The lessons you learn after a hurricane: Albright

The floodwaters remain, brown and vast and terrifying, destroying lives in Texas and inundating America's consciousness. 

Soon they will recede. Houston will be dry, and our collective attention will turn back to the endless squabbles and outrages that seem to dominate everyday life nowadays.

But while this awful moment lingers, while we all are still paying attention, I would ask you to consider two lessons.

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First: for the Hurricane Harvey's victims, the struggle has barely started.

I know something of their plight, having grown up in south Louisiana. I have no right to call myself a "survivor" — I have never stood in the wet ruin of my own home, have never hoped for salvation from a boat or a helicopter — but I have seen my share of rebuilding.

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When Hurricane Katrina roared up Lake Pontchartrain, my uncle's house near the north shore took on water, and a tree went through his roof. My grandparents were about to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary; the small house in New Orleans' Ninth Ward they had lived in that whole time filled with six feet of water.

Those are only two of the houses I have helped rebuild. 

The memories I keep from those grim, hard days are fuzzy. It is a mush of sledgehammers through moldy sheetrock, axes through once-loved, now-ruined furniture; and huge insatiable contractor's garbage bags that never seemed to fill, no matter how much you shoveled into them.

I remember a sore back, sore arms and a sore soul.

My grandparents did not rebuild. They evacuated to Baton Rouge and never went back.

My uncle did, and so did many of my friends. That they did is my personal monument to the strength we humans can show when it is required of us.

I don't know what it's like to haggle with an insurance adjuster over how much everything you owned was worth, but I imagine it is agony. I don't know how to try and replace, all at once, the things you've built up over a lifetime, but I imagine it is exhausting.

I have never been to the funeral of a loved one murdered by the flood, but I imagine it is painful beyond words.

Remember: there are thousands and thousands of fellow Americans who now know how these things feel. And they will be feeling them for years, long after the rest of us no longer think much about Hurricane Harvey.

When tragedies like this strike, there is inevitably an outpouring of aid to groups like the Red Cross, which do the hard and praise-worthy work of saving lives. But when the long, slow work of rebuilding happens, when the cameras have left and the headlines have moved on, the aid dries up like the waters.

If you have donated already, that is wonderful. But I would ask you consider thinking about donating again, when the spotlight is off but the suffering remains.

The second lesson I hope you learn is one that everyone who has endured a hurricane knows. You cannot help but learn it when you see all your possessions piled in a great heap on the side of the road.

The lesson is this: it is only stuff.

Our society places too much stock in possessions, in things, in stuff. Too often we measure the American dream in cars and televisions and stacks of cash. 

Stand in the rotting wreckage of a home and you will know that these are ultimately small and meaningless things. What matters is your own life and the lives with which you surround yourselves to nourish it.

Even when we lose everything we have, we can recover, because what we have is nothing compared to who we are. 

I hope you can learn the lesson without being taught by a flood.

Contact engagement editor Matthew Albright at malbright@delawareonline.com, (302) 324-2428 or on Twitter @TNJ_malbright.