Joyce Haldeman was 69 when she died last Sunday in a Port St. Lucie hurricane shelter. I wrote about her, but in the crush of news flowing into the paper as Frances waddled across the state, only a smidgen of the story made it into print.
I thought I owed her, and her sister, a little more.
I met Mrs. Haldeman's sister, Joan LiCalzi, in the shelter at about 5 p.m. Sunday, less than 90 minutes after Mrs. Haldeman succumbed to the cancer she had been battling for months.
LiCalzi wanted to tell the world how caring the dozens of volunteers and hundreds of other refugees were, how they opened their hearts to her sister when she arrived at the shelter to spend the last four days of her life while Frances stalked the coast.
She told me how she came down from New York just a week before to care for her sister in her final days, and how they had to flee to a big, impersonal shelter in the city's community center to hide out with about 400 other aged and infirm in the special needs center. All around LiCalzi and her sister, refugees toted oxygen or sat in wheelchairs or leaned on walkers.
Coordinating efforts, Port St. Lucie Assistant City Manager Bonnie Dyga (a former Hernando County administrator) said some nursing homes just dumped their sickest residents at the shelter and closed up before the storm. Some, in direct violations of the rules, left patients with severe dementia at the shelter. Volunteers were left to deal with the mess, to comfort the confused, serve the sick. They struggled to find food; they slept very little.
By Sunday, I thought nursing supervisor Debra Farmer was going to collapse. She had been working four days straight. Her nerves were shot. She was so close to tears she couldn't speak without her voice wavering. She was exhausted and emotionally wiped out, but she wasn't going to give in, she said.
LiCalzi said the others at the shelter took a special interest in her sister. They helped turn her over to make her as comfortable as possible. They held her hand. Maureen Bensen, who was at the shelter to care for her father, placed a small, silver cross on Mrs. Haldeman's chest as she died.
LiCalzi squeezed my hand for a moment. We talked for maybe five minutes. I don't know a lot more about her sister, what she was like or what she looked like or what she did. But I guess the fact that I can't shake the story from my mind, the fact that I felt bad I couldn't tell it better, means somehow I cared more about Mrs. Haldeman than just about anything else that I saw or learned or heard during the storm.
Frances didn't kill Mrs. Haldeman. Cancer did. She was going to die, and her sister said in the end, it was an escape from the pain.
LiCalzi said her sister felt at home among the strangers in the shelter. From the moment they brought her in that Thursday, people she didn't know went out of their way to pat her arm or whisper encouragement.
When I got back to my home in Zephyrhills from the storm-wrecked Treasure Coast on Monday, my wife, Saralee, was on her way out the door to buy baby formula and eyedroppers. She had two tiny, naked squirrels wrapped in a T-shirt in a shoe box. She found them in the front yard, shaken from their nest during the storm.
They might have been two or three days old. One of them was cut badly on its chest. Neither had its eyes open.
We tried hard to dribble some nourishment into their mouths. They chirped and wriggled. We put them on a heating pad to keep them warm, side by side. I wanted them to live so much.
When I got up Tuesday at 3 a.m. for a feeding, they were huddled together in the shoe box. But they were still and cold. They had died in the night.
God, I wanted them to live.
In the end, all we could do was put them with each other and keep them warm and dry. The rest, we couldn't change.
I guess it was the same way for Mrs. Haldeman. The best anyone could do was gather around her and keep her warm and dry, and good people did that.
