Reading the email of the living

In the days after Katrina, I was asked to help a local New Orleans site review and route reader email. It was, and is, a popular site, and many people desperate for news - especially news coming from local media - were sending email to the site. Emails like, please rescue my father. He needs insulin and is in a wheelchair. Or emails like, I can't find my mother. She is 88 years old and refused to come with me. Here is her address. I love her so much. Please, please help me. Or: I want to adopt that dog I saw on CNN. Can you send me information? Or emails like - and these were always fun to read - why do you people live where you live? Don't you know you're below sea level? The people of New Orleans deserve what they get. And you're all crooks.

Etc.

Reading these messages was soul-crushing. I was exhausted. Day after day, during that first 5 or 7 days after the storm, that's all I did. I sat furrowed and slackjawed at a computer screen, reading people's pleas for help - any help - and tried to get them relevant information. I posted address information to the site for search and rescue teams, with the hope that someone with a helicopter or a boat could reach them. Sometimes I felt like I was really doing something good. Other times I wondered if we were giving people a false sense of hope - we could not guarantee that rescue organizations were reading our site. We tried to direct them to FEMA, Red Cross, etc. but so many wrote us saying, I can't reach those emergency people - so please, please help me.

After the first week or so, the emails started to change. And as I type right now, I have big fat hot tears coming up, as I remember that first different message I got. To paraphrase, it went something like this:

My brother [name and address] was on oxygen before the storm. He did not evacuate with us and his body is in the house. Please how do we get his body? Can you help?

Search and rescue emails gave way to death emails. My optimism for the search and rescue cases - there were so many posts asking for help on the site - gave way to a new feeling: rattled, jittery helplessness. With a lot of quiet despair. I didn't know how to handle it. How do you handle something like this? How do you handle your emotions when your days are spent reading email after email of loss, death, and dying? People reaching out to you for help, and you're not equipped to help them? Lots of people were around me, living with us or visiting us, and I didn't feel like I could let it all hang out. Even if I could have done that, I'm not sure what it would look like, or how I could control all my emotions.

I'm sure that what I expressed came nowhere close to the trauma I was feeling. I felt like I had enormous responsibility to these strangers who wrote these things to me, very personal things about losing their "matriarch of the family who keeps us all together." Message after message about losing grandmothers, brothers, sisters, neighbors, and friends.

I thought, how did I get here, to this point? Where I'm reading a woman's email, who is upset about losing her Mawmaw, who likely lost everything that Mawmaw ever gave her for her birthday, crocheted for her wedding, or loaned her until she came over for her usual Sunday dinner?