-seven different indicators. The little Internet test instructed me to check off the symptoms I’d experienced. When I’d finished, there wasn’t a blank space on the page. I could have even added a few others, like “aggressive avoidance” and “post-traumatic procrastination.” The list read like a litany of mental distress and included “increased anger, nightmares, mood swings, memory problems and dissociation.” I learned that dissociation is very common in people exposed to extreme trauma. The term refers to a state where perceptions are altered and normal thought patterns become disrupted. Everyday reality transforms into a dream. Sign me up, I thought as I read. It sounded like an accurate description of my life during and after Katrina. Dr. Deborah Gross experienced an incident where dissociation actually affected her vision. Two days before Katrina, the psychiatrist had evacuated from her beachfront cottage in Bay St. Louis where she lived and maintained her practice. She shoehorned as many belongings as she could into her car, then said farewell to her beloved home and headed to her fiancé’s house in Jackson, Mississippi. The couple later shopped in a Jackson grocery store, stocking up on nonperishables in case they lost electricity. On one shelf, a row of cans caught her eye. “Pea cheese,” the labels advertised. Intrigued, she reached for a can, thinking that it’d be something new and interesting to try. Holding it in her hand, Deb squinted again at the label. It now read something completely different. “Peaches.” She placed the can in the cart and tugged on her fiancé’s arm. “Robert,” she said. “In the foreseeable future, don’t let me drive.” Deb never saw her home again. When she and Robert were able to return to the coast, she was unable to even recognize the spot where the building had stood. Her fiancé followed her as she clambered over the rubble, dispensing tissues while she sought some small reminder of her past. Over the next two years, the psychiatrist documented her own manifestations of PTS, as she struggled with crying bouts, panic attacks, and memory loss. Deb once discussed her growing concerns about memory loss with a scientific researcher. Her scientist friend informed her that psychological trauma can actually cause physical damage to the brain. “Hey,” he said. “If we bopped our lab rats over the head, they wouldn’t know how to get through the maze either.” Deb took a job away from the coast and tried to settle into her new community, yet like many who moved elsewhere for reasons of sorrow or practicality, she often felt alienated. Surrounded by unmarred landscapes and people who—although sympathetic—simply couldn’t relate, many “expatriates” experienced survivor guilt, an anxious suspicion that they hadn’t suffered, lost, or sacrificed as much as others on the coast. 
Nicholson Avenue at Central: A sign erected by survivors after tour buses filled with sightseers became a frequent occurrence. Photo by Ellis Anderson
One neighbor of mine who’d lost her home relocated to Jackson for her job. On a visit back to the Bay, she drank a cup of coffee on my porch and lamented: “Like a marriage, I was committed to this town for better or for worse,” she said. “We had many years of wedded bliss. Now it’s been hurt in an accident and paralyzed, but just maybe—with lots of intensive therapy—it’ll be OK. “By moving to another city, I feel like I’ve abandoned my duty and run off with the drummer from a rock and roll band.” For those of us who remained behind, the communal crack-up provided an odd comfort: our neighbors and friends could empathize en masse. Yet the inescapable, daily sight of ruin and debris added to our misery. Long-standing marriages dissolved overnight. Drug and alcohol abuse, suicide, child abuse skyrocketed. One local pharmacist estimated that prescriptions for antidepressants shot up at least 25 percent after the storm—at a time when the town’s population had declined significantly. My own doctor joked that antidepressants should be added to the water supply. Depression was sometimes accompanied by chronic fatigue, yet another PTS symptom. I compared it to the utter exhaustion I’d experienced while working on a ship as a young woman. After a few days at sea, I would no longer notice the motion of the vessel, yet my body unconsciously compensated for each wave, constantly striving to maintain balance. Mild activity in rough seas would leave me feeling like I’d run a marathon. I began to understand that trying to keep a mental balance in the post-Katrina world wore on my community in much the same way. The sense that we faced endless and unexpected travails was heightened by some bizarre attacks from strange quarters. We were still sifting through the rubble for our dead when proclamations began to appear in the national news claiming that Katrina was a punishment from God. A wild array of sources, including frothing ministers, antiabortion groups, politicians, and even Al Qaeda named a variety of sins that were supposedly to blame for the destruction. While most charges were aimed at flamboyant New Orleans, one Alabama state senator asserted that God had not overlooked the iniquities of Mississippi. Senator Hank Erwin wrote, “New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast have always been known for gambling, sin, and wickedness. It is the kind of behavior that ultimately brings the judgment of God... Warnings year after year by godly evangelists and preachers went unheeded. So why were we surprised when finally the hand of judgment fell?” The concept that a personal God had directed the devastation fired off already touchy tempers in some survivors. A petite, mild-mannered friend whose home had been destroyed, exploded in fury after hearing a seemingly innocuous comment. “If one more person tells me how blessed they were not to lose their house,” she fumed, “I’m going to smash their face! What are we? Unblessed?” Another ugly trend surfaced as blame began to be cast toward Katrina survivors for choosing to live in a vulnerable area. I once cried while reading a series of mean-spirited comments on a website that featured an article about our town’s recovery efforts. As people around the country lambasted Gulf Coast residents for trying to rebuild, their wagging judgmental fingers seemed pointed directly at me. Later, I was visiting another state when a man voiced that same venom to my face. He almost wound up a victim of my own PTS symptoms (numbers 1 and 26), increased anger and extreme irritability. He begins with a self-congratulatory pat on the back and lets it drop that he is leaving the following week for Mississippi, to spend a week building a house for someone who’d been left homeless by Katrina. But before I even have a chance to applaud him, he starts on a rant about how people on the Gulf Coast “deserved what they got.” “People down there knew it was only a matter of time, they should have moved out years ago. They should have had their insurance paid or moved somewhere else if they want to whine. I don’t feel sorry for them, I’m no bleeding-heart liberal.” I think that if I tell him that I live on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, it will embarrass him. I am wrong. He looks me right in the eye and knows I’m itching to deck him. He’s old and out of shape and I’m sure I can break his nose before he knows what’s happening. A friend who’s a bleeding-heart liberal saves me from assault charges by gently putting her hand on my arm and pulling me away. “But hey,” the jerk says from a safe distance. “I’m not king of the world.” “Good,” I answer. Although relatively rare, the misplaced blame seemed to compound the symptoms of stress already shouldered by the community. The saving grace for myself and other survivors in Bay St. Louis was something Wendy McDonald calls the “little piston.” “When someone was going down,” she said, “someone else was always there to step up. Nobody had to do it on their own, there was always somebody to lift the load, saying, here, let me do that for you.” The miraculous “little piston” went to work soon after the storm and somehow managed to keep the sputtering engine of community running. 
Wendy McDonald, city councilwoman and director of Bay-Waveland Habitat for Humanity after Katrina, photo by Ellis Anderson
Survivors gathered given the slightest opportunity. Communal dinners, city meetings, and church functions often acted as group therapy sessions, as neighbors shared stories of loss and residents embraced, reunited after long separations. Our Second Saturday Artwalk morphed from a social event to a psychological shindig, another chance to celebrate resilience. 
Christmas caroling on a very foggy beach in Waveland, 2005. Photo by Ellis Anderson
The opening of the new bay bridge in May 2007 became a milestone of recovery. Over seven thousand people converged in Bay St. Louis, all rejoicing at our literal and symbolic reconnection with our neighbors to the east. Of the many photographs taken on that jubilant occasion, my favorite is one of my beaming friend Prima Luke. The T-shirt she wore sported a lighthearted, yet ironic message. Build a bridge—and get over it. 
Prima Luke at the celebration of the bridge opening in May 2007, photo by Ellis Anderson
Humor had become our brightest buoy, with laughter lifting us above the swells. Understanding humor’s healing power, minister Jean Larroux coined a phrase for the community-wide mental disarray. “Bay polar,” he said. “That’s what we call it when you laugh and cry in the same sentence. It’s what happens when you come here, it’s the way it feels.” Some of our artists dug for any levity that might be mined from the loss. For the first post-Katrina holiday season, one couple sent out a photo greeting card that showed them embracing, with the sad ruins of their Waveland house looming starkly in the background. Beside them is a life-sized drawing of Rhett Butler holding Scarlett O’Hara in his arms. The large caption above the Gone With the Wind cartoon reads: Oh, Fiddle Dee Dee. Let’s worry about this mess tomorrow. Strangers thrown together would banter to lighten the mood. Once while standing in line at the liquor store (increased alcohol consumption—symptom number 8), I overheard several sweaty women in grimy clothes anxiously discuss an approaching storm. One woman bemoaned the threat, predicting that it’d be “the end of the world.” “If it’s going to be the end of the world,” groused another, “it’d better happen before I finish cleaning all the damned mud out of my house.” The gloom dispersed instantly as everyone in the store laughed. Uncomfortable housing situations were also fair game for dark humor. After living for over a year in a FEMA trailer with a miniscule lavatory, Ernie, the owner of the Good Life, grinned wickedly while describing the plans for his new dream house. “It’s going to have a three-thousand-square-foot bathroom,” he announced. Living in Jackson, Deb Gross noticed a lightening of her own spirit as the months turned to years. While her memories of her former life were “like a knife in the heart” during that first year of aftermath, she noticed a slow emergence of happier recollections. The psychiatrist found herself reminiscing about the fishy smell of the salt air and the luminous light on the coast. She returned to Bay St. Louis in May 2008 to marry Robert in St. Rose de Lima Catholic Church, where before the storm, she’d joyfully sung in the choir. “I was afraid that the loss would overwhelm the gain,” she said. “But I was so happy all day long, I couldn’t even talk to anyone. I just held Robert’s hand and looked at everyone in that church of my heart.” Gain despite loss. It’s not mentioned in the traditional psychological model for disaster. The accepted phases that a community undergoes after a traumatic event are Heroic, Honeymoon, Disillusionment, and Recovery. Dr. Scurfield pointed out that—based on recent research and his own experience —he’s convinced of another phase called “Post-Traumatic Growth.” “For the vast majority of Katrina survivors,” Scurfield said, “there were some positive outgrowths to come out of the experience. Post-Traumatic Growth usually manifests with enhanced relationships of some kind. “I call the ones I’ve experienced and observed the Three F’s: Family, Friends, and Faith. The faith can be enhanced in a higher power or in the inherent goodness and interconnectedness of humanity.” Considering my own life, I saw many signs of that growth. My understanding of community had transformed from the thought that it was merely a pleasant social accessory to the knowledge that those bonds served to sustain survival during crisis. While my relationship with Joe had shifted from romantic to familial, our friendship had become a bedrock of good will. My faith had expanded far beyond theological bounds. I’d seen terrible things happen to very good people, yet tragedy had also been revealed as an opportunity to magnify light in the darkness. I’d watched others around me change in a heartbeat from ordinary people to extraordinary heroes, willing to sacrifice their lives for others. I’d witnessed the evolution of complacent housewives who turned into courageous warriors, battling to provide normalcy for their children amidst the carnage. Some who’d found their livelihoods stripped away tackled challenging new careers they would never have imagined before the storm. 
Kimberly Lake and daughter Hannah Fitzpatrick who'd lost their home in Katrina, at Webb School, dressed for the first post-Katrina Halloween. Photo by Ellis Anderson
Each day on the coast presented me with more evidence of the indestructibility of hope and the human spirit. Yet despite the positive forces set in motion by Katrina, I remained haunted by the sense that I simply wasn’t “getting over it.” Dr. Scurfield inadvertently hit this personal land mine during our interview when he said, “The most important thing to remember about post-traumatic stress is to give credit to the power of the trauma. “In varying degrees, the impact will last a lifetime—even in perfectly normal people.” I kept typing furiously into the laptop as he continued, but had to fight off a sudden and powerful urge to weep. Several minutes later, when the kitchen table interview was completed, the gentle-spoken professor saw me to the door of his house and gave me a hug. As I drove the coast road heading back to the Bay, I thought about the shame I’d been living with for over three years. Get over it already, I’d told myself, time and again when I’d experienced depression and sleeplessness and crying jags over insignificant setbacks. I’d come to see myself as flawed and weak, unable to subdue the raw emotions that often bushwhacked me, ones that brought back the horror and fear of an event that had happened long ago. The beach to my left glowed golden in the sunset, but tears obscured my vision as Dr. Scurfield’s parting comments reeled through my head. “Time heals all wounds—it’s a myth. Else all old people like me would be paragons of mental health. Time helps assuage some of the piercing pain that comes in the immediate aftermath, but that pain never goes away. “At first, there’s some compassion from others. But you’re expected to recover and move on. If someone is still beset by nightmares three years later, the tide starts turning. “People’s acceptance and understanding seem to recede, and the blame shifts onto you. Others think that something’s the matter with you, and eventually you accept that blame, take it on yourself.” I pulled the car over for a minute and rolled down the window. The humid air smelled a little fishy, and luminous light bathed my eyes like a balm as more tears of relief streamed down my face. I realized that I had embraced that blame and the awful shame that was its companion. With a few simple words, Ray Scurfield had exonerated me from guilt and offered a cleansing absolution. I’d never quite get over it, and that was “perfectly normal.” But while I was marked for life, I now could see the beauty manifested in that intricate, mysterious tattoo. 
Bay Bridgefest in 2007 embodied the community's hope for the future. Photo by Ellis Anderson
From the book's acknowledgment:
I’d also like to thank Dr. Deb for sharing one of the best insights I’ve ever heard, applicable to the survivor of any trauma. My friend and fellow psychiatrist Donna Sudak says some variation of the following when people say they feel they should “just get over stuff ”: “I hope you don’t get over such a thing—what would that say about you as a person? And what would be the cost? I hope for you that your life becomes so big and so meaningful that it can contain such a thing.”
The Shoofly Magazine is publishing 12 of Under Surge's 25 chapters to commemorate Hurricane Katrina's 20th anniversary.
Missed one? Below are links to those we've published to date: 
Under Surge, Under Siege is available in paperback and as an ebook.
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