Rest in Peace Now

Helen White was laid to rest Saturday. Ms. White and her older sister, Willie Mae Minor drowned in the attic of their New Orlean's 9th ward home.
For remembrance of one and for all of the 1050 who died in NOLA, please read all of it.....

"Almost 11 weeks after she drowned in her attic during Hurricane Katrina, Helen J. White, 54, lay inside a polished coffin beneath a resplendent carpet of flowers, no longer an "unidentified black female" languishing in a morgue.

Some 200 relatives, colleagues, church friends and neighbors crowded into a funeral home here on Saturday to mourn and celebrate both Ms. White, a disaster loan specialist, and New Orleans, a city that could ill afford to lose its disaster specialists. It was a requiem for an individual and a community, but it was not entirely sad. Rather, the grieving seemed cathartic, an outlet for a preacher without a pulpit, a church without a building and a neighborhood without habitable homes.

As the horror of the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina fades from national consciousness, the grim, belated task of burying the victims forces the scattered citizenry of New Orleans to relive the cruelty of the storm.
The rest.......