The family all stayed together, moving as a unit. Ms. Green had physical ailments, too, some of which led to seizures, making it hard to stay at a job. She loved working with children but worried that she could be holding a child when a seizure struck. She did not want to drive, either, given the dangers to her and others if she were to have a seizure behind the wheel.
Ms. Green had married and divorced, and she had four children — two girls, Rose and Erica, and two boys, Gad, who is now in kindergarten, and Otto, who died three years ago of bone cancer. He was 7 years old.
Everyone lived in the house in Myrtle Beach: Ms. Green, her parents and her children, all taking care of one another. “It was sort of symbiotic I guess,” Ms. Green-Johnson said.
When Hurricane Florence came, they split up: Erica, 17, took her grandfather far inland, so he would not lose the electricity necessary for his oxygen machine; Gad and his grandmother joined Donnela at her house; Rose and Nikki stayed together. The medication she had recently started taking for her schizophrenia seemed to be working, “opened her eyes,” Ms. Green-Johnson said, making that time all the richer.
“They had a hurricane party kind of thing there, the two of them,” she said. “They were really reconnecting, getting much closer than they had been.”
On Sunday, after the storm had passed, the family had all been reunited. On Monday, things were back to normal. On Tuesday, Ms. Green had her counseling appointment. And that night, Ms. Green’s sister heard on the news about a van, lost in the floodwaters.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/us/women-drown-van-south-carolina-floods.html