Prometheus 6

After Katrina, a crisis of loss
Pulled by both the past and the future, many hurricane victims must hold onto their most basic possession of all: their sense of self.
By Susan Brink, Times Staff Writer

...Their home, books, clothing, the piano he played — all gone. And then there was something else: his doctoral dissertation, untouched for years, which was sitting on the living room bookshelf.

"I know it's absolutely useless in the greater world, but I put many years of my life into that book. It's gone," he says. "We may have lost everything. It's heartbreaking."

In some ways, all the hurricane victims are about to begin a parallel odyssey. They have all left their community, and life as they knew it will never be the same. They all are suffering through a crisis of loss as they glance in the rearview mirror, and a crisis of overload as they stare ahead through the windshield, says Rubén G. Rumbaut, a sociologist at UC Irvine.

Even their ability to return when they want to is beyond their control, says Rumbaut, who himself fled Cuba in 1960. "They're strangers in a strange place, trying to figure out which arrow to follow."

Americans have suffered through disasters — California earthquakes, Midwestern floods and previous Gulf Coast hurricanes — but the displacement of virtually everyone from a major U.S. city is unprecedented. As the victims begin their recovery and resettlement, they are in uncharted emotional territory. They've lost many of the things that help hold a human life together. They've lost basic necessities like homes, cars, beds, refrigerators. They've lost the institutions that anchor them: jobs, churches, schools, neighborhoods. They've lost personal treasures: the toolbox passed down from a grandfather, the plaster handprint of a 5-year-old. Worst of all, some have lost family members and friends.

"We'll find out what it does to people. This is something the country has not experienced before," says C. Scott Saunders, director of the UCLA Trauma Psychiatry Service.

"A sense of reality and personal identity is directly linked to the people and familiar objects around you," says Dr. Robert L. Pyles, a Boston psychoanalyst. "If those are lost, people come under enormous stress."