Angela McManus and Wilda McManus

Angela McManus and Wilda McManus are presented through a bond shaped by practical caregiving and enduring uncertainty. During the crisis at Memorial Medical Center, Angela cared for her mother at LifeCare Hospitals, then was separated from her as staff ordered her to leave. After Wilda’s death, Angela could not establish what had happened or be present for the family’s final rituals. Her subsequent efforts to find answers made her one of the few readily available voices for LifeCare families in Baton Rouge.

A relationship expressed through care

Before the storm, Wilda’s prayers were part of her daily life at LifeCare Hospitals. She recited the Lord’s Prayer and the Twenty-Third and Ninety-First Psalms; staff members bowed their heads during prayer sessions they came to call church. During the crisis, this familiar religious practice became part of the way Angela stayed close to her mother: she talked, sang, and prayed with her while also tending to her physical needs.

Angela’s care was concrete and sustained. Although exhausted, dizzy, and anxious about a sibling living near the levees, she nourished Wilda through her feeding tube and managed her colostomy care. With no running water available, she spent hours trying to recruit a nurse to help clean her mother and change her wound dressing. These tasks make the relationship visible not as an abstract expression of devotion but as work carried out under pressure, when ordinary resources and assistance were scarce.

Separation at the hospital

Angela’s presence at Wilda’s bedside ended when she was ordered to leave. Kristy Johnson walked her downstairs and reassured her that the staff would do everything they could for her mother. Johnson later described standing across from Anna Pou at Wilda’s bedside. According to Johnson, Pou told Wilda that she was going to give her something to help her feel better. Johnson did not look at what Pou was doing; she looked at Wilda and told her that Angela had escaped safely and would be all right.

Wilda was seventy, feverish, and moving in and out of consciousness. Johnson recalled that Pou later said Wilda was fighting and that she had needed to give her three doses. That recollection was disputed: Pou’s attorney, Rick Simmons, emphatically denied that Pou had said anything of the kind. The difference between what Johnson remembered and what the defense denied left the account of Wilda’s final care contested rather than settled.

When Angela later spoke publicly, she said she did not know whether her mother had died from an infection. Reports that hospital workers might have hastened patients’ deaths left her unsure where to turn. Her uncertainty was not simply about a medical cause of death; it concerned whether Wilda’s last moments had been determined by illness or by human action, while Angela herself had been kept away from the bedside.

The search for answers

From temporary lodgings in Baton Rouge, far from her flooded family home, Angela followed the news about the investigation. She made sure her new phone number was listed because she wanted investigators and reporters to be able to reach her. After the arrests, she believed that this had made her the only LifeCare family member the media could readily find in Baton Rouge. Her availability to speak was therefore both deliberate and isolating: she wanted the questions about Wilda to be heard, but she carried much of that public attention herself.

Angela’s position was one of religious uncertainty as well as investigative urgency. She did not claim to know what God’s will had been or when Wilda’s life would have ended. What mattered to her was finding out whether a person had made that decision. Her siblings retained a lawyer to seek answers, and other families of deceased patients also pursued legal help. Requests for death certificates formed part of the wider struggle: some families said the certificates had not been released, and those eventually received could list the cause of death as pending investigation, a status that could affect insurance payments.

The arrests gave Angela some hope that the uncertainty might finally be addressed. She told an Associated Press reporter that she had not known for months what had happened to her mother and needed answers in order to function. That statement connects her public search to the private consequences of unresolved loss: information was not merely a matter of legal record, but something she felt necessary to carry on.

Grief, family, and public testimony

Angela did not herself want to sue. The prospect of repeatedly discussing her experiences with a lawyer was too upsetting, and she left it to a sibling to file a lawsuit. She had little energy and struggled to recover, often finding it difficult to draw herself away from television. Yet she did speak publicly about Wilda. In Angela’s understanding, telling the story was important enough to undertake even though it nearly overwhelmed her; by speaking, she became her mother’s voice again.

She rejected the suggestion that hospital workers had simply relieved suffering in patients’ final moments. Her objection rested in part on the uncertainty itself: she questioned how anyone could know those were the patients’ final moments, especially when the workers involved had not previously treated them. She also felt that Wilda and the family had been violated, regardless of how much time her mother might otherwise have had. The separation from the bedside had deprived the family of a chance to accompany Wilda as she died, see her body, and keep vigil.

The circumstances after Wilda’s death also altered the family’s mourning. The condition of her remains led the family to choose cremation, so Wilda could not have the funeral Angela imagined for her at St. Raymond’s Catholic on Paris Avenue, around the corner from their home. Wilda had sung in the church choir, and Angela believed the service would have drawn a standing-room-only crowd. This unrealized funeral gives the loss a particular shape: the family was deprived not only of a final bedside vigil but also of the communal farewell that would have joined Wilda’s church, neighborhood, and family.

The relationship after Wilda’s death

Angela’s account holds together several kinds of care: the intimate labor she performed during the emergency, the reassurance Johnson offered when Angela was sent downstairs, and Angela’s later effort to establish what had happened. None resolved the central uncertainty. Her testimony instead preserved the distinction between a patient’s possible medical decline and a family’s right to know how that decline was met, especially when the family had been separated from the patient.

The relationship therefore continues in the narrative through Angela’s acts of remembering and speaking. She did not present herself as having answers about the precise cause of Wilda’s death; she insisted that the family needed a trustworthy account before it could find peace. Her search made the personal consequences of the hospital crisis legible: the loss of a mother, the absence of a final farewell, and the burden of asking questions when the available records and explanations remained incomplete.