Heartbreaking

When the pain finally erupted for Laramie Sweet on Thursday afternoon in the car park of a Food4Less supermarket her features seemed almost to dissolve and she could not speak. She and her brother, Paul, had been queuing with other disaster victims for aid packages, including food, clothing and medicines. When it was their turn, a volunteer asked, "How many in your family?"

How many in your family? Such a simple question. But here it's grotesque. She swallows and then lets out a brief wail. "Three," she finally manages. "I guess. Three. I don't know. I'm sorry. I can't find my dad." Those last words are blurted almost like a plea for help. A few minutes earlier she had told her story – how four has become three – and the telling of it was almost more than she and her brother could stand.

Her father and mother were at Pizza Hut by Home Depot when the sirens went off. With the other patrons, they huddled in the restaurant's cold storage room. They held hands tightly. Their mother, Vickie Sweet, blacked out after the wind started. When she woke up she was covered in blood and in a car being taken to hospital. Pizza Hut was gone, completely. And so was her husband. Just gone.

"He got pulled away," Laramie says, tears streaming. She says she still has hope that her father might be found alive, perhaps in a hospital, but her sodden cheeks tell you she is nearly at the end of that thread. "It has been a long time, it's hard. We've called everywhere." Paul has pleaded in vain to get into the city morgue to look for his father. "They said there are too many bodies, they were still coming in," he said.

This is the worst agony of Joplin. Laramie and Paul and scores of others are in the cruelest of all limbos. Their lost ones appear to have been taken but to where exactly? They burst to grieve but dare not let that strand of hope snap, because to do so would be to betray the one who is missing. You can't give up on a person when there is no body. And you can't grieve when there is no body. Echoes of 9/11 again.
~ from Echoes of 9/11, Katrina in Tornado-Hit Town by David Usborne ~