The Soul of New Orleans
I'm back from New Orleans and a weekend filled with intensity and emotion. I went there, as some of you may remember, to visit family after the death of my cousin Mary's 16-year-old daughter, Madeleine Prevost on January 6th. (Madeleine was also the daughter of Michael Prevost, Mary's ex-husband.)

Madeleine died of a heroin overdose, and because she was a well-liked girl, and because her parents have been counselors in the New Orleans school system for two decades, and because of everything that has happened in New Orleans in the past several years, over 1,000 people attended her funeral. Underneath a massive live oak, known as "the Tree of Life," in Audubon Park, there is a makeshift memorial for Maddie; her friends and classmates sometimes come to the tree to sit in its branches or on its roots and think and talk and remember.

For my family and for New Orleans, the ramifications of Madeleine's death continue. I won't go into the family stuff, because it's not my place. Suffice it to say that such a profound loss makes those close to it question everything—to look back and wonder what went wrong, how such a thing could have happened. And of course these are questions that are almost impossible to answer in anything deeper than a clinical sense. One of my cousins and I spoke at length about the concept of "closure." Is such a thing possible? Is it desirable? How does one achieve it? Why does one seek it? Really what we were talking about was how one can continue after the death of a child.

Over the weekend, there were two arrests made in the case, and so these and other questions will start to be discussed more publicly.

Madeleine's death has resonated in part because New Orleans is a struggling place and the question of its future is so urgent. If the city is in any way a threat to its children, how can the city have a future?

My cousins, who love New Orleans passionately, urged me to tell people that much of what has been written about it is untrue; much of the city survived Katrina with relatively little damage, and in places such as the French Quarter and the Central Business District, you'd never know that such a horrific event happened.

But as my cousin George put it, New Orleans, which was always a divided city, has become even more so after the storm. The fortunate remain, for the most part, fortunate; the poor are worse off than they were before.

My cousin Allen took me on a tour of the 9th ward, the area hardest hit by flooding, and it was a scene of astonishing desolation. Rows and rows of homesites where once were houses and now only concrete foundations remained.... Many houses left abandoned and hollowed-out since Katrina, still with the markings on their door indicating that rescuers had found a body within. As I said to Allen, it reminded me of Kosovo after the war, except that in Kosovo they were rebuilding with incredible fervor, and here, in this ward, rebuilding was spotty at best, and the area remained a wasteland. One would not want to be walking there at night....

Anyone with a heart can not help but wish for New Orleans to survive. It is a place of incredible mystery and magic and history and power and beauty, one of the great treasures of this country. But it's a terrible truth that, whether or not New Orleans survives, some of its most vulnerable will not.  ¶ 8:26 AM