For a brief moment today I could actually imagine our entire house repaired and restored. In that moment I felt at least five conflicting emotions: joy, sadness, guilt, relief, and fear.
I suppose the 'joy' part is obvious. Eighteen months - almost nineteen months - since Hurricane Katrina happened. Long stretches of no hope or uncertainy followed by short stretches of slow progress or disappointments. Finally, here we are at a point when it seems entirely possible that we will come through all of this with our home once again intact - and our finances not totally wrecked. We'll be normal again. We'll sit on furniture and hang pictures on the walls. We'll cook dinner and eat at the table and play in the yard on long summer evenings.
The sadness comes mostly from thinking about how we got here in the first place. Anything at all that reminds me of that fateful day in August and that horrific week that followed calls up a wellspring of dark and miserable emotions. I feel desolate. I mourn for the lives that we all had before August 29, 2005 because they are gone forever... no matter how hard we try to piece them back together. Katrina is our only reference point here now. Every event of our lives is cleanly fit into one of two categories: before Katrina and after Katrina. Beyond that - nothing matters. We are changed people. All of us.
The guilt has always been there. Guilt because we survived and so many didn't. Guilt because our home stood and so many didn't. Guilt because we received assistance before others did. Guilt because we didn't lose our loved ones and so many others did. Guilt because Dave never lost his job and there are so many with no income now. Guilt for having the means to help ourselves a little and there are those who simply never stood a chance. And now we will be faced with the guilt of moving on while others are still waiting for some hope.
Yet I feel so relieved today to have gotten this far, knowing that the rest of the ride is downhill.
All of these months of worrying about whether or not we could pull this off stand a chance of coming to an end. I will be able to sleep again. The hardest part for us has passed.
And that's where the fear comes in. We have lived like this for so long now - it is hard to imagine anything else. Every day and every night has been consumed with planning and praying for the next step - the next solution. We have lived and breathed the restoration of our home ever since we shovelled the first glob of goop out of our house. Now I'm asking myself: "So what am I supposed to do now?"
It's not that we won't have home improvement projects to do for the next few years... It will be a long time before every single repair is complete. It's just that the doom has lifted and normalcy is knocking at the door. What is the price of normalcy? Will I have to face all of the mental and emotional recovery that I've neglected while feverishly focusing on fixing our house? I'm not ready.
I had hoped that fixing the house would feel like fixing myself. I had believed that with each completed room I would start to feel whole again. I'm not so sure that will happen now.... It seems like the house is much more complete than I am at the moment and I don't think I'll be catching up anytime soon.
Or...
Maybe I'm wrong and the return of cabinet doors to the house will make everything better.
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