Journalism professor Meredith Cummings and her eight-year-old daughter took shelter in a closet as they heard their home being destroyed by the tornado on April 27.
“You couldn’t not know it was being destroyed,” Cummings said of her house in The Downs, a neighborhood hit hard by the storms. “It sounds like a train from a ways off, but like a fighter jet in your living room.”
Even after six months, Cummings said the experience rarely leaves her mind.
“The tornado happens in my head every day. In small ways, like doing insurance and mortgage paperwork,” she said. “But in big ways too, like the flyover in Bryant-Denny last Saturday. I teared up – it sounded just like that day.”
Cummings’ home was heavily damaged in the storm, but the structure was left standing. She said they did the best they could to save it that Wednesday night and the next day: moving out belongings and patching the roof and windows up with blue tarp.
Nothing has happened since.
“Our house looks exactly as it did April 28,” she said. “That is frustrating beyond belief. The houses next to us were totally gone and are now rebuilt. It’s hard to see progress around you and be stuck in the past.”
Cummings, who said she and her family recently signed a year’s lease for an apartment after moving four times in three months, hired a lawyer this past week in hopes to expedite the rebuilding process.
For now, she said the insurance process is just as stressful as anything else.
“Coping is hard. I’ve started seeing a counselor,” she said. “It took me a while to see someone because my anxiety today stems from the lack of progress more than the tornado. When I walk into my house, I don’t think ‘comforting home.’”
For tornado victims, life may be getting back to normal, but it will always be a different kind of normal, Cummings said.
Recounting a recent doctor’s visit, Cummings realized she hadn’t been taking her regular vitamins for months. When asked why, she didn’t really have an answer, except that her routine had changed.
“Our lives just changed,” she said
For Cummings, it appears that life will be a different kind of normal for a while.
“We’ll be lucky to be in our house by the one-year anniversary,” she said. “It will be a miracle – and we didn’t even totally lose it.”
But while she waits, life goes on, evident in work for the adults, school for the children, doctor appointments, Halloween trick-or-treating and football games.
In the midst of it all, though, the events of six months ago remain in her mind.
“Last night, my daughter brought me one of her Barbies. She said the Barbie was so sad because she had lost her boyfriend,” Cummings said. “I asked her where he was and she told me, ‘He was loose and got blown away.’ In the grand scheme of things, not that important. But it was heavy. We still have those moments.”
