For Many Casualties, No Who, How or When

But as the days wore on, Samuels grew quieter. He stopped eating or speaking. A nurse stopped by to look at him but did not send him to a hospital, family members said. Last Thursday, he died in a single bed in a small room at the shelter that had been set aside for him and his wife, Louise.

"I think he grieved himself to death," said daughter Julia Samuels, 56.

It was a sad end to a life marked by hard work and a huge family. He and his wife had raised 11 children in the community about six miles west of New Orleans, and he saw himself as "the neighborhood granddad," said Fabiola Jack, 28, one of his great-grandchildren.

If police officers came looking for a neighborhood kid, Jack said, Samuels was likely to try to persuade them to give the youth a second chance. " 'That's my grandson,' he would say. 'Don't put him in jail. I'm going to talk to him first, and if he don't listen, then you can put him in jail.' "

On the Phone

Brenda du Faur wishes she had been more alert during her sister's last phone call, that she had had the presence of mind to suggest a way out, that she could have somehow transmitted the belief that Cynthia could survive a flood in the middle of a dark terrifying night.

"I was profoundly inadequate," Brenda du Faur said in an interview from Chicago, where she was away working as a racehorse walker. "Even though my sister was brilliant in her own person and the most creative thinker I've ever known, she had challenges and I was the one who was able to function a little better. All my life, I've saved my sister and I'm just tormented I didn't save her, and I could have."

Cynthia and Brenda du Faur shared what is called "a shotgun house" in mid-city New Orleans, each of them occupying one side of the dwelling; the dogs and cats, with such names as Petrouchka and Svetlana, ran back and forth between them.

Cynthia, a recovering alcoholic, was not working but had many deep interests, her sister said, including ballet, figure skating and old movies. Concerned about the poor, she was "a vehement critic of the establishment when they did wrong," Brenda said. She liked to dress in long, colorful sundresses and vintage shawls.

"She disdained a lot of the modern things she felt were inferior," her sister said.

Brenda said her twin often depended on her to take care of practical matters. She wishes she had cleared access to the attic, as she had long thought of doing. She wishes she had bought a small boat, assembled some kind of kit for emergencies. "All she needed was an inner tube," Brenda said, bursting into tears. "I never thought about a levee breaking."

Officials have had no news for her, as she waits in Chicago. But Brenda du Faur feels certain Cynthia would have gotten word to her if she survived.

"I still want to think she is alive," she said, "even though I know better."

Salmon reported from Baton Rouge. Staff writer Lisa Rein in Houston contributed to this report.