“AS YOU ARE I WAS. AS I AM YOU WILL BE.”

“AS YOU ARE I WAS. AS I AM YOU WILL BE.” is the inscription on a skull-and-crossbones tattoo on John Russell’s left arm, recorded during the identification of his body after Hurricane Katrina. The words reverse the positions of the living and the dead: the reader is asked to recognize that each condition can become the other. In the account of Russell’s death and his family’s search for information, the inscription becomes more than a general memento mori; it is attached to a man whose final days and fate remained uncertain to those closest to him.

The Inscription on Russell’s Tattoo

The tattoo was noted among the identifying details of Russell’s body. A DNA sample was taken from his left tibia to help confirm his identity, and investigators also recorded unique skin marks. The skull and crossbones and its inscription were described as seeming wryly placed for the occasion. The book does not establish when or why Russell chose the words, so their force comes from their discovery in the aftermath rather than from any stated intention behind the tattoo.

A Family’s Delayed Knowledge

Russell’s wife of forty-two years and their daughter had last seen him shortly before the hurricane, when he appeared to be in relatively good health and lucid. They received a death certificate but no conclusive information about the date or circumstances of his death. His widow took three weeks to locate his body and could not view it because of its condition; it remained under investigation and was released to a funeral home more than two months after the storm. Nearly a year later, the family’s lawyer wrote to Butch Schafer seeking answers. Russell’s widow had imagined him suffering in the heat and did not know that he had died before the worst of the ordeal described in news reports. Schafer arranged for Russell’s medical records to be sent to the lawyer.

Meaning in Context

The inscription’s balanced reversal makes mortality reciprocal: the living person reading it is not separate from the dead person whose body bears it. In Russell’s case, that thought meets the practical and emotional uncertainty of disaster identification—his family had to wait for basic knowledge of when and how he died, and his widow was left imagining a later, more prolonged ordeal than the one he experienced. The words do not resolve that uncertainty, but their placement on Russell’s identified body gives the general warning an intimate human context.