Yall, the real victims of Katrina aren't just the ones found in their homes. The death count didn't end at 1800.

Yall, the true victims are the ones not counted, the silent sufferers.

This piece from The Times-Picayune touched my heart. It's about an elderly man that recently died. I first heard of this man after Katrina when I read an article about him losing his the Lakeview home he built himself in Katrina.

No natural disaster killed this man. It wasn't just the faulty levees. This man died from things that exist in every New Orleanian: a broken heart.

Yall, read this story. If it doesn't send a tear down your cheek then you most likely have no heart.

From the Times-Picayune by Chris Bynum:

On March 24, 2006, Irwin Buffet stood in his flooded Lakeview home, echoing the words of so many elderly survivors of the storm.

"My future is behind me now," said the retired building inspector for the City of New Orleans.

The recovery of his home and neighborhood, he felt, would take more years than he had left to give. Irwin Buffet was right. On Oct. 8, the 89-year-old World War II veteran died from complications of a stroke he suffered in late September, less than a month after the anniversary of Katrina.

Buffet is an example of Katrina's hidden, untallied death toll: elderly people in good health before the storm who deteriorated rapidly after.

"He died of a broken heart," said his daughter, Janis Shreve. "I see him as a Katrina victim. He had many more years ahead of him."

As friends and family gathered for his funeral service last Tuesday, one of Buffet's new neighbors put everything in perspective in the carefully chosen words of his eulogy.

"The two big events in Irwin Buffet's life were World War II and Katrina," Doug Madden said.

When the young Navy man returned home to New Orleans in 1945, he purchased a lot on Gen. Haig Street for $6,000 and built a home where he would bring his bride and later welcome a baby daughter. She would grow up, marry and move to the other side converted into a double. As grandchildren and great-grandchildren arrived, Buffet and his family remained the sole occupants of the house he built.

After Katrina, the house stood gutted and empty. Following the the memorial service Tuesday, family members brought the flowers that had surrounded his casket to Buffet's front door.

Neighbors no longer live next door or across the street. Driveways and streets are empty. There are no tricycles on lawns. No mail in the mailboxes. Just the orange writing still left on walls and doors from Katrina rescue squads, and a few warning signs from absent neighbors to would-be looters.

Even when a Florida firm earlier in the year donated free gutting and mold-remediation services to prepare Buffet's home for rebuilding, his daughter had asked, "How can I bring him back to an empty neighborhood?"

This was Buffet's heartbreak -- that life as he knew it was history, with all its markers washed away. The floors in Buffet's home had been stripped down to bare concrete, in anticipation of a new beginning. But Buffet's life came to an end before he could see the recovery through.

Mark Shreve quietly removed a few red roses from the funeral arrangements outside, and silently walked through the house, dropping one in each room. Other family members stood outside the house, quietly weeping, unaware of a son-in-law's final goodbye to Mr. Buffet's life.

Mourners who came to Lake Lawn Metairie Funeral Home that day had a place in Buffet's half-century of life in Lakeview.

Lola Freedman had known Buffet for 60 years. Both had been married to someone else, and as couples, they were the best of friends. When Buffet's wife, Josephine "Jo" Wachsman Buffet, became ill in 1978, Freedman sat with daughter Janis Shreve while her mother lay in a coma for eight weeks.

"Janis was 2 when I first met them. I played canasta with her mother. One day we got stuck in the sand going out to her Lakeview home to play," said Freedman, recalling the early days of a new subdivision when the streets were still gravel.

Six months after Buffet's wife died, Freedman's husband died unexpectedly. Buffet and Freedman began a friendship that later blossomed into romance, creating a bond that lasted until his death. They never married, but they kept a standing date on Wednesdays.

Buffet, an award-winning photographer, was a founding member of the Greater New Orleans Camera Club. He was a monument to patience, always willing to wait for the right light, the right moment, the right angle.

A photograph of sunlight filtering through an iron cross in Metairie Cemetery that Buffet had captured years ago (returning to the site four times to "get the sun just right") sat on an easel at the foot of his flag-draped coffin. It was a symbol of his passion for pressing a shutter and freezing time -- at just the right time.

Freedman pressed a tissue against her high cheekbones, catching tears that spilled from her eyes even as she smiled at a memory.

"His sense of humor was delicious," she said. An animal lover and rescuer, Buffet prided himself in his ability to train his dogs. One eulogizer recalled the time he demonstrated his gentle dog-training skills to a neighbor by issuing the "sit" command to his dog.

The dog promptly pooped on the lawn.

Buffet's quick-witted explanation: "She listened. She just misunderstood the word."

As the reception area filled with visitors, Buffet's life stories became intertwined with Katrina conversations -- stories of insurance woes, rebuilding concerns and deaths.

Mike Macksey grew up on Gen. Diaz Street in Lakeview. His aunt, Elaine Seeger, raised him when his mother died in 1952. Seeger, like Buffet, had built her home in the early '50s. When Katrina came, she refused to leave. She drowned in her own home.

Grace Moskau lived across the street from the Buffets. Her daughter, Dara Moskau Troescher, had grown up there. Troescher, now married and living in Mississippi, drove to New Orleans before Katrina to help evacuate her mother. When the two returned to Gen. Haig Street, they went through the meager belongings that were left.

"One of the few pictures that survived was a black-and-white portrait Mr. Buffet took of me 27 years ago," Troescher said.

The loss of a studio and photographs documenting five decades of a passion formed that core of loss that Buffet mourned most. There was little from a lifetime to salvage.

And Katrina had taken his car, his last connection to his independence. And later that summer, Buffet, the oldest of seven children, buried the last of his siblings.

When Buffet and his daughter and son-in-law moved to another community to begin a new life after Katrina, their arrival went almost unnoticed.

"We kept seeing people down the street, and we waited for a moving van. But one never came," said Madden, the new neighbor, who described the marked distinction of Katrina survivors whose new lives began without luggage or boxes or keepsakes.

"Daddy would just sit on the patio and stare for hours," said Shreve, recalling her father's displaced days in his new home 50 miles from Lakeview.

"I would say, 'Daddy, what can I do?' And he would say, 'There is nothing you can do,' " Shreve said.

People of all ages gathered at his service, among them his granddaughters, Cara Coste and Shana Mace, and his great-grandchildren Kelsey Coste and Kaela Mace. Katrina had left a mark on four generations. Healing would take time.

The day after the funeral, his 31-year-old granddaughter Shana pulled up in front of her childhood home.

"Shana was just sitting in the car, staring at the house," Shreve said. "It broke my heart. She said she just likes to visit where she grew up and remember how wonderful things were before Katrina."