Izzy

A Hurricane Katrina Memoir, Part 3

I didn’t intend to post again so soon or to post again about Hurricane Katrina. But Izzy is on my mind today. She died 19 years ago today while we were still living in Jackson, MS after evacuting in front of Katrina.

In the above photo, she sits on her daddy’s lap while he reads the paper on a normal day at our house in the late 90s. She was a daddy’s girl and always wanted to be in his lap. It’s too bad you can’t really see her sweet face, she had an adorable underbite, but she was never really photogenic because she was so very black. Izzy was the sweetest of the sweet who never had a bad day. Even while she was having radiation treatments at Louisiana State University Vet School for an inoperable benign brain tumor. The vet techs there loved her and told us so often. She was in the midst of treatment when we had to evacuate with her and all her meds and an oxygen machine (and 2 other pets, and my husband’s handicapped mother, and, and, and….) Connecting with her vet in the days after evacuation was really, really hard because cell service was bad to nonexistent. She started having seizures. I was frantic dealing with her on top of everything else. My husband went back to New Orleans only a few days after the storm - that’s a story in itself, another very hard feat. So he wasn’t with us when she died in my arms. So hard. So missed.

I don’t know why all these memories are especially vivid this year. What is it with our brains that sometimes a thing doesn’t bother us but other times it’s all you can think about.

We received the sweetest condolence card from the vets and vet techs at LSU with very personal comments about Izzy. They took the best care of her but it was only a matter of time. Her time ran out in a strange place, far away from home.

Love you, Izzy.