Hurricane Sandy: A View From the Distance

Posted by Jennine Lanouette on Friday, November 2nd, 2012

It was mid-day Saturday, the 27th, before I realized that the San Francisco to New York flight I had booked for Monday night would be flying straight into a hurricane. I was going to see my mother, possibly the last time, as her six years of advancing Alzheimer’s now appears to be finally doing her in. A trip I was both looking forward to and dreading. Given such mixed feelings, I didn’t relish having the excitement of extreme weather to cope with as well. Thus, I was relieved when, at 11:00 that night, my partner Ed nudged me to look over his shoulder at a window on his computer screen showing the words, “Your flight has been cancelled.”

The next morning I called my father in coastal Connecticut and urged him to head inland before the rain started to wait out the storm at my sister’s house. Although he was in full boy-scout readiness, all stocked up on bottled water, batteries and canned goods, he nonetheless seemed relieved at the suggestion. Knowing I didn’t have to fly and my father would not be alone was all the preparation I needed for this disaster. I knew Mom was safe in her nursing home.

Late that night, on a whim, Ed tried the airline phone number and was surprised to get through. He booked us seats for after the weekend. Dad had reported Mom seemed pretty stable lately. So, despite her dwindling 80 pounds, I decided I could relax. She would not be departing this week. The upside was that now I could focus on writing a blog post about Cloud Atlas before getting pulled into family concerns.

On Monday morning, I texted Happy Birthday to a friend in Lower Manhattan and wished her smooth sailing through the storm. Then I started watching the Sandy reports on my twitter feed. Around 10:15 I got a call from a doctor’s office letting me know I had missed my 9:30 appointment. I apologized profusely, wondering if it would have any meaning to this person if I gave the fact that my flight was cancelled as an excuse. On the one hand, there was no real connection between the two. But, on the other, I couldn’t help feeling that there was.

At noon, I pulled myself away from all the storm tweets to head off to my second viewing of Cloud Atlas. My plan was to spend the rest of the day unraveling its Byzantine structure. But when I got home, I couldn’t resist going back to those cryptic message-in-a-bottle-style notes out of New York. Their growing collective intensity prompted me to text my friend again. She responded that she was holed up at home, alone, watching Turner Classic Movies. Didn’t sound like the way to spend a birthday so I called. As we chatted, her lights flickered a few times and then the line went dead. I checked the outage map of Connecticut Light and Power. Only 15% down where my sister lives, whereas my father’s town showed 85% in the dark. Glad he took my advice.

At 5:30, I went off to join a friend who had invited me on a “full moon walk.” I didn’t know what that meant, but felt honored to be asked. When we reached the top of the ridge above town just in time to see a big basketball moon rising over the hills across the bay, I remembered the value of making room in one’s day to be impressed by nature. I had to tell her, though, that I was somewhat ambivalent about this particular full moon due to its contributing role in swelling the tides coming into New York. She invited me for dinner, but I had to get back to my twitter feed.

Around 8:30, I noticed a few tweeters seeming to gain comfort from David Letterman’s resolve to do his show despite having no audience. I decided to stay up for the 11:30 west coast broadcast, passing the time watching remotes from New Jersey, Long Island, Connecticut and the snow covered hills of West Virginia on MSNBC. Needless to say, by the end of the day, I had done no writing on Cloud Atlas.

Tuesday passed much the same – twitter, TV news, on line photos and videos. I e-mailed a few other friends in Manhattan asking how they fared. Only one or two responded, which I took to indicate the rest were without power. Again, by the end of the day, no writing about Cloud Atlas had happened.

I went upstairs to change clothes for my improv class that night. Finding Ed in the bedroom, I expressed my frustration about not getting anything done. This was not the usual writer dawdling. I wanted to write this thing. I had ideas to explore. But I couldn’t get focused. I kept getting drawn back into the news out of New York. I paced around the room, trying to put more precise words to my angst. It was like a part of me had gone on strike. I was shut down, in lock-out mode. I just couldn’t get moving, no matter how I wanted to.

Finally, like a festering infection bursting through skin, I wailed, “I was supposed to be with my mother today!” and collapsed, face down, on the bed, as waves of grief poured out.

So that was what was bothering me. My mother. I had finally gotten the courage to visit her shriveled body one more time, to meet her blank stare, to hold her boney hand in case I might convey some comfort to her. I had spent the week clearing my desk of niggling tasks and warding off various stress-related maladies so I could be fully present. But I still had to gird myself for the grief I always come away with after seeing her.

I told Ed I felt like I had been building up steam to push through a heavy door of fear so I could be with Mom, but when my flight was cancelled the door suddenly flew open, sending me flailing into the air. My rationalization that a week’s delay would make little difference could only go so far. My feelings, ultimately, told a different story.

I was angry. But unlike the indiscriminate anger I often feel about my mother’s illness, this anger had a target. I was suddenly gripped with a desire to round up and give a good beating to all the climate change deniers who were surely responsible for this mess.

With all this spewing forth of raw feeling, an image came to mind. It was one of the photos I’d seen on line that day of ambulances, lined up outside of NYU’s Langone Medical Center, waiting to evacuate patients to other hospitals after the back-up generator failed. I was suddenly aware of a resonance I felt, back to a scene I witnessed during the 9/11 disaster in 2001. It was the day after the towers fell, when I walked by St. Vincent’s Hospital, two blocks from where I lived at the time. A long row of gurneys lined the sidewalk in front of the emergency entrance, as medical personnel waited in vain for ambulances that were few and far between. Despite frantic rescue efforts, few wounded were pulled from the rubble. Nearly everyone who had been in the buildings was already dead.

Like the cold front from the north on a collision course with Sandy, another force of grief slammed into me. Financial District images of smashed cars, debris-filled stores and deserted streets were haunting reminders of that earlier horror. Back then, the area below 14th Street became isolated behind police barricades so emergency vehicles could speed through. In this disaster, it’s that same area of Manhattan, plus some, that’s cut off by the power outage. The associations are, for me at any rate, inescapable.

I moved to California a year after 9/11. When people here would ask what I missed about New York, I would say things like, “I miss swearing.” Or, “I miss my four flight walk-up workout.” But, truthfully, what I missed most was the bond forged by collective pain. It was a bond felt in the silence that conveys more meaning than the words just spoken, or the knowledge that a slight reference is being met by recognition, or a shared agreement that the subject be handled with utmost respect. It was also a bond of unshakable belief that those who weren’t there will never understand.

Seeing New Yorkers in peril again has reawakened that pain at a time when I’m already a quivering exposed nerve bracing for my mother’s passing. My body is in tranquil northern California, but my being is back in the disaster netherworld of New York, hovering with my mother on the liminal edge of her life, stuck in my own perfect storm of internal weather events.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Midge Lanouette, July 2011