The long road home ends with a sacred handshake

    From her apartment windows, Carolyn Nazar has seen plenty of the world.
    In August 2005, Nazar was on an upper floor of St. Bernard Manor in Meraux with two dozen other elderly residents when she saw the wall of water bring the Gulf of Mexico into her kitchen sink.
    Her first-floor apartment already was history, submerged along with the luggage and jewelry she had carefully packed in advance of Katrina but decided not to move because she couldn’t bear the thought of evacuating and leaving her friends behind.
    Then, at dusk, as she looked out the window, she saw a man in shoulder-high water carrying a blanket over his shoulder. At least that’s what she thought she saw.
    “I can still remember it,” Nazar said. “He put the blanket up in the crotch of the tree. It was right near Hannan High School. It turned out it was his mother. He had a rope and he tied her in there so the body wouldn’t float away. He had three small children and he had to take care of them. He couldn’t carry her body.”
    Then she saw a mother, wrapping her arms around her baby as tightly as she could in the swirling waters. Then, impelled by the swift current, bodies and parts of bodies floated past her window.
    From her crow’s nest above Atlantis, Nazar grabbed onto anything that could buoy the spirits of the senior survivors in their 70s and 80s. It was 98 degrees outside and even hotter inside, and Nazar suggested that everyone dress down to T-shirts and shorts.
    “But there was one little lady who was only about 4 feet tall who had to wear her high heels and her dress,” Nazar recalled. “It was so funny when the fireman threw her over his shoulder and came down the ladder with her.”
    From the banks of the Mississippi, the women, each with a small “go bag,” clambered onto a barge’s deck and set sail for the emerald city of Gretna.
    “Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn had nothing on us,” Nazar said. “We started hearing snipers, so we tried to duck down. That’s a little scary having all those women on a barge and people shooting.”
    From Gretna, Nazar wound up on a bus to Lake Charles, and she stayed there until every one of her friends was transported out of state to safety before she accepted a plane ticket to Buffalo. By Day 12, Nazar finally made contact with her family to let them know she was alive.
    On Christmas Eve 2005 – from her 15th-floor apartment in upstate New York – Nazar peered out her window and saw another body of water, a place synonymous with honeymoons and wonder. Niagara Falls was a metaphor that night for her eyes and  cheeks.
    “I was so down,” Nazar said. “I had no family around. It was Christmas and you had groups of people in the building and they were having parties and singing. All I did was lock my door and stay in my apartment. I couldn’t say anything to anybody. How do you say ‘Merry Christmas’ when your heart is broken?”
    Nazar had made attempts to get back to New Orleans through Christopher Homes, the archdiocesan senior housing agency. But every time she moved to the top of the wait list, she was recovering from surgery. She had broken both ankles, a foot and had three hip replacements – “eight operations in seven years.”
    Instead of getting down, she got out of herself. There were a few men at her residence who were paraplegic, and none of the women wanted to play cards with them.
    “You know how everybody steps back and you’re the only one left in line?” Nazar said. “I stayed with the guys and we loved playing poker.”
    But Nazar was sure of one thing. She would never go home again.
    “I even went to the funeral home and made arrangements that if I died I wanted to be cremated,” she said.
    All that changed on June 29. An affordable apartment opened up at Rouquette Lodge in Mandeville, which is run by Christopher Homes, and with help from FEMA, the Red Cross and other agencies, Nazar found herself zooming to New Orleans on a jet. The plane stopped in Orlando, where members of the Jacksonville Sharks, an Arena Football League team, joined the flight to New Orleans for their game the next night.
    Nazar was seated between two of the beefiest men she had ever seen.
    “This ain’t going to work, boys,” she said, and they displayed their chivalry by moving to give her the aisle seat. And then on the 90-minute flight to New Orleans, big strangers with red Sharks’ T-shirts heard Nazar’s story.
    “Because I needed help, I was the last to get off the plane,” Nazar said. “As I went down the breezeway, the whole team was waiting for me, doing the second line.”
    Now that she’s home, close to her daughter, Nazar has had to buck up one more time. The 40 boxes she had packed in Buffalo – including her medical records and 300 collectible angels – all have disappeared. She has taken her most recent loss in stride, going down to the Rouquette Lodge chapel at odd hours to pray in thanksgiving for her safety.
    “I’m going to try to accept this one more time,” she said. “In the chapel there’s a large statue of the Lord with holes in his hands. The way they’re positioned, I can put my hands in his hands, and that gives me comfort. I can’t kneel down. But there’s nobody else there – just him and me.”
    Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at [email protected]