This is one person’s year-in-review. She’s Kim Rodrigue, since 2002 a resident of south Arlington and the pastor at my church, First Presbyterian on North Vermont Street. She worked with me on this piece just before Christmas.
Kim is a native of New Orleans. When Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005, her parents and grandmother evacuated to Orlando, Fla., near Kim’s brother. Kim’s grandmother, who was on oxygen, the caregiver who stayed with her, and a neighboring couple traveled in one car, Kim’s parents in another. Her mother was suffering from cancer.
Katrina ruined her grandmother’s house in the city’s Lakeview neighborhood, while gutting the main floor of her parent’s house in the Metairie suburb.
In November 2005, her grandmother died, but couldn’t be buried in New Orleans until January. Kim spent time before Christmas 2005 in her parent’s rental house. It was a surprisingly nice Christmas, as her mother was "in the moment" which she had not always been since the hurricane. But that made it very hard to return for Christmas services in Arlington, where "everything was just off."
Her mother died last February, her ashes interred in March. Kim’s father moved back to his home, and started rebuilding in April, completing the job about a year after Katrina. Kim visited her father then to celebrate a homecoming with neighbors.
Her year has been filled with "lots of grief. I miss my mom a lot, and I miss my grandmother a lot. One of the things that is odd, I think, is that the combination of them dying so soon, and the hurricane, and them dying away from home, means that the grief all runs together….
"There were things I had to do. I had to still preach. I had to still do worship. I had to still moderate Session [an administrative arm of the church].
"I preached the Sunday after mom died. I’d written the sermon before which was how I was able to do it. And I remember what I said at the beginning of the worship service. I don’t remember the rest of it….
"[It’s] such an interesting year in terms of the value of things. ‘Cause we lost a lot of things….It’s been a funny reminder that things are just things, and they’re not people, and we can let them go…and at the same time the reason those things have power is that they represent so much more than what they are.
"They represent what it was like to become friends with your mom when you’re a daughter. And what it was like to have a grandmother who was always there and who liked to listen to Elvis Presley tapes….and throwing away her Elvis Presley cassette tapes just made me sad because I remember listening to those with her, and thinking ‘I have a cool grandmother.’" Kim laughed, one of many times. "I still have that memory certainly, but there was sense of power…it’s just another way of letting go."
"I’m really struck with what people have told me before which is exactly how hard holidays are when you miss someone. I think of my mom a lot right now. [As] time went by after March…I was able to be more in the present of what I needed to do here and now. That was very, very difficult. And sometimes was still a challenge but has become less difficult and more doable."
Steve Thurston writes About Arlington for The Connection every other week and posts to his news blog, http://buckinghamheraldtrib.blogspot.com, on Wednesdays.