When the sky swallows everything in its path, there is still hope

I have lived in the South for a total of forty years, in Kentucky, South Carolina, and Louisiana, with a brief four-year break in California and Kansas. It was in Kansas I saw my first tornado. We watched it from our living room because we had no basement, and the welcome wagon hadn't told us the church on the hill had one for people to go to. So we watched as it spun and undulated, and the debris churned up--but it was a mile or two away, not down upon us. And that makes all the difference.

I've been to every Southern state save Florida, of all things. I have family in Kentucky, Texas, Alabama, and Georgia. We think of tornadoes in the Midwest, but the South has a long history of them. In 1974 hundreds made their way across the South, dozens near where I live now. Last week, that number was pushed aside as hundreds of people died. Yet a week after the deadly tornado outbreak, pain and hope go hand in hand. I'm lucky--no one I know was caught in the outbreak, as far as I know. My family are safe. But my thoughts and prayers are with those in that uncertain limbo and those who have lost loved ones. Southerners are tough, but there are a lot of people in pain right now. I hope they find the missing, and have closure. Uncertainty is almost worse than the finality of death.

For families of tornadoes' missing, a long torment: It's uncertain how many people are unaccounted for after twisters in seven states killed 329

Efforts to pin down the number of missing have been complicated by factors including multiple reports of the same missing person, or survivors who found shelter without contacting friends who reached out to police. Sometimes the police have only a first name.

"Obviously, there's not a whole lot you can do with that information," Tuscaloosa Police Chief Steven Anderson said Thursday.

Alabama officials are declining to say how many people could be missing statewide, and are now even keeping mum about the state's official death toll as it re-examines the tally. They reduced the figure from 250 to 236 on Monday after accounting for a gruesome fact of the storm: Some victims had been counted more than once because parts of their bodies were found in more than one place.