by Kate Tallman.
On September 13, 2013, I woke up in the middle of the pet supply aisle at a local big-box store. There was no call for alarm. I was standing upright, leaning against a shopping cart, staring down at a long list of items:
Cat Food- I guess we ran out this morning…
Litter Scoop- I must have broken the only good one left…
Litter Box- Don’t we have three of these at home?
Home?
I don’t know how my brain managed to dismiss the disastrous events that precipitated the need for this bizarre shopping trip. Science might try to explain this phenomenon by measuring the physiological impact of regular adrenaline dosages, multiplied by hours without sleep, divided by volume of coffee. I believe it was realization of waking awareness during the mundane routine of a shopping trip that most surprised me.
I began to wonder if I was the only person wandering around that store shopping for the barest of necessities to keep myself comfortable for the next few nights. I searched for faces that might resemble my own; shell-shocked, exhausted, overwhelmed. I quickly angered at the sound of laughter or the flash of a smile. How could someone shop on a day like this? Unfortunately, this feeling of resentment, shame, and self-pity would come and go for many months. My moment of awareness in the big box store is neither unique nor significant. It is, however, one of the few memories that remain from those first few days after the event. I am often amazed by the coping power of the brain. Seemingly without prompting, it chooses to remember the good and forget the bad. But what about the really bad moments in life? I think the really bad moments are left intact so that we have time to process, mitigate, and prepare for the other ‘really bad’s’ coming down the road.
Forty-eight hours before I woke up in the big box store, I was driving up to our house marveling at the unseasonable rain. The last three autumns had been tense. Wildfires raged across the Front Range of Colorado and rarely did a week go by when we were not on high alert for fire. The rain was a relief and neighbors were joyfully chattering about “black roots”; a mountain forecasting marker that signals the end of fire season. The flood itself was not as dramatic as one might expect. It started in the creek and made its way slowly to the road. It afforded enough time for me to call to the police and stand safely in the road with a flashlight, coaxing drivers to turn around and find another way home. The volunteer fire department came and went.
I couldn’t help but marvel at the grand spectacle of it all: so much rain, so much water, and so much power. I recall a light-hearted phone call to my husband, asking if we had anything to fill sandbags. I turned off the weather radio because it kept squawking alerts at me. I fielded calls from concerned family and friends who wanted me to start packing my bags. It wasn’t ideal but things were under control. At a certain point, escape started to look impossible, so I gathered food and water and settled into bed, drifting off to the sound of boulders crashing down the mountain. Flash floods are a known danger; but the most insidious characteristic of a flash flood lies in its ability to give you pause, to feed that nagging thought in your head that you might be overreacting, and to turn around and tear the road out from under your feet.
The next morning I woke to the smell of sewage and the rumble of a small rockslide smashing into the house. Light began to illuminate the first round of damage; a large debris pile clogging the culvert across the road, a secondary river flowed through the ditch in the frontage, bits and pieces of pavement were peeled off of the highway like someone had taken a can opener to it. Emergency vehicles were coming and going, the rain had tapered off to a drizzle and I made coffee. The ritualism of coffee resembles normalcy and it is this routine that makes coffee the perfect drug for disaster. I drank a lot of coffee in those first hours. And then I turned on the news to see the second round coming.
One evening after the evacuation, I found myself in the restroom of a local restaurant. I overheard a conversation near the sink as two women were offering help to a young lady in distress. She lived in a town that was nearly destroyed by the flood; most of the houses were wiped out and the first fatality occurred near her home. She kept saying “I’m ok. It was bad for us but it was so much worse for them”. I learned that she had lost her car, her home, and her dog. How could it be much worse than that?
The phrase, “they had it so much worse” was a common refrain I kept hearing from those affected by the flood. I have come to view this as a variant of survivor’s guilt. I have heard these words come out of my own mouth many times as I thought about my own situation compared to my neighbors, folks in other towns, and pretty much any one in the world who has experienced misfortune of various kinds. Why should I feel bad for myself when there is so much destruction in this world? Why should I personalize my own bad experience when there is so much evidence that there is nothing personal about it? Eventually, disaster strikes us all.
One of the most damaging side-effects of the “they had it so much worse” phenomenon is a cycle of shame that interfered with my physical and mental healing process. Every question about our house filled me with anxiety for not being able to fix the problem, or even yet knowing what needed to be done. This led to guilt and shame for feeling this way because so many of my neighbors were facing even more difficult circumstances. In the meantime, co-workers and people from outside the flood areas seemed completely clueless about the scale and scope of the damage in our communities. Completely rebuilding would take a year or more, and tens of thousands of dollars, for many of us. But people who weren’t impacted would still ask whether we were back in our house yet after only two weeks, or months. Overcoming this sense of shame and frustration was one of the more complicated exercises of psychological damage-control that I have ever had to undertake.
I turned on the news after waking on the first day of the rains, and saw that there was a second round heading towards the mountains. Firefighters told me to shelter-in-place and expect to wait for up to two weeks. My most immediate preoccupation was not the flooding of my home or the rapidly deteriorating only escape road, but the absence of my husband. His background in emergency planning would come in handy, as I would soon learn, but I was beginning to worry about his lack of contact. Flooding the previous night forced him to stay in town outside the canyon overnight, and he’d informed me hours earlier that he was going to try to pass the roadblock and bring supplies, but now I couldn’t get him on the phone, because in all likelihood he was hiking in through the flooded canyon where cell service is spotty at best. My fear nearly turned to panic as another caravan of emergency vehicles appeared and advised me to evacuate within an hour. The rain was coming and it was going to get worse. My life might be in danger and I needed to get out if I could.
Believe them when they say that you should always have an evacuation plan on paper. While I was packing my car full of our most valuable, sentimental, and practically necessary possessions, one of my colleagues was busy putting stuffed animals in a box and left without her house keys. I called my husband until the ringing drove me mad. This was my real disaster; knowing that he was out there and not knowing if he was ok. Reports of fatalities were already reaching the news stations and I felt that my naiveté about the situation had finally caught up. Terrible thoughts were unavoidable and yet they filled me with anger for doubting his ability to traverse the flood and make it in safely. He was the one who envisioned this scenario and provided me with copies of the evacuation plan. Forty-five minutes later I finished packing and pulled out of the garage.
Five months later, I was asked by a dear friend to help a neighbor distribute quilts for those affected by the flood. Regretfully, my first thought was, “I survived the Colorado flood and all I got was this quilt”. This slogan was not meant to belittle the efforts of these thoughtful quilters. After a disaster most people want to help. Some send food and supplies, others send money and equipment. These fine folks sent quilts.
By this point, I knew that the simple act of accepting charity was difficult for me. So I didn’t know how this would affect neighbors. Would they be offended by the quilt? Would there be quilt-guilt? Would they turn us away as we pulled into their drive, assuming that we were just another car full of disaster groupie lookie-loo’s? A few months before, I remember filling out my first application for assistance. Not government assistance, just good old-fashioned “nice people wanting to help” assistance. It was difficult to admit that we could use the help, but ultimately I found myself standing in a Starbucks, accepting this kindness with shaking hands and tears running down my cheeks as a neighbor who I had never met gave me a hug and said that he couldn’t just sit back and watch his neighbors suffer. After all, the neighbors had it “so much worse” than him.
As we drove through the neighborhood and knocked on doors I realized that I wasn’t the only one who found it difficult to accept this kindness. Some neighbors wanted to pay for the quilts; others refused the gift. Most cried and thanked us for making them feel good on a rainy Sunday afternoon so many months after the flood. This trip gave me the opportunity to share stories, complain, cry, laugh, and promise to get together after things were back to normal. I learned to give charity and I learned to accept it. All of these things happened in the presence of neighbors who shared in my trauma and there is something about this collective experience that allowed the cycle of guilt, shame, self-pity, and sadness to lose intensity.
The timing was lucky. As soon as I departed from the house I noticed a figure off in the distance. My husband reached the car just as the last sheriff’s deputy still left in the canyon started losing patience. “As soon as I leave”, he said “you guys are on your own”. The rain came down in sheets. Our hour was up and it was time to go. We cruised down the mountain and watched the road crumbling away before our eyes, disintegrating beneath us. We knew that we had left just in time; we were likely within minutes of tumbling into that river. We also knew that we would not be home for a very long time but we were together, we were safe, and that’s what mattered.
There are plenty of times in life when significant events alter routines, modify priorities, and reroute the direction of life. Generally speaking, life affords us a fair amount of time to adjust to these shocks. New parents get nine months or more to prepare for the arrival of a child. New employees negotiate with employers and establish a reasonable timeline to adjust to a move or make a change in schedule or habits. In most cases, illness and old age affords friends and family members an opportunity to say goodbye and prepare for the greatest change of all. This is what makes the term “disaster” so unique. It always feels fast. Time is not afforded; warnings may be issued but they rarely speak truth to the scope of the event. It may be days or weeks before those affected by disaster escape the surreal and dreamlike quality of it, and start logically understanding the true scale of destruction, and what must be done.
The psychological cost of such events cannot be quantified like the insurance people filling out a form at our house, checking pre-printed boxes for major appliances and items of furniture beyond repair. The experience of disaster creates a kind of psychological debt, and it’s more insidious than any financial debt. One must put in the time and effort to pay it off, and even then it may still remain, buried somewhere in the emotional credit score. Eight months and twelve days later, we plan to move back into our home. Soon after that, I’ll start making payments.