Linette Burgess Guidi

Linette Burgess Guidi arrives at Memorial Medical Center from the Netherlands just as Hurricane Katrina is bearing down on New Orleans, intent on being with her mother, Jannie Burgess, whose cancer has become inoperable. Their reunion is affectionate, funny, and shadowed by the approaching evacuation: a moment of renewed closeness between a mother and daughter whose visits had often been strained, set against the hospital’s decision to place patients with Do-not-resuscitate (DNR) orders last in the evacuation sequence. Jannie’s history—as a nurse who helped care for others while being barred from treatment at some hospitals—gives the bedside encounter a significance beyond a family farewell.

A daughter returns to her mother

Linette had lived overseas for more than two decades with her Italian husband. She and Jannie spoke frequently, but saw one another rarely, and their visits often went badly. After learning that her mother’s uterine cancer had spread and could not be operated on, Linette traveled from the Netherlands, arriving the previous evening. Around midday, she hurried into the intensive care unit, found her mother, and kissed her face. Jannie opened her eyes, lifted her head from the pillow, and looked pleased to see her daughter.

The reunion’s intimacy appears in its small, teasing gestures. Linette looked at Jannie’s hands in mock horror and said, “Your nails look terrible, Mother. You need a manicure.” Jannie had long cared about lipstick, powder, and paint; even in illness, the joke addressed her as a woman with habits and a past, not only as a patient. Linette also told the nurse assigned to her mother stories about Jannie’s life, turning a bedside introduction into an account of the person behind the hospital gown.

Jannie’s history, told at the bedside

Jannie was seventy-nine, obese, and intermittently conscious, but Linette’s stories carried the nurse back through her mother’s life. Jannie had left an abusive husband while raising her children and had lost her only son in Vietnam. She had worked jobs including taxi dispatcher and secretary to a mortician before becoming a licensed practical nurse, a career she pursued to support her children. She then spent thirty-five years working in New Orleans hospitals and nursing homes.

Her nursing career held a sharp racial contradiction. Jannie, whose skin was light brown, could care for patients in many private hospitals but could not herself be treated in them. Born only months after Memorial opened in 1926 as Southern Baptist Hospital, she would wait more than four decades before she could become a patient there. The institution’s resistance to integration lasted into the era of federal hospital programs: Baptist refused to participate in Medicare and other programs rather than accept requirements against racial discrimination. Linette’s bedside account therefore connected her mother’s life to a longer history in which the work of caring and the right to receive care were unequally distributed.

Linette also recalled a more exuberant Jannie: tall in her youth, with an hourglass figure and access to the beauty parlor owned by her older sister Gladys. She remembered her mother’s delight in perfume and her habit of grabbing her daughter with an invitation to dance: “Let’s dance, let’s dance!” These memories, told to a young nurse who had not known Jannie was herself a nurse, made her past present during a crisis that threatened to reduce patients to beds, conditions, and evacuation categories.

Estrangement and a tentative reconciliation

The distance between mother and daughter had not been merely geographical. Linette had become the first Black Bunny at the New Orleans Playboy Club in 1973, a distinction that brought shame to her observant Catholic mother, whom Linette called a Holy Roller. Differences over that choice and other matters accumulated into years of tension. Their frequent conversations had not erased the strain, and their rare visits did not necessarily repair it.

This visit was different. Linette came because her mother was gravely ill, but the encounter did not consist only of fear or medical information: it included teasing, stories, remembered dancing, and an acknowledgment of what Jannie had done for her. The book presents it as something of a reconciliation, not as proof that every old dispute had been settled. Its closeness is real precisely because the history of difficulty remains visible around it.

A farewell under evacuation pressure

Jannie had been admitted to Memorial in early August after severe weakness and a bowel blockage. Surgery revealed cancer in her liver that could not be removed. After an infection and worsening kidney failure, she said she did not want to live on machines and refused dialysis. Her doctor discussed her preferences with Linette, Jannie’s sister, and a niece, then shifted the aim of care from treating the underlying problems to keeping her comfortable. Small doses of morphine were ordered as needed for pain, and Jannie was expected to move from intensive care to a regular medical floor when a bed became available.

With the mayor demanding that residents leave New Orleans, the relatives who had driven Linette to the hospital were anxious to begin their journey west. Linette told her mother she loved her and thanked her for raising her and making her the woman she was. She urged Jannie to “Release, let it go,” and said she would return on Wednesday. The promise gave the parting a future tense, even as the storm and evacuation made that future uncertain.

Memorial’s doctors had decided that patients with Do-not-resuscitate (DNR) orders would be evacuated after others, a policy that included Jannie. A DNR order meant that a patient whose heartbeat or breathing stopped should not be revived; it did not itself mean that the patient had a terminal condition or should be denied rescue. The decision thus placed a treatment preference into a different role, as a determinant of evacuation priority. The account does not describe Linette’s response to that policy, but her mother’s inclusion among the DNR patients makes the farewell part of a larger institutional crisis: the person Linette had come to see as her mother was also being classified by a rule that could delay her escape.

Narrative significance

Linette’s brief appearance joins intimate family memory to the book’s account of disaster medicine and unequal care. Her mother’s life spans both sides of hospital access: Jannie worked for decades in institutions where racial exclusion could prevent her from becoming a patient, then entered Memorial as an elderly woman with advanced cancer and a clearly stated preference against invasive life support. Linette’s stories restore the years and personality behind that vulnerable status.

The chapter’s movement from a manicure joke and a remembered dance to a farewell shaped by evacuation captures the fragility of the reconciliation. Linette leaves expecting to return; the reader knows that the hospital’s emergency decisions will determine what happens to those still inside. Her role is not to explain the medical crisis or resolve her mother’s history, but to make the stakes legible through a daughter’s visit: what is at risk is a particular relationship, with its unresolved hurts, shared memories, and renewed tenderness.