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That leaves plenty of room for other views from across the nation by well-known and lesser-known names alike.  * How to submit a column  When I tell people I lived in New Orleans in 2005, or that I've written a novel set in post-Katrina New Orleans, people quickly start talking to me — telling me, usually, as if I hadn't been there — about the government and its failings, about  , about the depth of the levee pilings and the billions in damage done. Things should be back to normal by now, people rush to say, indignant. But after a few years I noticed there is not only a rushing  in these calculations — a rush to assign blame, to solve problems. There is also a rushing  — a turn away from the sorrow of a city where thousands have died and thousands more were been left behind. Numbers and facts are necessary. But they're also a distraction from what may be the most important legacy of Katrina — psychological and spiritual trauma, and how we live with it. Or don't.  Facts and figures can help us understand the truth. Equally they serve to hide the truth, not from others but from our own private selves.  New Orleans famously high crime may be symptom — or a symbol — of this dual urge: the rush to blame and the rush to avoid facing our well-earned pain. After Katrina there was a frightening rise in violent crime in New Orleans. Crime in New Orleans is not new — young people are abandoned by parents to a spectacular degree, violence has become normalized, and educational and economic opportunities have been slim. (And before you get excited about the relatively low unemployment numbers for New Orleans recently — 8.2% — keep in mind those numbers explicitly leave out those who have, after a lifetime of poverty and rejection, given up looking for work.) In talking about the upswing in violence, people blame the police force, new drug distribution trends, the availability of weapons — all well and good.  But such conversations miss an important point. After undergoing a disaster, after being left behind by the entire world, after being clearly told that, in case they had somehow not yet gotten the point, they do not matter to us, we should not be surprised that some people come to feel so frightened and alone that they will truly believe they must shoot the other guy before he shoots first — or that many people loathe themselves so completely they will eagerly kill another who looks like them. This does not absolve such people of responsibility for their actions. But it does call into question exactly what they're to be held responsible for.  This is not a popular topic of discussion. But the government, people tell me, these well-meaning people who, despite never having been to New Orleans, are happy to tell me all about it. The government didn't do what it was supposed to do. True enough. But the government cannot heal broken hearts. This is the job of each human alone.  We have spent five years talking about money and rebuilding and slab foundations and evacuations and blue roofs. Rarely do we use the words sorrow or sadness in talking about the storm. 1,800 hundred people lost and all anyone wants to talk about is FEMA.  "Paradoxically," Tanya Wilkinson writes in her brilliant Persephone's Return: Victims, Heroes, and the Journey from the Underworld, "mourning must be embraced if it is ever to be finished."  Nothing will ever be normal again; this truth is gigantic and awful and very difficult to understand. There have been few novels so far that deal with the storm — maybe this is why. What we have to say is likely not what anyone wants to hear. But we will tell our stories anyway, eventually, and maybe it will fall to us, in the years to come, to tell the real story of Katrina — not who we blame for what but what it looked like, sounded like, and most of all, felt like, different for each of us and no two stories alike. Maybe this will be our mourning and maybe, although things will never go back to the old normal, maybe things can get better.  Or maybe people will keep ignoring us and keep up their cry. The government, they will say. Don't you want to talk about the government?  Sara Gran is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, Come Closer and Dope. Her next book, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, comes out June 2011. A former bookseller and native of Brooklyn who lived in New Orleans during Katrina, she now lives in Northern California.  You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference.
The storm's tragedy was about people. And stories. And sorrow. And living with its aftermath. Yet we still look elsewhere.