Today is the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Today is the 10th anniversary of Anthony’s death.

I cringe at the annual reflections on the storm, I admit. I am never certain if or how the waves of grief might hit me, and certainly there’s never any escaping the date. This year in particular, the post-Katrina investigations and op-eds started early – a steady drumbeat reminding me that the anniversary was imminent. “Ten years later…” “Ten years later…” “And now, ten years later…”

August 29 is a day of such profound and personal loss for me. Yet my loss feels so small compared to the profound and systemic failure of so many institutions in and around New Orleans; it feels so small next to the profound and personal losses so many people experienced on the day the hurricane hit and on the days and weeks and months and years that followed.

I often wonder, how do the people of New Orleans grieve – not just from such devastation but under such scrutiny? Can they actually grieve, or does the media narrative and the political posturing demand something else from them? (There are so many terrible examples of this this year.)

“He’s doing his grief work,” the therapist wrote in an email to update me on my son’s progress.

“Grief work.” It’s akin, I suppose, to “working on yourself” – the sort of thing that some of us purport to do whether or not we seek counseling. The sort of work. Difficult work. Emotional work. Work that is both a necessity and in many ways a luxury. I mean, who has time? Who has the resources to stop, to heal, to reflect, to grieve?

The phrase “grief work” has been stuck in my head since that email, not only as I prepared a keynote for the Digital Pedagogy Lab on the future of education, automation, and affective labor but as I have been hit by crisis after crisis, loss after loss this summer. I should be grieving; I suppose I am. But I’m so busy, struggling to meet the deadlines of my work – the writing and the public speaking that I’m paid to do. As a freelancer, I have little time or support for my own “grief work.”

And in the “freelance economy,” who will? Despite the tech-speculative fiction that posits a future of leisure, the future of work, so it seems, will increasingly be contingent, precarious; and as such, it’s hard to see how it will be anything other than an unhealthy one – physically, mentally. We’re already overworked; we’re already broken. We already cannot grieve.

(A "Tweetstorm" Un-tweeted)

Roughly 10 years ago (not to the day, for sure): I was so thankful that Anthony was eligible for hospice.

My (grad school) insurance had denied covering his latest morphine refill. I blogged about the shock of learning that at the pharmacy.

He needed the morphine. I needed him to have the morphine. I have never seen someone in so much pain.

Insurance denied paying for morphine – we’d used up the annual allotment for pharmaceuticals or something. But hospice would take care of it.

Hospice also gave Isaiah and me time away from the house when the nurses and care-takers came to visit. We had spent the previous couple of months care-taking full-time.

Care-taking the dying: One does that even when one is not mentally/psychologically prepared. We were not prepared. I was 33ish. He was 12.

Handing over care-taking to hospice meant, as hospice always reminded us, we were approaching The End.

Krystee, who had many years before introduced me to Anthony, came to stay for the last few weeks of his life.

Hospice signaled “the last few weeks.”

The last few weeks of Anthony’s life were the worst weeks of my life.

The worst weeks. The worst. The worst. The worst. The worst.

Liver cancer – which had, in Anthony, spread everywhere: pancreas, lungs – is terrible. The pain, terrible.

I can’t believe my insurance wanted to limit Anthony’s access to morphine.

Hospice nurses are angels.

Krystee had spent time in NOLA. A healer herself, she watched over me, Anthony, the kid. She was also deeply concerned about the impending storm. She knew people would die.

Anthony’s parents had recently relocated from Wyoming to Louisiana. (They were originally from Mississippi.)

I was glad they weren’t with us; Anthony didn’t want them at his side.

Yet I was puzzled why they’d move across country during their youngest son’s final days. I worried…

My brother had just been married – on my birthday. He’d taken a shortened honeymoon and was set to arrive in the evening of August 29.

Isaiah was at a friend’s house. Because, my god, how much of these final days of such painful suffering need a 12 year old witness?

I called Anthony’s sister, a nurse in Louisiana, to make sure the Vanderfords were weathering the impending storm…

We were not close. Rather, Anthony was not close with his family. It was my attempt to, in the final days of his life, do The Right Thing

While I was on the phone with her, sitting on the back porch listening to her updates about Hurricane Katrina (they’d lost power as a tree had fallen), Anthony died. (Irony noted.)

That is, I came back inside, and he was lying there (as he always did). Krystee and I had to make sure he was really really dead.

Like we’d done that one time when her cat was hit by a car, hodling a mirror to its tiny mouth to see if there was a fog of breath. Like, is he really dead? And I remember thinking, why are we so bad at knowing death?!

Then I had to call Susanne and have her bring Isaiah home. Because he’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead. I told Susanne what happened; I asked her to not tell Isaiah.

When Isaiah got home, I met him at the door. I told him his dad had died. He uttered the most guttural scream. That cry – the worst moment of my life

That cry. That cry. That cry. That cry. That cry. That cry.

The undertaker took Anthony’s body away wrapped in purple velvet. I didn’t watch, but Krystee kept repeating “purple velvet” and it seemed like an honorable, beautiful gesture.

I sent Susanne and Isaiah to pick up my brother from the airport. Fred said he knew when he saw their faces what had happened.

Anthony was dead.

Anthony is dead.

It’s been ten years, and it’s still so raw.

He’s dead.

The wound of August 29, 2005 has been re-opened by the crises of this summer

Yet August 29 is not mine, I am always reminded by the media: the narratives of loss are elsewhere, as are the narratives about rebuilding.

“Rebuild!” That’s the story we’re supposed to hear. That’s what we’re supposed to do: move on; do better. Trauma begets better-ness.

“Hurricane Katrina was the best thing that happened to me,” I’ve heard more than one story framed.

Jesus. Who says that? Really. Who thinks that? I dunno. I mean, my life now… Better? Because of tragedy? Fuck….

There is so little space in the drumbeat of the 8/29 anniversary for grief. For the utterly debilitating reality of grief.

We’re supposed to have re-builded by now… That's the work we're supposed to have done. Not "grief work," but simply the more economically productive, busy "work" of rebuilding.