Fear and Loathing in Lincoln--Part Two

The Katrina kids craved shelter, almost without thinking about it.  They couldn’t be at ease when they were in the open, naked, unprotected.  Even children who fought tooth and nail for a ball on the playground were fiercely protective of one another at the least sign of threat.  The older children felt constant anxiety when they were away from their younger siblings, as if they might lose the few connections still remaining in their lives.  

Their world was much less secure than it had been before the winds blew and the waters rose.  Their simple trust had been replaced by a deep mistrust and constant anxiety.  How I connected with that experience in the first months after Anne's death!  I grew stiff with anxiety even when one of my sons posted on Facebook that he was having a tough day.  The trauma of radical loss made me hypersensitive to even the “odor” of grief and loss.  I retain some of that hypersensitivity even now, like a psychic inflammation that will not subside.

That was true for the little ones we served in New Orleans.  Those children of Katrina were beset and besieged on every side.  Their homes, their families, their communities and their bodies had been attacked by nameless and unconscious enemies, and there were very few ways to fight back.  The life upon which they had counted without thinking or calculation—that life was gone, and nothing was yet there to replace it.  

They lived life looking over their shoulders, calculating the nearest cover, and cowering for fear of another blow.  I have had those moments when I see every good-bye as a potential catastrophe, and I have to discipline myself to resist such fears.

Those children wondered at every moment when the other shoe would drop.  In this anxiety the grown-ups joined them.  

One afternoon there were tropical storm warnings in the general area.  The anxiety of the whole town went off the scale.  The locals stepped outside at regular intervals to scan the sky.  Jaws began to tremble as a few raindrops fell.  Was it going to happen again?  

In that time after Katrina, they were even more vulnerable, more exposed, more at risk.  Their houses were gone.  At best, they lived in fragile eight by twenty foot travel trailers that could easily blow away.  The levees were patched together with spit and bailing wire.  The government had proven itself ill-equipped to respond.  Life was filled with threat and danger.  Enemies were everywhere.  That’s what real shock is like.  

I lived with that shock to varying degrees from the moment of Anne’s death.  It was an experience of "learned helplessness" that repeated itself almost daily for a while.

Psalm 13 is a good example of such real shock.  The Psalmist writes,

“How long, O Lord?  Will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I bear pain in my soul,

And have sorrow in my heart all day long?

How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?”

(Verses 1-2)

Four times the psalmist asks, “How long?”  The Hebrew literally asks, “Until when O Lord?”  Will you ignore me and my suffering on a permanent basis?  Until when is this going to continue?  Is this how things are going to be between us from now on?  

Will I obsess and ruminate and stay awake nights wondering about my suffering for the rest of my life?  Anyone who has suffered knows that last question intimately.  It is the question that wakes one up in the wee hours of the morning, when every insomniac minute seems like an hour, and when the internal debate loops and twists and turns upon itself over and over and over again.

The questions get less frequent, but they haven't entirely departed yet after eighteen months.  It still takes tremendous discipline to stay out of those anxiety loops.  It takes the kind of self-distancing and self-debate that Jill Taylor Bolte learned in her "stroke of insight."  It is what makes it possible at some moments for me to go forward.