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The death of her mother — a heart attack, sudden — took Selarstean Mitchell by surprise. Mitchell, who spoke with her mother every day, had called her on a Saturday morning, nothing out of the ordinary. By Saturday afternoon, her mother was in the hospital.

The oldest of six siblings, Mitchell spent the next week planning the funeral, which was scheduled for Aug. 27, 2005, the following Saturday morning. Mitchell and her family decided to hold the service in Columbia, Mississippi, her mother’s hometown, and return to New Orleans for a repast in the afternoon. 

She put together a program, wrote an obituary and drove out to Mississippi to make arrangements for the burial site. The logistics kept her so busy that she didn’t even realize a storm was coming.

Mitchell’s house in Gentilly filled up with flowers. Sympathy cards arrived every day in the mail, and she stacked them in a basket on the kitchen island, planning to read them after the funeral. On the day of, a friend collected the food for the repast, awaiting Mitchell’s return to the house. 

It was only after leaving the funeral, on the drive to the cemetery, that Mitchell tuned in to the car radio: “And that’s when I found out,” she said.

She knew that navigating contraflow to get back to the city would be impossible. So she stayed in Mississippi that Saturday. On Monday, Katrina hit.

Mitchell’s home in Gentilly took on eight feet of water. When her son returned to New Orleans, he called her and described the condition of the house. She envisioned the food from the repast — the red beans, the chicken — being swept away. 

And she remembered the sympathy cards, unopened and unread. 

An illustration of envelopes with scribbles to looks like writing on the addressed to and return parts of a parcel. There are blue and yellow flowers surrounding the envelopes.
Selarstean Mitchell lost the sympathy cards that were sent to her following her mother’s death.

“I’m the kind of person who likes to write thank-you cards,” she said. “I’m like, ‘I don’t know who to send a thank-you card to.’ But then I thought about it — they don’t care! They were going through their own Katrina experience anyway.”

Still, Mitchell found that the storm had impeded her grief, she said. Not only were the cards gone, but she was now working nonstop.

By Aug. 31, she was in Dallas, where her employer, the Housing Authority of New Orleans, had opened up a temporary office helping evacuated public housing residents find new homes. Mitchell, who directed HANO’s voucher program at the time, worked through the weekends at the city’s convention center to assist other displaced New Orleanians.

When a job opened up in Fort Worth, she remembered that her mother always used to tell her that she worked too hard. Mitchell had always devoted long hours to her work at the housing authority, but she knew that her job in New Orleans would become even more stressful in the storm’s aftermath. 

She had lived in New Orleans since she was two years old, grown up in Central City and raised a family in Gentilly. Now she was faced with the prospect of rebuilding her home and trying to grieve her mother at the same time. 

Mitchell chose to stay in Texas.

“I thought it would be easier for me, but I was overwhelmed with guilt about doing that,” she said. “I went to counseling to help me with my guilt. I felt like we were forsaking the city when the city really needed us, but I knew I had to deal with what I was going through because of my mother’s death.”

In a way, Mitchell said, the timing of her mother’s death did have meaning. Her mother, LouElla Magee, had raised children in New Orleans but sought to be buried in Mississippi. That meant Mitchell’s family had driven out to Mississippi for the funeral — which spared them the experience of riding out Katrina in New Orleans. 

“My family’s always been close, but I think it made us even closer,” she said.


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