These house numbers are all that's left from my grandparents 20 years after Katrina. These numbers were caked in dried sludge when we pulled them off the drowned brick.

Even after so many years, Katrina anguish still spills through the cracks. I still pause at the grocery when I pick up something with an August 29 expiration date. The NFL’s insistence on showing Katrina footage before Saints games still unglues me. I recently encountered a Katrina door unexpectedly in a museum (marked with that spray-painted body count symbol), and felt like I’d been punched. So many, many times I have driven past my grandparents’ empty lot by the 17th Street Canal like visiting a grave.

There are so many more moments of Katrina grief that I could list here. It may very well be a lifelong, ongoing list because even now, there are still new ways that I realize we’ve lost something forever. There are still new ways that I realize the scars.

Once my daughter, upon watching tears roll down my face when Katrina images randomly appeared in a car commercial, asked: “Are you crying about the storm where everyone lost everything?” I have never been able to articulate a more concise description of what happened.

You might imagine, in the way people do when they only hear stories after the fact, that’s an exaggeration or hyperbole. It is not. Not only did we lose homes and schools and office buildings and churches and historic landmarks and almost two thousand precious lives, we also lost every place that was central to our memories, everything that was familiar, everything we had anticipated would be part of our future--everything that filled the days of our lives.

The routes we would drive to get somewhere no longer existed. Restaurants we loved closed forever. People who had been lifelong neighbors moved away. My own grandparents evacuated and never returned, not even to be buried when they died years later.

Everything is the familiar way home. Everything is the way I could stop any time I wanted at my Grandma’s house and hear her hilariously exaggerated tales. Everything is the churches where we worked out our salvation, the balconies where we kissed, the way someone we loved used to be there, and then was never there again.

Everywhere else it was just Monday. But on August 29, 2005, life in New Orleans became marked by "before" and "after.” No one who survived it will ever forget, and no one who didn't will ever truly understand the kind of heartbreak and strength and hope that can come only from such tragedy and despair. And it never won’t hurt.

Yet I will always think of Jesus behind the cathedral, His fingers broken off by the storm, arms still open wide, still promising Psalm 32: 6-7: "Though flood waters threaten, they will never reach him. You are my shelter; you guard me from distress; with joyful shouts of deliverance you surround me."

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