Remembering All the Dead on All Saints Day

Today, New Orleans remembers her dead.

It is a deeply rooted part of the city’s Catholic heritage that Nov. 1 is the day when New Orleanians visit their cemeteries and remember those who’ve passed. When I was growing up, Memorial Day was just another bank holiday. We’d all been to the beach long before the end of the end of May, and calendars back then still carried Confederate Memorial Day listed among the holidays.

So, in honor of the holiday, I want to announced: today the death toll for Hurricane Katrina stands 1,055, about where it's been for the last month.

Today, more than two months after the storm and it’s flood, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children lists over 1,000 children who are missing, or who can’t locate their parents. That's an improvement over the 2,500 the last time we reported a figure, but still a staggering number.

The same organization has a list of missing from Louisiana that runs to 147 pages, current as of 10/14, a list that would total some 7,000 lost souls.

Others lists are just as long. The Times-Picayune’s missing database still lists over 1,000 entries. KatrinaSOS.org lists 1,024 pages at 20 per page of people, half of them missing. That would be 10,000.

Why, in the day of the cellular telephone, the fax machine and the Internet, is anyone still listed as missing?