“It gave me closure,” she said. “I did not know that some of those things happened or what was going on when it was happening. I turned to my husband while we were watching [the documentary] and said, ‘Why didn’t we know that?’ And he said, ‘Because we were the story.’”

In South Carolina, I watched most of the coverage of the storm in my pajamas, unable to get dressed or leave the house. When I was upset and feeling particularly helpless, I sent emails to the White House to demand immediate aid be sent to New Orleans. I screamed my emails: “How dare anyone call off rescue efforts because the city appeared too dangerous! You can go into Iraq and not go to New Orleans?!”
  
I cried like thousands of other TV watchers. And in the calm after the storm, in the deafening silence of my own heart, what haunted me was this: What is it like to wake up one day and find your neighbors are gone? Your mother and sister are gone and you don’t know where they are? Your daughter is gone and you can’t call her to find out where she is? The man across the street who used to cut your grass and do odd jobs around your house is not there, nor is his house?    
  
Where is your best friend?
  
I woke up day after day haunted by this. I realized the quality of my life is increased greatly by all the people who leave their fingerprints on my spirit.

I tried to imagine what it would be like to not be able to reach my daughter for days, or to look next door and not see Martha and George, who keep me laughing and get my mail and newspaper when they get theirs from the box.
  
What if I looked next door and did not see them or their dog Buddy or cat Boots. What if I did not know where my sisters or brother were? Or if my other next door neighbors were not there–my neighbor Dale who waves at me in the upstairs window of my home office as she walks into her house after work.
  
I will never forget the young boy screaming desperately–and yet so eloquently–for help for everyone outside the New Orleans Superdome. I will always remember the elderly woman in the wheelchair, dead, covered with a sheet. I will remember a lot of what I saw and still see on television about the evacuees.
  
I remember daily that there are thousands of people still searching for what I have–for home. I’m not talking about a house, but a home. Some of them were living in New Orleans because they wanted to be surrounded by family and now those relatives are scattered in cities they never dreamed of living in. Health officials in places like Houston and Atlanta, who took in thousands of evacuees, are now seeing anger and mental illnesses caused by stress in children as well as in adult evacuees.